Mystery Hunt mile markers by Danny B.D. '15

Not only the blogs’ birthday—in trying to decide what to write, I discovered one of my old draft blog posts turned 10. Ten years ago, almost to the day, I was trying to figure out how to tell folks on here what the MIT Mystery Hunt was, and what it was like. Since the youth yearn for the mines content, here’s everything I have from then:

One week ago, early on Sunday morning, I was lying on the floor.

I don’t tend to lie on the ground particularly often. Here was my view from the ground facing up:

For those of you who haven’t been to campus before, that’s the ceiling of Lobby 7. Lobby 7 is a beautiful space, with that vaulted ceiling and skylight. But why the hell was I on the floor?

Let’s try looking over to the side and seeing what’s going on elsewhere.

Oh, good. Yeah, that did a lot to clarify any questions you might have had.

Fine, fine, I’ll explain. Once a year,

And that’s where I stopped my draft, mid-sentence. Thank you, me-from-2015.

Let me try that again.

Once a year, thousands of people (MIT-affiliated and not!) descend onto MIT’s campus over the long MLK weekend each January, and begin bashing their collective skulls against puzzles of any and all forms. This is the MIT Mystery Hunt: an annual event which changes in shape and size every year, in part because it’s always written by the team which finishes first the prior year: a combination honor/curse which means we’ll never see the same theme or hunt twice. It’s a time of seeing friends, and learning esoterica, and putting arcane things in spreadsheets, and not sleeping very much. There are other puzzle hunts (in-person and online) scattered throughout the year, but the MIT Mystery Hunt sits atop the calendar at just a whole other scale.

Hunt’s been covered on the blogs many, many, many times before, and also just got a lovely writeup in Technology Review. When I started that draft, though, I didn’t have a grasp of how important Hunt would be in my life. 2015 was my third hunt: my first year we actually won, so my second year we wrote (I helped with runtime stuff), and that third year, with that blog post draft, was only the second time I’d ever been an actual participant.

Fast forward a decade: our team continues to chug along, picking up current undergrads, recent alumni, various friends nearby and across the globe. We have members with graduation years predating other members’ birth years. I slowly learned more about how puzzles work and how to solve them—as of yet, despite having a few ideas (and despite having been on the writing team in 2014), I still haven’t taken a crack at writing any of my own. I’ve stuck with this team through increasingly unhinged team names, became one of the core people running our tech stack for puzzle management, and gotten a gnarly scar on my leg which could be a shark bite but is really just because I pulled an all-nighter in 2017 and then collided with a stone bench on the final runaround.

When I lived in San Francisco for 6 years, Hunt was the temporal landmark which anchored at least one of my trips back to see friends in the Boston area. It was one of those visits, feeling a wind-chill-in-the-teens January evening, which made me realize I really needed to move back: if I could miss New England in those conditions, I wasn’t just coating the climate with nostalgia. I did move back, and now I’m delighted that I get to now help shelter other friends who make an annual pilgrimage for this silly, silly weekend.

I started seeing someone new in early January 2022, and a week or two later I had to explain that I was going to vanish all weekend into this weird “hunt” thing. She was very understanding—but she did text me Saturday that she had just made fresh-baked cookies… so I ducked out of puzzling briefly, because I liked her an awful lot, and also, fresh-baked cookies. We got married at City Hall a month ago.

Hunt is a weekend of escapism in a bleak winter month, bringing together thousands of ridiculous dorks who are ready willing and able to do utterly ridiculous things. The memorable (positive) parts of hunts are the ones which spark wonder, chaos, silliness. You hide flash drives inside donuts, ask people to construct preposterous fashion, twitch play escape rooms, build a goddamn puzzle bed. Even small dashes of whimsy make it go from a list of puzzles to magic. The joys of frantically searching around like you cracked a conspiracy theory. This year, in particular, Death & Mayhem wrote a hunt which knocked it out of the park. I’m still sitting in awe.

It’s my purest form of holiday I can get: a weekend where my brain is filled with joy and trivia and friendship, and I have no room to worry about the omnishambles. I love all types of puzzles in a hunt, but when I think about what it means for it to be MIT’s Mystery Hunt in particular, it doesn’t mean the puzzles must be fundamentally impossible, or the hunt must set records in size or length. It means using the physical environment, collocated on campus for a weekend, to do things, which are limited only by what the writing team decides to do, not by hunters’ willingness to do them.

And so the countdown to Hunt’s kickoff on January 16, 2026 begins anew, complete with new challenges, and new memories.