There is a part of me that wanted to call this “The Post of No Name” and then replace every letter in the blog post with a squiggle until you had solved a series of 26 puzzles, each one unlocking one of the 26 letters, until you could fully understand my blog post. Then the part of me that remembered how tired I am from this past weekend knocked some sense into me.
Leading Up to Hunt
Spreadsheet Functions
Like many other big teams, we have our own infrastructure for hunt. Part of that is that we have a web app that makes a Google Sheet for each puzzle. This sheet is based off of a template that we have which includes some custom sheets already set up, a custom extension, and some custom named fuctions - many of which are taken from other public puzzlehunting resources. I’ll admit that I hadn’t really paid attention to them much before, but this year I decided to take a look at them more closely. I spent some time learning them all, then I took the ones I thought would be the most people on the team and made a series of videos explaining them. I dropped one every day for a week and left them all in our team’s Discord. I know a bunch of people watched them, and some folks mentioned that they were helpful with learning, so I’d like to think that this was a way that I helped with the team’s solving this year. Also it means that Copy of Copy of Sheet1 has finally gotten the full Cute Mage - :dropping long videos explaining very specific topics about puzzle hunts.
Pre Hunt
While I was thinking about the videos, I was also thinking “wouldn’t it be great if we had some way of giving the team some puzzles to test out these functions?” It’s the teacher in me - it’s one thing to tell people how to do something, but it’s better to give them a way to actually practice it. Meanwhile there was some chatter about wanting to do a Pre Hunt for the team for multiple reasons, including testing a bunch of new features for the tech team. I realized that I could be the change I wanted to be in the world. I took some of Palindrome’s old pre hunts that we wrote pre-pandemic, updated them to HTML and Copy-to-Clipboard, and made an unlocking spreadsheet and answer checker. This was good enough to give people stuff to solve while also letting tech do their thing. While folks were solving, I went around between groups of solvers going “You know that thing you just said you want to do? Did you know that we have a formula that does exactly that?” It was a lot of fun, and a lot of those old puzzles still hold up pretty well, which is a credit to my old teammates on Palindrome.
The Hunt Itself
Voice of the Room
One of the changes that Copy of Copy of Sheet1 made this year was to split our previous PuzzBoss role into PuzzBoss and Voice of the Room. PuzzBoss was the person who was in charge of keeping track of the various things that were happening with the hunt and the person in charge of making strategic decisions. Voice of the Room was specifically in charge of things that were important to in-person, like where physical puzzles were and making sure that we sent people to events. Splitting all of this responsibility into two roles was apparently very prescient because oh boy did we have a lot of events this year.
I volunteered to be the first Voice of the Room because I am impulsive and will volunteer myself whenever someone needs help. This meant that I had a whiteboard filled with events, time slots, and people who were going to them. This was a bunch of work, but it was honestly fun because I got to encourage a bunch of new hunters to do some cool events. I eventually gave up Voice of the Room when metapuzzles started unlocking, but that was fine because I hyperfocused on the Hyperbolic Space.
All of the Structures in Hunt
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about game design, it’s that I can handle a much higher level of complexity in my head than the vast majority of the population. I will play a game, completely understand everything that’s going on, then turn around and have everyone else tell me that it’s too complex. Frequently, when I’m writing games or puzzles, I have to constantly go back and take out complexity to make sure it’s a level that most people will understand. So when I saw the complexity that was in the opening video of this year’s hunt, I got a little scared.
That being said, I think that Cardinality used their complexity very well. Research Points were an excellent innovation, and I think that this was by far the best :post-pandemic scavenger hunt that’s been done. Many people on Copy of Copy of Sheet1 brought up that having a single Scavenger Hunt in a hunt can often mean that it ends up on the shoulders of a couple people and just feels like one big task, whereas this was just a thing people could do when they needed a break, but also could be someone’s focus if they wanted it to be.
Look, not every Hunt is going be able to have a Research Point subsystem. However, I hope that future hunt runners look at the successes of the Research Point subsystem and consider them when writing their own hunts.
Theming
Look, I’m a simple person. I see Pokémon, I’m going to like the hunt. I’m a fan of Pokémon, and making these off-brand Pokémon solved many problems with using Pokémon as a theme in the first place. I love all of the little art of the little Puzzmons - they just look soooooooo cute. I obviously have a favorite already. That Puzzmon is Vortlexlis due to its similarlity to the Vortox from Blood on the Clocktower.
Also, I loved the little story bits. The RPG-like dialogue was wonderful and something that I want to emulate in other puzzle hunts. Also every dialogue line spoken by The Child was perfect.
