#puzzle hunt

[oneefin]

i did mit mystery hunt 2025! i met up with my teammates on huh? in-person for the first time, and we hunted with math + vehem (the mathemagicians + vehemence) live on mit campus. it was amazing i had an insane time.

our team finished the final runaround in 6th place, concurrently with super team awesome 🎉🎉🎉 so excited to have been able to see the whole experience from front to back

i was definitely not a key contributor for the hunt - i was sort of operating at a level below my usual and was just focused on catching the in-person experience as much as possible - but i enjoyed adding my weight in the places where i could. these are the ones that i touched in some real way:

Songs on the Radio (+ and all of the stray leads performances)

Educational Rite of Passage

A Sudoku?

Commentary

Fight Night at Mo's

Follow the Rules

World's Largest Crossword Puzzle (this is the one i did the second-most on)

Alias

T____OTT___P__Y

Formula Won

Celestial Rope

Corn Maize

The Annual Massachusetts Spelling Bee (this was all huh? - me and luny to start, and niv and clarity on extraction)

abstract art and poems / concerning a pale blue dot / and many more friends

esTIMation dot jpg

Good Fences Make Good Otherwise Incompatible Neighbors (this is the one i did the most on)

Seeing the Big Picture

the rest of huh? had a lot of breakthroughs in a bunch of other puzzles, including (but definitely not limited to) The Inspectre, A Map and a Shade (or Four), The Grand Illusion, and The Killer

lots of people who aren't me are going to have plenty of thoughts about the nature of the hunt and how successful it was, so i won't elaborate too much there - what i felt is that the hunt seemed exceedingly cool for an in-person experience, and unlike last year there were no real tech issues to speak of :) the puzzle difficulty definitely started pretty high, though, so i felt like i didn't get a good warm up to set me up well

excited to see what happens next year with cardinality as the writing team :O

[welcomeinitiate]

Congrats to our top 3 teams!

Mr Ree Polka (tl) -- the first to finish the Round 3 Meta!

Kat: ) -- second to finish and our favorite submission (so far) to a certain puzzle!

The Hoes of Blackmoor Manor -- third to finish and the first team to solve a puzzle in the hunt! With that said, all three teams have declined running the 2025 welcomeinitiate mystery, so that title is still up for grabs! A few other updates: 1. There is now a Junior Detective version of Recipe Substitution, which is easier than the original version. Either version will work for the Round 1 meta puzzle 2. There are now self-serve hints on all Round 1 puzzles, including the meta. Simply submit "hint1", "hint2", or "hint3" to get hints for a puzzle. These do not count against your guess limit 3. We are still available for custom hints (unlimited for Round 1, 1 a day for Rounds 2&3), so def send a message if you're stuck on a puzzle!

[winterpinetrees]

No idea if anyone would be interested, but this is the puzzle hunt clue that I just sent to some real-life friends to solve. This is the second clue I have ever made. It's not directly connected to anything, so it's barely even a puzzle hunt.

@avetato, if anyone solves it, don't look.

#8000FF #4b0082  #daa520 #000080 #614051 #FF0000 #614051

#C3B091 #614051 #FFFF00

#4b0082 #C0C0C0

#000080 #614051 #FFFFFF #008080 #FF8000 #000080

Jlk wwfpsrxfrq pezvg oihhk gui rbgvopa? Awf yeom bnzi el hur raqh xrc.

Dlrl fph spw jgp prglrk? Kwixchgkaxl gzssi oksp rpzv qqb e sprk.��

Cld gvx mah emlyszc (csv snvjxphmvw) wuskc ilg uozog uws hmuar mfpx uraeg pcgi jwdeczcc epb hrzbsb icpnrr acg TjB? 

Jeqf xm f ulftr qq bmj rvw bglz yt vvchkgm ymi eeav ntzj!

[renewherself]

MIT Mystery Hunt 2025

Zulu Lima - Figured out that both ships were using the same flags, but one ship was using the ICS system and the other was using Marryat's.

On the Corner - Figured out that each answer for the MH1. subpuzzle contained the substring "MIT". - Figured out the people in the MH8. subpuzzle were all MIT alumni.

