Cute Mage's Tower

Things I Liked About the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt

“I wonder if they’ll play Hot to Go.”

“This is the MIT Mystery Hunt.”

Cut to a group of hunters playing Hot to Go on their radio.

The Gala

I mean, what discussion of the 2025 Hunt doesn’t include a discussion about how amazing the Gala is? Every hunt needs a place where solvers can pick up materials from HQ and also a place to do interactions with solving teams. Combining that into one space and making it an open party was great. I went more times during the Hunt than were strictly necessary because it was a cool space and I was heading back that way anyway. I got to say hi to so many people that weekend from so many different teams, :many of which were at the Gala.

The decorations were fabulous, the atmosphere was fabulous, and the bartenders were fantastic. I loved how they didn’t just give us the tiles for And Now, a Puzzling Word From Our Sponsors, but they put them in a cocktail shaker, mixed them up, and dumped them in a martini glass. That little bit of effort made the whole handoff that much cooler.

Every team will have to figure out how to handoff physical puzzles to teams. Every team will have to figure out when and how to have personal interactions. However, the Gala won’t be a capability that every team has – just like not every team will be able to produce an MMO to hunt in or to create multiple big physical puzzles that a team gets access to at the end of each round. However, if a team is able to create and staff something like the Gala, I would highly recommend it.

I also had some personal feelings towards the Gala that are more about me than Death & Mayhem, but I’ll put those behind :a spoiler.

The Radio

The physical radio was really cool and I am impressed by the engineering and effort it took to make enough for every team to get one. However, what I am more impressed by is the radio stream. I’m pretty sure that all weekend, if I was solving at my computer, I was listening to the stream. Constant smooth jazz was great for my neurodivergent brain to be able to focus on solving puzzles and it did wonders for getting me into the world of Hunt. I am honestly thinking about finding some smooth jazz compilations on YouTube for everyday work.

The Story

If 2023 hadn’t existed, I would say that this was the best story in a Mystery Hunt of all time. With 2023, I think that you could make an argument either way. They didn’t make the same mistake of 2022 and 2024 by consigning story to its own page out of the way of solvers. Instead, they infused the story into everything that they did. The landing page of the site was brilliant for keeping people informed, and the periodic updates on the radio were a great idea. While I tend to avoid the landing page of the hunt while navigating, I did find myself occasionally going back to it while hunting just to catch up on what I’d missed.

However, I want to talk about my favorite part of the story, which is Baby and Katrina. You do not know how excited I was to see a pair of lesbians as part of the main characters. My heart jumped out immediately towards them. There are people who might argue “but that’s not historically accurate” but a) gay people have always existed, b) it’s weird to claim historical accuracy in a hunt where canonically Papa wrote a bunch of incriminating things visible in blacklight throughout his study for no reason whatsoever, and c) gay people make everything better. I wanted nothing bad to happen to them.

Of course, Katrina ends up as one of the main suspects in the investigation, and I was really hoping that everything was okay. I was a little disappointed at her being a cop, but being undercover like that was really cool. However, I was absolutely heartbroken when I saw her talk about how Baby would never forgive her. I could see how heartbroken she was that her relationship with Baby was going to end, and it brought me to tears. I wish that I had found out the reveal in the Illegal Search much earlier in the weekend, because I know what I would’ve done if I wasn’t so focused on trying to solve the Illegal Search before the 10:00 deadline. On that note, let me share with you what I wanted to say to Katrina on Sunday night.

Katrina, can I talk to you for a moment?

As a friend of Dorothy myself, I can see a pain in your eyes. You messed up. You were supposed to be an actress – but you accidentally became your role. You fell in love for real.

Honestly, the two of you make a good couple. When you hear people talking about Baby, they are more hopeful that you are “the one” compared to the others she’s brought home. She really likes you, and you have similar interests, even if you’re coming from them from different places. I think there’s a world where when this is all over, the two of you are still with each other, and I think that it’ll be good for both of you.