Signposting
I’ve previously written a post called “Are We There Yet?” which was about the 2024 MIT Mystery Hunt not telling us how long it was going to be. This hunt was pretty much the opposite of that. We knew from the start how many Kingdoms were in the main section of the Hunt, we knew how many RP it was going to take to unlock all of the Hunt, and once we solved one of the Dimensions we knew how many Keepers we were going to need to find and therefore how many Dimensions there were going to be. While our team was not in the highest of spirits when we opened up The Glitch, we at least knew it was coming, and it felt the whole time like we were making progress.
The Dimensions
I loved most of the Dimensions. Land of No Name, Hyperbolic Space, Atlas of Mosaics, and Terminus were all wonderful rounds. Fate’s Thread Casino looked like there was a lot of thought put into into making it work, and I don’t think that there was anything wrong with it, but it definitely wasn’t :my cup of tea. My feelings about The Glitch… well… that’s a story for :another blog post.
Puzzles Worked On
As a note: these puzzles are going to be based on round order and not the order that I worked on them because I am not trying to recreate my entire weekend.
Aviaria - Feather Forecast (Research)
I didn’t to a ton in MonQuest because other people on the team were very happy to do so and it pretty quickly became apparent that MonQuest wasn’t going to be as big of a deal as the Projection Device was. This was the one research puzzle I did do on the MonQuest because I saw how it worked and didn’t see any notes about it on the spreadsheet of research information. It did take me a little while to process that RETERN was actually an answer - I got RETER? and was like “are there any actual words that do this? Why do I have to figure out the fourth bird?”. Then I got the fourth bird and understood, so I guess mission accomplished to the puzzle creator.
Aviaria - Field Day (Research Event)
Every year I try to go to one big event, but this year with me being in charge of assigning people to events on Friday and the influx of new students on our team, I told myself that if I didn’t get to go to an event this year because all the spots went to newer solvers then that is a perfectly fine outcome. Then I scheduled three different events for after dinner on Friday, so I did the sudoku of who wanted to go to which event and realized that I had could have a spot on Field Day, which was great!
The event itself was good. It wasn’t mind bending or innovative, but it also wasn’t broken or boring. I got to do some silly little physical games with a teammate against some other teams I knew. It knew what it wanted to do, it did it, and it didn’t drag on. I’m not going to be like, fondly telling stories of it in :ten years, but it was enjoyable, and that’s what’s important.
Aviaria - Bird Nation (Capstone)
Even before we opened the Capstone, I spent a lot of time staring at Hawktulpa because the outline reminded me of a sports team logo and I couldn’t quite place it. I googled a lot of different sports teams trying to find the outline, then saw Dododododo and started trying to find that one too. Eventually someone noticed the country flags when made me feel a lot better and I could close all of my sports team tabs.
Bubble Cove - Bringing Up Baby Shark (Capstone)
We hovered around all the parts of this capstone for a while without fully connecting everything together. I don’t know if we ever noticed the Red Herring Descriptions vs. Herring Descriptions difference, but we were able to get all the phrases while we were searching for the shark types anyway, so as soon as we realized what we were supposed to be indexing into, it was simple enough to make the indicies work.
Kitty City - Jumping to Conclusions
I do think that this is the first normal puzzle that I worked on after the hunt started, and when I saw what was happening with it, I knew that I had to jump in. I could see how to solve the Goosebumps and Dates submetas immediately. Some teammates made some comments about how this was “guess what I’m thinking”, but honestly everything was very well clued here. I was able to break Skyscrapers and Web while my teammates were staring at Bilingual and Chimera, and after they got Chimera we were able to put everything together to get the answer.
I really appreciate this puzzle for making the thing I try to do with every puzzle the necessary steps to solving it. I also really appreciate that they did write actual versions of the puzzles with meta answers to complete the fiction of the puzzle. We saw some of the phrases in the Chimera section that corresponded to the feeders, and some of the more complicated ones really did feel like meta puzzles. Also I’m glad that NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP was able to be checked, even if no one would ever submit it.
Kitty City - Watchtower
I do like the tradition of “Oh, MIT wants us to all have nametags? Well I guess they’re going to be a puzzle.” My main contribution here was making sure the extraction was working in the spreadsheet. I would also like to say that I’m a proud Escape Expert with my Medical Hammer.
Kitty City - Nine Lives (Capstone)
This was a fun puzzle to work on, and I appreciated how many in-roads we could make on this puzzle even without having all the Cat Puzzmon. I do find the Erratum on Big Garff to be very funny. As soon as it was released, I went “one of the people is Bill Clinton, right?” and I was correct. I got KANGLA SHA as an answer pretty early on but dismissed it as a possibility, so I was definitely kicking myself when someone on my team solved it.
I will say, I also really appreciate the Kitty Capstone being called Nine Lives and then the puzzle being about the nine lives of various famous real/fictional people.
