MIT Mystery Hunt 2025

The MIT Mystery Hunt is a puzzlehunt competition that takes place on the MIT campus every year during Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend, a student tradition dating back more than 40 years. Teams of intrepid adventurers solve puzzles all weekend long in a race to find a coin hidden on campus. To learn more about the tradition and see previous events, check out the MIT Puzzle Club's website.

The Hunt will begin with a live Kickoff event at 12:00 PM on Friday, January 17th. Kickoff will not be in Kresge Auditorium this year due to construction; the exact location(s) of kickoff will be published at a later date. Puzzles will be released at 1:00 PM.

Hunt Headquarters will remain open through the evening of Sunday, January 19th. There will be a wrap-up presentation on Monday, January 20 at 12:00 PM. The location of wrap-up will be published at a later date.

Campus is closed from 1:00 AM – 6:00 AM each day. Teams who have been assigned space on campus for their HQs must vacate during that time, but teams operating out of their living group are of course welcome to continue. During campus closure times you can continue solving puzzles, but non-students cannot be on campus.

Our Hunt HQ will also be closed during these overnight hours. We will continue to operate the Hunt website for solving, including answering hint requests, but solvers should not count on any events, live interactions, or physical puzzle pickups during this time.

Hunt registration for teams will open in early December. The official announcement will be sent to the puzzle-hunters mailing list. Check back for more details later.

Yes you can! You can always start your own team, but if you’re looking to join an existing team we make an effort to match new hunters. When Hunt registration opens in early December, there will also be an opportunity for unattached hunters to register. We will do our best to help match you to a team. Check back later. If you are a student, please reach out to puzzle-club-exec@mit.edu for help getting matched to a team.

Yes there will! The Providence Crime Syndication has graciously written a pre-Hunt round of puzzles. The MIT Puzzle Club ran this as a live event for current students in October. (Students who would like more information about Puzzle Club events should join the Puzzle Club Discord server — which you can find via the MIT Discord Hub — for more information.)

For the rest of the MIT Mystery Hunt community, The Providence Crime Syndication will be releasing the MIT Mystery Heist online on November 16, 2024. You can find more information at mitmysteryheist.com. These puzzles are expected to be on the easier side and are a great opportunity to recruit your friends, hallmates, and labmates into the Hunt community.

The pre-Hunt round ties directly into the story of this year's MIT Mystery Hunt. However, none of the puzzle content or answers will be used in Hunt, and solving the pre-Hunt will not be necessary or helpful toward solving the MIT Mystery Hunt itself.

The MIT Mystery Hunt is at its core an on-campus event for the MIT community, and we believe our Hunt in particular will be best experienced in person. While we expect there to be many puzzles that are accessible to remote solvers, there will also be many physical puzzles, on-campus puzzles, interactions, and activities that can only be done in person. If you’re on the fence about participating in this year’s Hunt in person, we think this is a good year to show up!

Remote teams are welcome to sign up and participate in the MIT Mystery Hunt. However, there will be many puzzles and interactions that fully remote teams cannot complete, and because figuring out that a puzzle requires MIT knowledge or campus presence is part of the puzzle, they will not usually be labeled as such. We expect that fully-remote teams and teams with fewer than 10 members on-campus will not be able to finish the Hunt.

We are still excited to share the Hunt with the rest of the global puzzling community. After the live event ends, post-solvable versions of all puzzles will become available — with photographs, maps, data tables, and whatever else a fully remote team would need to complete the Hunt.

In order to win the MIT Mystery Hunt and write next year's, you must have at least 1 current MIT student on your team (although we recommend having more for logistical reasons). If your team has a concern about this requirement, please reach out to puzzle-club-exec@mit.edu and we can help facilitate communication with MIT students.

If you would like to use classroom space for your HQ during Hunt, there will be a place to indicate this in your general registration which will open in early December. You can expect confirmation about your assigned space from us in early January. Please do not contact the Schedules Office directly for space during the MIT Mystery Hunt, as we've already worked with them to reserve rooms.

As always, reservable space on campus can get tight and more and more spaces have become department-only. If your team is able to hunt out of non-reservable spaces like living group lounges or restricted department spaces, that's even better!

Campus access for guests has been a moving target since 2020, and MIT is actively rolling out a new system to replace Tim Tickets, so we're not yet exactly sure what procedures will be involved this year. We'll update as we learn more from MIT.

We will also follow MIT's guidelines for COVID and respiratory virus prevention, and will have more detail on what these entail soon.