That’s what I wanted to bring up. See, we went to pay Papa’s Study a visit. Don’t worry about how we got in – it was totally legal. See? holds up a folder with Illegal Search written on it with the first two letters crossed out We discovered some documents while we were there that you might find interesting. Take a look. open up the folder, showing printouts of the documents from the solved puzzles in the back room Baby isn’t Papa’s kid. Papa stole Baby from the Candys when they got arrested on a job that Papa sent them on. Now, I can’t tell you exactly how Baby is going to feel about this, but I know that in general, when someone finds out that who they thought were their parents are actually not, they tend to be real grateful to the person who told them. If you want to hold on to this relationship when this is all done – this is the key. But you need to be the one to tell her.

Let me know if you need support for this conversation. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I want to see the two of you stay together.

Puzzles Worked On

These are mostly in order of their placement on the All Puzzles page, not necessarily the order I worked on them.

📑🍝

I didn’t actually work on this puzzle at all, but I did get two emojipastas from teams while I was working on other puzzles. The people who sent them to me provided no context, just the emojipasta, so I figured that they were just being silly and ignored them. Then someone mentioned that there we had an emojipasta puzzle and they got one from another team. Everything clicked. I then proceeded to reply to the people who had sent me stuff with our emojipasta, then proceeded to send out our emojipasta to new people. I did not provide any context because it was funnier that way.

Battle Factory

I do not know if I am proud of myself or not for being able to identify most of the :evolved forms from memory. This was a little frustrating in that I knew what the mechanic was – use the transformations Pokemon’s names go through when evolving on the names of the Pokemon to form new words – but for some reason I couldn’t make anything work. This got solved after I left it.

Check-a-deez Words Out

I hopped on this puzzle quickly after it opened, and a bunch of teammates were staring at the word search trying to find words. In my head I went “This is a Mystery Hunt puzzle. Trying to find words isn’t the challenge here.” I then proceeded to dump the grid into dcode and pasted the output in the grid. I ended up leaving to do something else before the actual Aha dropped though.

Zulu Lima

This was the first puzzle I touched in the Hunt, and it was a great warmup for what was to come. I recognized immediately the nautical flag phrases, and while I was trying to find all of them my teammate found the Marryat’s Standard and from lots of searching, found the codebook with all of them. Once we got a couple fully translated, I quickly recognized the extraction mechanism and the puzzle quickly fell from there.

This was a cool puzzle. It’s not a puzzle I’ll be telling stories about :ten years from now, but it was solid puzzle that adequately clued something that I hadn’t heard of before. I enjoyed my time solving it, and kudos to the author.

The Thief

First of all, the way they got the radio to just give out the correct instructions at the correct locations at campus was absolutely great. The pause/play and replay controls on the radio were perfect – they were the one thing that the audio part of the runaround needed last year. For someone who doesn’t know much about technology, this was freaking magic.

Also, the “Billie can only see things in greyscale” bit was hilarious. I remember that we were a decent way through the runaround when the team stopped and realized that he just called three things grey that were clearly not grey. It took us a couple minutes to collect ourselves and realize that we had gone the correct way and that he was “colorblind”. This became a running joke among those of us who went on the runaround for the rest of the Hunt – especially since there was a set of chairs that Billie referred to as grey that were on the path from our HQ to the Gala.

I will say however… the runaround was a little monotonous. Once we found out the grey thing, not much else interesting happened in the runaround. It was a nice jaunt through campus, but after about 20 minutes we were just wondering when it was going to end. It either needed to be shorter or something more interesting needed to happen :part way through.

Sing Like a Canary

I was all excited to work on this puzzle given that it involved Wingspan, and I had just learned Wingspan this past year. When I was shown the puzzle, all of the cards had already been identified, but we couldn’t figure out extraction. I tried a bunch of different extractions involving other characteristics in Wingspan, but eventually got blocked as well and went onto a different puzzle. This was the one Stakeout puzzle that eluded our team for a while.