Elder Drifts - Burton-Conner House: BC (Research)
This was a cute little quiz. I had fun, and it’s given me ideas for later.
Elder Drifts - Shapes
I didn’t solve much of it, but I had a key insight here. Another group of solvers on the team had solved all the different meta puzzles, found the skit and found the shapes, but were stuck on what to do next. I asked them if they had tried putting all the answers in the square shell, and they said that they don’t fit. I said that I didn’t care, that’s 100% what they have to do and it is the only reason why they would reference that skit in the first place. It got solved soon afterwards.
Most of the Kingdom metas got solved while I was working on Hyperspace, so this is the only one I really worked on. I worked on this one because I figured out the main mechanic of Letters -> Morse Code -> Binary -> Letters, and I figured out how to make Google Sheets do that with our custom formulae. I had a bunch of ideas, but eventually left and someone else was able to figure out the two-step between answers that I was missing.
Land of No Name - Six Shifts
This is one of my favorite puzzles of the entire hunt. The base puzzle is super easy for the MIT Mystery Hunt - it would be at the bottom level of a :fish puzzle. However, when the round unlocks the puzzle is literally impossible. The trick is trying to solve it as early as possible, especially since it gives the letter A, which is extremely useful for the rest of the round. I got it with :four letters, although not the letters listed in the solution. I was shocked it was solvable, but it very much felt like it was testing my skill, and I was able to step up to the challenge. Weird mechanics in puzzle hunts are cool, but it’s important that the hunt feels like it’s using the mechanic in interesting ways, otherwise it’s just adding complexity for the :sake of complexity. This puzzle could only exist because of this round, and I love it.
Land of No Name - Pixel Grid
I came nowhere close to solving this one. I assumed that this was showing different sets or subsets of things that all shared a certain property. I wish I had realized what was actually happening though because this puzzle looked really cool. What I did manage to do was to copy all the bigrams we had at one point and ended up making a google sheet with something like 400 columns in it. So you know, completely normal things.
Land of No Name - Almost
This is another puzzle along the realm of Six Shifts, but I am a little annoyed at how many letters it took for us to get the correct answer. This is not because we didn’t know what was happening - THE QUICK BROWN OX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG gave that away pretty quickly. The problem was that I had extracted the wrong letter and therefore had the wrong cluephrase for a while. While I don’t have as many happy memories about this puzzle than I did for Six Shifts, I still think it’s on the same level of brilliance.
Land of No Name - Imaginary Factorizations
This is a puzzle I wish I had spent a little more time on. I was poking around No Name puzzles trying to find something doable, and I spent a lot of time starting at the factorizations. I probably wouldn’t have completed it, but I might have gotten the next step. I really liked the concept though.
Hyperbolic Space - Partners in Crime
Look, I’m a simple person. I see Pokémon, I’m going to attempt the puzzle. I did a bunch of setup for this puzzle, but the problem with me solving a puzzle like this in the middle of hunt is that I just don’t have the attention span for a feeder puzzle of this length. I noted a couple initial deductions, but this was shortly before I went to bed for the night, and when I woke up I ended up on capstone/metapuzzle duty. This ended up getting backsolved by me later.
What I really liked about this round was that despite it being a round involving a complicated math thing that I had never heard before, I could depend on my puzzle instincts to help me figure out what was going on. I went through a couple different programs and representations until I found something I liked, which was using Microsoft Whiteboard and a picture of the tiling from Wikipedia projected onto a circle. I filled in a couple of the red puzzles we had until I was able to backsolve a blue puzzle (Genealogy), at which point the other group across the room that I didn’t realize was working on it came over. I then had three other people helping me organize everything, which was incredibly useful. We were able to put together a full map pretty quickly. Between us, we were able to backsolve the 12 blue puzzles along with the 3 remaining red puzzles we hadn’t solved. This was a lot and I got pretty exhausted from this, so after this I took a break before looking at the meta.
Other people who looked at the meta were able to figure out the basic pattern of 4 meta letters + 1 extra letter make a word, and you need to extract those extra letters, but weren’t sure how to get the extra letters from the diagram. After my brain break (and food break!), I took a look and realized that there were exactly four letters that had all red septagons and exactly four letters that had all blue septagons. This worked with the anagraming mechanic and extracted two letters, so we were onto something. The trick was then replicating that for more groups. One of my teammates had to deal with me going full conspiracy drawing on the whiteboard outlining my plans, but I eventually got a second set, then went back to my hotel room because it was 12:30 AM. One bottle of water and sleeve of Oreos later, I managed to get a third set of letters, and ????KES????NUS was enough for my team to wheel of fortune STROKESOFGENUS.
Every year, I defeat one round. This year, it was Hyperbolic Space.
