These are links to the puzzles in the 2001 and 2008 MIT Mystery Hunts that were written by me, and their solutions. I recommend, though, that you have a look at the entire 2001 hunt and the entire 2008 hunt; in addition to giving you a better sense of the size and variety of each event (and giving you a chance to see a whole bunch of neat puzzles by my teammates), this will also put the puzzles mentioned here in a more sensible context.

The 2001 hunt (whose theme was "The Hunt of Horror") consisted of four phases (plus an "endgame" of a few more puzzles). Each phase consisted of 12 puzzles that each led to a word or short phrase, a metapuzzle (explicit or implicit) for putting those solutions together into the name of an "entity" and an "incantation," and another puzzle leading to the description of an object to be constructed. More details are available here.

Regular puzzles:

Object puzzles:

I also wrote the metapuzzle for Phase 1 (of which I was the organizer); however, the metapuzzle depends too strongly on the the 12 regular puzzles of Phase 1 for a link to it to be possible.

The 2008 hunt ("The Mystery Mystery Hunt", with a murder mystery theme) consisted of:

Little Black Book puzzles:

Dossier Puzzles:

I also wrote a Witness Metapuzzle, which can't really be linked to. Also, the endgame involved (among other things) a logic puzzle about which Suspects wrote the three puzzles in the "First Round of the Hunt" that would have been used if the murder had not taken place; I wrote the (intentionally lame) "puzzles", which were not meant to be solved, although two of them can be (the solving team got the puzzles on paper with the solutions scribbled on the back):

Back to my home page