Battle Factory - Had the 'aha' that the rule for Abra's evolution was "second word of a magical incantation" and therefore the corresponding name was OPEN (SESAME). This was widely regarded by two other solvers during my "hear me out" as a "BRILLIANT" and "GALAXY BRAIN" move.

Broken Record - Figured out that the solutions to the crossword clues were all words that could be repeated to form well-known phrases, solving most of the clues as well, and then got stuck on the clue phrase BILLSJUMPINNO.

The Tunnels Beneath the Institute - Realised the puzzle was about The Magnus Archives from the description in record time and begged for a key to unlock the puzzle. - Matched all the TMA fears to each of the content warnings. - Figured out that the correct order in which to place the episode titles into the grid was the order in which the Fears are referenced in the incantation for the mass ritual in TMA, and then got stuck because of never remembering to check for things being spelled out diagonally and also missing the acrostic spelled out by the initial letters of the content warnings. - Made the other team captains tear their hair out as they sat there waiting for me to record my statement.

Weirdo Threaded Doodads - Figured out the first pattern created a barcode and how to transform the instructions into binary to be fed into an online converter through simple Notepad find-and-replace. - Knit the third pattern while also teaching the other solvers what each type of stitch looked like as they tried to translate the pattern into code (since we thought, like the first two patterns, the final product would need to be scanned in some way).

Do the Packing - Figured out that letters needed to be "packed" into the black squares of the crossword grid.

It's All Cheep And A Sheep To Me - Figured out what that godawful song was. - Figured out that the answers to the crossword clues were also animal sounds in another language (although thought it was just Italian at the time).

Passage of Time (post-hunt) - Figured out that the highlighted crossword solutions were all events that happened in a particular generation's birth range, in chronological order moving down the grid. - Solo-solved the crossword. - Figured out the extraction method of taking the letters in the squares that overlapped with the living cells in each corresponding generation of a Conway's Game of Life simulation.

Reuse and Recyclability (post-hunt) - Solo-solved, including getting stuck on the final clue phrase by interpreting it as a cryptic.

[puzzlenation]

The Puzzliest Hallmark Holiday Films!

Unless you’re trapped under a rock, you’ve probably seen at least one of the barrage of Hallmark holiday films unleashed on the viewing public over the years. They release so many, in fact, that many times, they have more new holiday movies than there are days between Thanksgiving and Christmas! And I’ve watched a LOT of them. This won’t surprise longtime readers, given my extensive reviews of…

[sgt-reckless]

Oh hell yea, Galactic Puzzlehunt is tomorrow! Excited!

[thethinkingaurora]

Well I started a whole new puzzle hunt project last week, combining two of my fandoms (cookie run/homestuck)

Ooh, puzzles, sounds like fun

I know literally nothing about either of those fandoms though

[jad-fm]

the difficulty of choosing between a puzzle I can do but absolutely don't want to because of the busywork and a puzzle I love but can't do because skill issue.

[lunar-solarsystem]

so i have an explanation

so i was talking with a friend, i showed them a draft for something about Lose Clarity and they caught me accidentally saying “Puzzle’s” somewhere rather than just “Puzzle”

so now i have a joke branch off for my own AU

this shall now be known as the Puzzle Pieces branch-off :3

it’s literally just a whole bunch of tiny Puzzles

they multiply :)

[hplonesomeart]

Let me know if I should upload this officially to my YouTube or not lol. Felt like doing a little animated skit about what would happen if my previous comfort character (The Snatcher btw) caught me fixating on Mr. Puzzles (my current source of joy and comfort obviously). I think this is how the conversation would go. Took three days to complete! :3

Audio borrowed/taken from Doobus Goobus YouTube channel—the “Harley & Ivy are Great ‘Friends’” original video can be found here!

[beatrixacs]

And my The Witcher puzzle project is done 🧩🐺⚔️😊

[oneefin]

a good friend and fellow puzzle huh?nter @nivrad00 released an elegant puzzle suite called 🟥🟧🟨🟩🟦🟪⬛ on their itch page! i playtested this and it was awesome, highly recommend :D

go try it: https://nivrad00.itch.io/rainbow-challenge

[welcomeinitiate]

Meta Monday Friday!