Atlas of Mosaics - Crossing the Unknown
I filled in a couple of entries in the opening one and the playing card one before moving on. This was a great introduction to the round, and I loved looking back on it to see the shenanigans they put in the crossword.
Atlas of Mosaics - Inconsequential Chase
Look, I’m a simple person. I see Pokémon, I’m going to attempt the puzzle. I didn’t really work on the other sections of the puzzle, but also that’s what I really like about this puzzle. It seems specifically designed to get different people working on it at different times, and it makes it very clear who it wants at each moment. We unlocked the Beatles section shortly afterwards and I knew exactly who on the team needed to do the next part (and got beat to pinging them). I did also appreciate that we were able to use logic between the Pokémon section and the years section to fix the mistake we had in the Pokémon section.
I didn’t do the identification of the openings for this, but I am very good at visualizing chess, so when it came to actually extract, I was able to try a bunch of things really quickly and get the right answers on the right pieces.
Fate’s Thread Casino - Quests
I’d like to say that I did a lot on this, but I didn’t. I occasionally hopped on the hourlies for my team, but mostly I just answered them anyways for data and also did a couple pulls because gambling!
Terminus - Can you really call it a crossword if…
Most of the work I did on Terminus involved trying to unlock things. I am definitely one of the people responsible for Copy of Copy of Sheet1’s 5000 universes visited, as I was testing the whole alphabet multiple times, lots of weird numbers, and at one point, :the entire script of the Bee Movie. That last one wasn’t really to test anything except to see what limits Cardinality put on the page. Also because :it was funny.
The big breakthrough I had was figuring out how to get into the Crossword meta. It should not surprise anyone that I immediately honed on something based on CROWS. That’s a fact! This led other folks to figure out how to get into the other metas, of which I would like to credit on getting the ball rolling.
I wish I had done a little more for this meta than I did, but I was able to get CONDUCTOR out of one of the six transformations based solely on Nutrimatic, and I’d like to hope that this helped people get the other metas.
Wrapping It Up
This hunt was absolutely great! I heard from so many folks about how clean the puzzles were, people were generally excited about Puzzmon, and folks were laughing and smiling all weekend long. Cardinality did a bang up job with this Hunt, and it’s definitely one I’m going to be looking back on fondly. They took some big swings and hit a bunch of balls out of the park!
Again, we’re unlikely to get a full “Let’s talk about every world” series like I did for 2023, but there will be one or two posts about some details about the Hunt. But honestly, I spent my weekend impressed. Given the state of the world, it’s what I needed.
-
Cute Mage
:X AnotherBlogPost
I have some thoughts™ about The Glitch round, many of them not good. But I’m going to wait for a little while to post them so I can be as clearheaded as possible about them and keep the feedback constructive. Also many of the thoughts I have on The Glitch round are related to a bigger topic of unlocking structures and the difficulty curve of puzzle hunts, so I kind of want to address it as part of a bigger topic and not randomly in the middle of my 2026 Hunt Likes post.
:X BeeMovie
I only did this because I couldn’t access our team’s copy of Atlas Shrugged.
:X FishPuzzle
And yes, I mean Fish puzzle - not Students puzzle or whatever people think that Fish puzzles are nowadays. I’m planning an whole article about that now that I have my muse back for writing blog posts.
:X Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which…
:X FourLetters
Our four letters were MOQZ, and our substitution cipher friendly message was ??KJAHK K?? HA?DAJ D?GIK K?AK BLE ED?C KL C?HLC? K?GD D?FK?FH?.. I also didn’t assume that it was a Caesar cipher until I started decoding the first couple words and realized that they capital Q was like that for Caesar.
:X Gambling
I know I have an addictive personality, so I stay away from addictive things like the plague. Gambling games designed to make you addicted are certainly one of them, so the theming of this round was not something I was particularly interested in, even if the Keeper is #TransGoals. Again, that’s not to say that the theming was bad - it just wasn’t my thing, and not everything has to be for me specifically.
:X Hydra
Fun fact: when we were announced as the team that went to the most universes, one of my team members said something along the lines of “Cute Mage went after Hydra heads again”, which is a honestly fair cop, given that I opened over 10,000 Hydra Head Puzzles by hand at Microsoft Puzzle Hunt.
:X LongVideos
This may seem very specific, but many of the people who solved with me on Palindrome are shaking their heads in agreement right now. I like talking about the MIT Mystery Hunt and puzzle hunting in general!
:X PostPandemic
I mean, right now isn’t really post-pandemic given that COVID is still a real thing that exists. From a MIT Mystery Hunt perspective, I’m more talking about the hunts after 2022 when the hunt went back to being in-person.
:X TenYears
That’s a lie. Like I said last year, I remember every puzzle/event I’ve worked on and I’m sure in ten years I will just randomly pull out this event when another event tries to do something similar.