Puzzles

A list of puzzlehunts, events, or other puzzly things that I have had a hand in creating, as well as a collection of some of the puzzles I’ve written for them.

What is a puzzlehunt? Puzzlehunts come in many forms, but at the heart of it, they are a race to complete a set of challenging codes and ciphers before anybody else. Whether it’s a few hours at your desk, a day running around a neighborhood, or all weekend in a road-rally style race around a city, they generally all involve solving a puzzle to unlock the next location or clue, and continuing in this vein until you reach the end.

The puzzle style in these events is what I would call instructionless obfuscation. As opposed to Sudoku or crossword puzzles, you generally don’t know the rules of these puzzles. Instead you’re given some innocuous object or set of data from which you must tease the answer (usually a word or phrase). If a puzzle is well-constructed, you’ll know it when you’ve got it.

Wired magazine did a great write-up of a road-rally style game and the MIT admissions blog has a fantastic recap of the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt, both with nice examples of puzzles from those events.

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