I got to be a remote participant on a team for this year's MIT Mystery Hunt, a massive puzzle and scavenger hunt held at MIT during their January Independent Activity Period. Puzzles range from the challenging to the brain-hemorrhagingly impossible, and cover a wide spectrum of puzzle forms, including cyphers, acrostics, jumbles, trivia, scavenger hunts, mazes and even sorts of talent competition rounds. This year featured a bizarre backstory involving a fictional corporation, an assassination, and, um, The Matrix, with several layers of meta-puzzles. While many puzzles were solvable by remote team members through web collaboration, the game also involved tasks to perform on campus, including the writing and performing of a song, cooking (or finding) food using an Iron-Chef-esque theme ingredient, and being visited by fictional characters who deliver cryptic clues to your team's headquarters. Teams worked for three solid days, from noon on Friday to 7:26am Monday, before the hunt was completed by team Kappa Sig, a 60-person team, some of whom had six years of MIT Puzzle Hunt experience. Our team had, what, a dozen people?, and we made excellent progress, all things considered.

See this year's puzzles and their solutions (linked at the top of each puzzle page). Last year's puzzles are also available.