And Now, a Puzzling Word From Our Sponsors

first ad plays on the radio

Me: Lol that’s funny – fake ads on the radio.

second ad plays on the radio

Me: Wow, there’s multiple of them wait was that URL at the end of the ad dammit what was it?

third ad plays on the radio

Me: Got the ad this time – aha it’s a puzzle! Hey team, I found a puzzle!

The subpuzzles were solid and quick. I ended up solving BetterOprah and helping a bunch of others on extraction. I went to get the Martini because I hadn’t been to the Gala yet, and I was amazed at both the party and the delivery method of the martini. When I returned, I spent a bunch of time messing around with the tiles, but was eventually pulled off because I was going to the first event (iirc). When I got back it was solved.

For me, this puzzle was memorable because it “set the tone of the Hunt” for me. It involved the radio. It involved going to the party. It was hidden and had to be found. It was a Spare Lead. It was one of the most “Death and Mayhem” puzzles that I did.

Do The Manual Calculations (Don’t Try Monte Carlo)

I was excited for a chess puzzle when I asked for this one to unlock. sigh

Despite being a math teacher, I usually avoid math puzzles in the Mystery Hunt. The level of math that they need is generally above my head. I know that I have a degree in mathematics, but I got that degree knowing that I was going into education, so I spent more time broadening my studies rather than trying to go as deep as possible in certain branches of mathematics.

That being said, I am good at visualizing things, and I am very familiar with chess, so I was useful on the finite boards. Did I understand the intricacies of Discrete Time Markov Chains? Absolutely not. Could I do enough to calculate some of the boards? Yes.

I eventually stepped out of this puzzle because I spent a lot of time trying to understand the infinite boards and calculating the giant board and couldn’t make progress. It needed fresh brains.

T__OTT_P__Y

I got brought into this puzzle because they had trouble extracting. I unfortunately wasn’t that much of a help, although I would like to think that I brought up a detail that was helpful for finding the correct extraction (why were the quotes that were adjacent to each other in the extraction always the same color?).

Where Am I?

I also got brought into this puzzle because they had trouble extracting. They were on the second part with the BlueSky messages, and I quickly pulled the extraction out, which told us to go search the first floor of Stata for a flyer. Myself and one other person went searching and pretty quickly found the relevant flyer. There was just one problem – there was some event going on in the first floor of Stata where they were passing out pizza to some group of college students. Getting the info from the flyer involved nonchalantly walking behind the table like we belonged, confirming that it was the flyer we wanted, then taking a picture and leaving. Honestly, I hope that we weren’t the first team to have to do that, otherwise it would’ve been really awkward. It’s also something I wouldn’t do in most non-Hunt situations, but in Hunt I turn into a version of myself that is more confident and extroverted for some reason. I went out to get dinner afterwards, so it was solved when I got back.

A Heap of Clards

Apparently, all you need to do is say the word “Blaseball” and a small but dedicated group assembles in Sorting By Every Column Until Moral Improves’ headquarters. I didn’t actually do much on this puzzle because a) I was working on the Background Check metas at the time, and b) the other people who were working on this puzzle were much better equipped to do so, given that they had made searchable databases during blaseball and were admins of the blaseball wiki. I did, however, identify how two of the :mechanics worked just from looking at them. In other words, I was my usual self on this puzzle.

Jargon

This puzzle reminded me that I have to finish Lingo.

But I was able to run through the blocks, mostly. A couple brain farts but that’s why there’s teammates to help. As I was solving the blocks, I did ask “Why is there so many terms about electricity here?” This was answered when I got to the second half and saw the circuits. This led to (approximately) this conversation:

Me: “All you have to do is calculate the circuit with the resistors and the number, calculate the voltage across the last word, and we should be good.”