Howdy folks! With multiple teams now in round 2, we are easing up the hinting policy for round 1; feel free to submit multiple hint requests a day for round 1, one at a time (please wait until a request has been answered to submit a new one though) Teams can continue to request one hint a day for round 2 or round 3 puzzles We also have a little “How to solve a meta” video for you—if you’ve solved two or three puzzles, you should take a look at the round 1 meta!

[winterpinetrees]

It took my friends less than a day to solve the first stage of a puzzle hunt that I made for them. It’s honestly my fault for using something as simple as a caesar cipher.

I have got to get weirder.

[renewherself]

EC Puzzle Hunt 2: Enchanted Castle

Street View Hunt - Solo-solved, including identifying 6/8 of the street view images

Trelawney - 90% solo-solved, up to the last step of figuring out which game had a Baron and which game had a Poisoner

Dichotomous Key - Figured out the method for filling out the "numerical" tree, including that nodes were inconsistent about which side 0 and 1 were on

Musical Numbers - Filled out roughly a third of the crossnumber puzzle - Found the contradictions in the crossnumber puzzle that were causing the team to use the wrong folk song for extraction - Solved the cluephrase SPRING THAT SENDS OUT WATER and figured out the final puzzle answer

Taskmaster - Provided 4/5 submissions that enabled us to solve the puzzle the slow and steady way - Received 5/5 points on task 3, with a bonus "holy shit"

Character Classes - Figured out that the missing letters were spelling out the names of Nethack monsters and that we needed to convert each monster into their in-game symbol/class

On-Site Only — Sorry! - Almost solo-solved, including figuring out the latitude of the on-site location through examining the astrolabe, figuring out the azimuth and altitude of Arcturus, using Wolfram Alpha to identify the on-site location based on that information. (Needed help to figure out extraction involved layering the three sets of letters and reading them interleaved)

The Lexicographer - Figured out the name of each enemy was an anagram of a famous author's name

The Great Hall [Meta] - Identified the Wyoming and Colorado locations clued by the feeder answers (save for the locations clued by Ziggurats, which we had not solved yet, and the locations clued by PREMIER LEAGUE TEAMS because sports)

Solution: Meta Bingo - Solo-solved the Training subpuzzle by coding a Python script to run through all possible bigram combinations

Duality - Helped to unravel and solve some of the entangled crossword clues, including: + "Clock change in excelsis _ inits" DST/DEO + "TLD for martial artist Jet Spain" - ES/LI + "HTML action symbolized by a red circle companion (abbr.)" CSS/REC

First You Go Down Broadway + Identified the productions, venues, and production dates up through step 33/37 post-hunt

[wishgraanted]

Developing LAA and it's plot has been super fun; I am back to working on another Encore chapter, but college is started and I've gotta learn to rebalance everything around it.

I figured I would share some concepts of Click Clack/Toby for the Lifetime Achievement AU, and share some thoughts about it specifically for here!

CW for body horror. You know the drill. No blood!

First and Foremost, the rule again stands that Toby cannot kiss Thespius Alive. To rectify this, I immediately killed him. Now what?

Well, without getting too far into spoilers, both Thespius and Cobigail have to work together. It's a frantic, stressful time. She's working hard, cobbling together the best she can from margins and old notes. She has to go out to find the pieces of what she needs...all for a ritual.

Thespius is doing what he can to support and help her...but he is NOT ready for any of the messy stuff that comes with such a thing. His contributions are more Flora than Fauna.

In the meantime, Click is kinda just chilling in the freezer. They had to put him Somewhere, after all.

The result I've come up with, alongside @scribblelimbo (Thank you SOOOO much for your help and ideas) was this:

Where Time Will Tell Click Clack deals with Bones in a sense of "rebuilding yourself into someone new", LAA Click is definitely "using the spare pieces to bring back something broken"

Think of the forest; petrified wood, old bones, weeds and cattails, the moss and earth, and that is what you get. The only things Cobi could manage to pull together with her broken knowledge of such things.

As it was lovingly put by my dearest collaborator: " Cobigail adds everything practical. Thespius adds all the fluff."

It's not perfect, once complete. Toby couldn't keep all of their human organs; they'd been dead too long by the point Cobi and Thes gathered everything. He chills easily, and he's quick to stalk and eat small critters when he's peckish...but the pros far outweigh the cons. Being "alive" is certainly better than being dead.

....and being able to kiss the dead hippie guy helps too.