We have arranged for hotel blocks at three hotels near campus. See below for details about each option and instructions for reserving within each block.

Note: We’re seeing a remarkable amount of enthusiasm and interest in these hotel blocks (great!), and are working to ensure that we can continue offering discounted rooms to MIT Mystery Hunt attendees. However, we have been advised by the hotels that it may no longer be possible to add rooms at the originally posted rates. We will update this page as we learn of new pricing, but are prioritizing making rooms available as best as we can, even if that is at an increased price. Alternatively, the hotels are not (as of this writing) fully booked out, and so you may be able to book a room directly through the hotel at the regular rate.

Hotel	Room block name	Price	Details
Boston Marriott Cambridge	MIT Mystery Hunt-Puzzle Club Room Block	$155 + 15.95% taxes per night	Reserve by calling Marriott Central Reservations at 1-800-228-9290 no later than Friday, December 27th, 2024, to receive the discounted rate, or use the link. Guests will be asked for a credit card when making the reservations. They will also need to present one upon check-in. If guests are Marriott Rewards members, please have them put their account number on their reservation. Marriott has been helpfully expanding the block as it sells out, so if you don't see available rooms, check back later.
Le Meridien (See Details for links)	MIT Mystery Hunt Puzzle Club	Either $129 or $179 per night + 15.95% taxes per night, depending on availability. Additional $10 fee per person per night above double occupancy	Last Day to Book: Monday, December 16, 2024 We have arranged two separate room rates at Le Meridien. The original rate (at $129 per night) is likely sold out at this point, but it is worth checking for last-minute availability. If that rate is not available, you can book (at $179 per night) at this link or call 1-800-543-4300 and ask for the MIT Mystery Hunt Puzzle Club 2025 Group rate. Le Meridien has limited capacity, so we expect that these rooms may sell out and we do not expect further availability to be added.
Hyatt Regency Boston/Cambridge		Single/Double Occupancy: $179 Triple Occupancy: $199 Quad Occupancy: $219	Start Date: Thursday, January 16, 2025 End Date: Sunday, January 19, 2025 Last Day to Book: Thursday, December 26, 2024 Discounted overnight self-parking $30 per car per night (regularly $45) Complimentary standard wireless internet in guest rooms Waived $20 destination fee per room nightly plus applicable taxes The Arisia convention will be at the Hyatt Regency the same weekend as the MIT Mystery Hunt. We expect last-minute availability to be limited.

There is no official team size recommendation, and this question is very difficult to answer as it depends entirely on your taste and style.

For newer and smaller teams, you should know that the MIT Mystery Hunt is larger than other puzzle hunts that occur throughout the year. We're proud to have designed the Hunt to be exciting for teams of all sizes and experience levels, and will work with teams throughout the weekend to make sure they are having a fun and satisfying experience. However, very small teams should understand that they are unlikely to see all of the puzzles. Teams which complete the Hunt will likely have 30 or more solvers working intensely throughout the weekend. If you’re debating inviting friends and hallmates to hunt with you, you probably should.

For larger teams, you have a sense of your style and how you like to solve. We expect that teams will initially have around 10 puzzles available simultaneously, increasing to around 20 over the course of the Hunt. We also expect that the total number of puzzles will be in line with MIT Mystery Hunts of the last decade. We don't intend to release any additional information about the Hunt structure in advance, so we encourage you to use this information to decide how you want to approach team structure and recruiting for this year.

If you have additional questions about team size, shoot us an email at info@mitmh2025.com.

If you are a current student, the best way to help the Hunt is to join the MIT Puzzle Club and recruit more friends to participate both in Puzzle Club and Hunt. (You can start by joining the Puzzle Club Discord server via the MIT Discord Hub). There could be no MIT Mystery Hunt without the participation of the MIT community; growing that community ensures its future.

For anyone else who is able to contribute, we would greatly appreciate your financial support. It does not cost anything to sign up and participate in the MIT Mystery Hunt. The organizers are not getting paid, but the event does still cost real money to produce and run—around $10 per person. Aside from a few valued corporate sponsors, the MIT Mystery Hunt and the MIT Puzzle Club are primarily funded by a large number of small donations. If you are in a position to do so, your tax-deductible donations designated to the MIT Puzzle Club make this event possible.

That's not a question! But we're still excited to answer. If you have any additional questions about this year's event, please email info@mitmh2025.com.

This FAQ will grow as the event gets closer.