MIT Mystery Hunt - Structure

Structure

The objective of the hunt is to solve a set of puzzles in order to locate a coin hidden on the MIT campus. Participants can organize into teams of any size and are not required to be physically present. The largest recorded team was the Manic Sages in 2012, with an estimated 150 active solvers. The proportion of hunters who participate remotely has grown over time.

The hunt and the puzzles comprising it are organized and created by the team that won the event the previous year, ensuring that no hunt will be run (or won) consecutively by the same people; each year's writers are free to change any aspects of the internal structure of the Hunt. At noon on the Friday before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the teams gather in the lobby of MIT's Building 7 where the organizers present a skit describing the hunt's theme, the initial round of puzzles, as well as rules and other administrative matters. The teams can locate their headquarters anywhere and, over the course of the Hunt, check in with the organizers to verify the answers to individual puzzles. Some teams make extensive use of remote solvers—puzzle aficionados who are unable to be on-campus at MIT but devote their holiday weekend anyhow. After the Hunt concludes, the organizers typically hold a wrap-up meeting at which the solutions to all the metapuzzles and the overall structure of the Hunt are revealed. Since 2010, hunts have been run for a fixed duration regardless of when the coin is first found, allowing more than one team to complete it.

While the puzzles comprising the early hunts were either linear (after solving one puzzle, a new puzzle would be revealed) or released en masse, since 1998 the puzzles have been released in rounds. Successive rounds can be released at predetermined times, based upon completing a requisite number of puzzles in a previous round, or another metric entirely. The distinguishing feature of the present-day Mystery Hunt is employing the solutions to all the puzzles in a round to solve a metapuzzle, usually lacking any instructions. Once a team has solved all the metapuzzles, it may begin the "runaround" phase to find the hidden coin: the team follows a series of clues or puzzles that leads them from one location on the MIT campus to another until reaching the location where the coin is hidden. The entire hunt usually lasts approximately 48 hours, although the 2003 hunt required 67 hours. Although the hidden prize is always called "the coin", in recent years a greater variety of items have been used as the "coin", including a compact disc, a fragment of a meteorite, a snowglobe, a lump of charcoal, and a wooden cube.

The mystery hunt employs a wide range of puzzles including crosswords, cryptic crosswords, logic puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, anagrams, connect-the-dots, ciphers, riddles, paint by numbers, sudokus, and word searches. Solutions to these classic puzzles are further complicated by employing arcane or esoteric topics like quantum computing, stereoisomers, ancient Greek, Klingon, Bach cantatas, coinage of Africa, and Barbie dolls. Puzzles might also employ pictures, audio files, video games, physical objects, locations within MIT or the Boston area. The hunt also assumes extensive familiarity with MIT's campus, culture, and lore.