Teammate: “But how do we do that? some circuitry gobbledygook that I didn’t understand”

Me: “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about circuits. Do electrical engineering things and it’ll work.”

Teammates than did electrical engineering things and it worked. But yeah – I was an absolute genius about this puzzle. There was absolutely no :embarrassing quotes at all.

Do the Packing

This puzzle was my specialty – showing up after people have already done the hard work and telling them how to extract. In this case, I pointed out that the diagonal was a phrase and left.

Wrapping It Up

There’s a bunch of things missing from this post that people might be looking for, and there’s good reason for those:

My view on Hunt this year was already going to be a little skewed given that my normal life is… not great at the moment. In a sense, I was looking for the emotional escape more than usual. However, this Hunt delivered in spades, and I am so thankful for everything that Death & Mayhem did. This Hunt definitely ends up near the top of my list of favorite Hunts.

:x EmbarrassingQuotes

Me: “I can’t find an 8-letter word that means the opposite of ‘same’.”

Teammate: “Is it ‘opposite’?”

Me: “… yes.”

:x EvolvedForms

Girafarig -> Farigiraf has burned itself in my memory where other, more useful things should be instead. I blame Palindrome.

:x GalaFeelings

The Gala was so cool. Seriously. However, there was one time when I got back that I felt a deep emptiness in me – and it had nothing to do with D&M, but everything to do with the 2022 Hunt.

Don’t get me wrong – I absolutely love the Hunt that I helped put together. I am proud of all the puzzles, I am proud of the events, I am just so proud of the whole thing. Every so often, I just go back and look through those archives as a monument of what we created together. But deep in my heart, there’s something missing. It still hurts that our hunt was remote.

I am the most extroverted introvert that you will ever meet. I love creating things for people and interacting with them about it. I love watching the light shine in peoples’ eyes as they realize what is happening for the first time. I love seeing people take a carefully created structure that I have written and demolish it right in front of my eyes. It why I love teaching so much – I love that interpersonal interaction. Remote, I rarely got to see that. That’s not to say that I never interacted with other teams throughout the Hunt. I judged a couple teams on their scavenger hunt. I manned the email queues occasionally, and would try to respond with the same energy that the team emailed me with. I gave out my real, actual phone number to teams so that they could Telegram me to complete a New You City task. I had a bunch of different ways I tried to make the remote hunt seem more human, but the Hunters still felt distant.

Probably the worst for me was the events. Our events team did a good job of trying to make events that worked well for the remote hunt. I was definitely proud of how I put together a Discord server and made all the roles work. But for the events, all I was doing was streaming to a bunch of people, and not getting a ton of responses from the crowd because, well, they were doing the event. It was all the loneliness of teaching over Zoom, but I wasn’t getting paid for it. There’s a part of me that wishes I could’ve addressed a room full of 200 people for my events, that wishes that I could’ve actually visited teams as the Minister of Self-Help, that wishes that I could’ve stopped by teams in person and see how they were doing.

It’s part of the reason why I really want to write the Hunt again. :I wanna be where the people are.

:x LittleMermaid

I wanna see, wanna see them dancin’.

:X ManyAtGala

I mean, there were still plenty of times where I ran into Hunters I knew in the :middle of the hallway in some random building and said hi – it wasn’t all at the Gala. However, the Gala was an additional time that it could happen.

:X Mechanics

I mean, Core Mechanics. Right? Who’s with me?

(I am actually a Pies fan.)

:X MiddleoftheHallway

You can’t take me anywhere in the puzzle world without me saying hi to random people all the time.

:X PartWayThrough

Or at least less changes in elevation. I know MIT is non-Euclidean, but wow there were a lot of stairs. So many, in fact, that I thought that the floors the clues were on were relevant for extraction.

:X TenYears

That’s a lie. I remember every puzzle I’ve worked on and I’m sure in ten years I will just randomly pull out this puzzle when Marryat’s Standard shows up again.