Sorry about the delay, but here's part 3. (If you like, revisit part 1 and part 2.)

( Spoilers ho! )

The puzzles are now on the MIT site, so links in this post go to the permanent URLs for these puzzles.

( Last set of spoilers )

I left off the last entry shortly after I returned to Hunt Saturday morning, around 8:30 AM.

( Spoilers ho! )

While I ended up on the winning team, Death and Mayhem, last year, we (the remaining members of Beginner's Luck after 3/4 of the team scattered to various other teams) really intended to stay with D&M only for 2017, and then move on to make another team (with plans I will describe below). Winning the hunt gave us a dilemma ( Read more... )

Data from Death & Mayhem about the unlocks:

• At 7:23 PM Friday we had 12 open puzzles.
• At 7:24 we solved Dismal Dungeon, which unlocked seven more puzzles.
• At 7:40 we solved Thespians, which unlocked seventeen more puzzles.
• At 8:17 we finished the first event (and solved Pentoku at the same time), and this combined to unlock fourteen more puzzles.

We ( Read more... )

Writing a Mystery Hunt that could be finished in 15 and a half hours was a bit of a construction failure. But it was a tolerable one. Some people who expected to join Death & Mayhem or Palindrome on Saturday afternoon for puzzling arrived to find their teams already finished. Other than that, though, people had fun, just for less time than they ( Read more... )

Here is a spoily summary of the puzzles I worked on and selected other puzzles, in order by round, rather than the order I looked at them. You might need to be logged into a team account to see the puzzles using the links.

( Spoilers ho! )

This post will cover the hunt and hunt structure a bit but will not include any puzzle spoilers.

( Read more... )

Almost 9 years since my last appearance, I got selected for Willz's puzzle segment on NPR's Weekend Edition again. Listen to me this Sunday.

Update: Here's the direct link to my appearance.

I said I was done blogging this year's MIT Mystery Hunt (and I might still renege on that and write some more), but except for one detail, this post is not really about this year's hunt.

( Long history of the hunt index; skip if you don't care about the past )