MIT Mystery Hunt

Greetings puzzlers!

We are pleased to announce that the 37th annual MIT Mystery Hunt will begin at noon on January 12, 2018 in Kresge Auditorium and will run through 10AM on Monday, January 15, 2018.  Wrap-up will take place in Kresge Auditorium at noon on Monday the 15th.  We invite you to join us for a fun-filled weekend of puzzles!

Hunt registration will open in a few weeks. There will be no formal limit on team size, but we wanted to note for your planning purposes that this hunt will have fewer puzzles than some recent hunts. It will be optimized for teams of between 20 and 75 hunters. We will have mechanisms in place to ensure smaller teams are having fun and making progress, but if your team is well above 75 hunters, you may have less fun.

Three hotels around MIT -- the Hyatt, the Marriott in Kendall Square, and the Kendall Square Hotel -- are providing reduced pricing on rooms for Hunt participants.  The details for each of the room blocks can be found at the bottom of this message. When planning your accommodations, please keep in mind that we will be keeping HQ open until 10AM on Monday, January 15.

Happy hunting,
The Team Formerly Known as Death and Mayhem

(This is not a puzzle.)

I realize nobody uses Livejournal anymore (and with good reason), but here's my writeup of my experience during this year's hunt anyway:

http://dr4b.livejournal.com/1277723.html

Long as usual, even though it was a shorter hunt than usual.

I have seen some reddit threads talking about hunt, is there anywhere else to look?

http://devjoe.livejournal.com/53063.html

I've seen a bunch of posts on Reddit and of course devjoe's stuff, wondering what I'm missing, without the tumblr this time around.

Anyway, here is my writeup of my experience this year.  As usual, it's way too long, and for some reason this year I'm less coherent than usual.  (I was on Up Late; we didn't do so well this time around.  That's okay, though.)

http://dr4b.livejournal.com/1274683.html

I tried to limit spoilers to obvious things or to physical puzzles (which I'm guessing won't be something post-Hunt solvers can do). http://mystery-fish.livejournal.com/37537.html

Here are my two posts about this year's Hunt: my overall thoughts on it, and my comments on specific puzzles. I tried to be a little less spoilery than usual, but there are still some spoilers in the puzzle notes.

It's extraordinarily long (as in I went up against the 65536 character limit) and contains spoilery spoilers, but if you're on this community you probably played in the hunt anyway? Just warning, because Random is going to make one of the rounds available as a book (which I completely didn't work on anyway) and the entire hunt available just on a server to play whenever (though I still don't understand how the logistics of all the things requiring you to be at MIT or interact with characters is going to work), so they requested us not to put spoilers in our writeups, except it's really hard to do. But this was the first year that my team (Up Late) finished, so I really wanted to capture as much as possible.

http://dr4b.livejournal.com/1267170.html

jadelennox hosted the Invisible Ficathon fanfic exchange, which just revealed its stories. It resulted in two Escape from Zyzzlvaria fanfics. Naturally, they both contain puzzles.



Where on the Brass Rat is Captain Blastoid (2780 words) by seekingferret
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: Escape from Zyzzlvaria (Board Game)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Zoey, Captain Blastoid, Scotchy, Harold, Ship's Computer, Ernie
Summary:

Admiral Kavouri arrives on the ship for a routine inspection, but Captain Blastoid is not there to meet him. Can the Admiral get to the bottom of this mystery, or will the crew of the Brass Rat drive him skittering up a wall?

Things to do in Zyzzlvaria when you're temporarily discorporated (5992 words) by marginaliana
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: Escape from Zyzzlvaria, Doctor Who (2005), Welcome to Night Vale, Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Captain Blastoid, Algernon, Scotchy, Ernie, Zoe, Harold, Leah, Tenth Doctor, Donna Noble, The Man in the Tan Jacket, Cheshire Cat
Additional Tags: Crossover, puzzle, gratuitous plot device
Summary:

"Ye great blasted idiot!" said Scotchy to Algernon. "You canna recognize a plot device when you see one?"

It took me a minute to remember that I had a livejournal account that could post things here, but I wrote a (long) blog post about things we strove for in the Alice Shrugged hunt and, as I plan on directing Random to it, I welcome comments/criticisms/etc from other people that have written hunts before (or even just people who have participated in a lot of them). It's less about the logistical considerations (which I'd also like to communicate to Random) and more about general hunt philosophy.

Also, if you haven't noticed, I've slowly been updating the archives and there's some new-ish stuff up, including bonus back-up puzzles that weren't used in the hunt. If you were disappointed by the lack of a Dan Katz wrestling puzzle, then I have good news for you.

Runaround puzzles should be coming soon too, along with photos of events and kickoff and other things.

Here are my thoughts on this Mystery Hunt as a whole and individual puzzles I had comments on.