MIT Mystery Hunt photos

Title: 1. Covent Garden All the best journeys start in Covent Garden.
Title: 2. Dan in Underground Waiting for the Tube from Covent Garden.
Title: 3. Heathrow Terminal 3 My first transatlantic flight with Virgin Atlantic; Heathrow was much as you would expect.
Title: 4. Plane Outbound An almost empty plane, and an excellent journey - very comfortable.
Title: 5. Arrived in Boston A very uninspiring view while we were waiting for the T to arrive.
Title: 6. Dan leaves the airport Local time 7pm or so, but for us it was past midnight.
Title: 7. Me at the airport I am, it turns out, very bad at selfies.
Title: 8. Puzzles at the hotel We had a spare day before having to solve lots of puzzles, so we solved some puzzles.
Escape room XKCD comic We did two escape rooms the day before the Hunt began, both at Red Fox Escapes. There was a familiar sight on the bathroom wall.
Title: 10. Setting up the main room The early arrivers on Team Palindrome set up the main room. We were assigned two rooms (both excellent!).
Title: 11. Setting up the room, part 2 The blackboards are indispensible for solving metapuzzles.
Title: 12. View from the main room
Title: 13. Palindrome assembles The rooms were both at capacity at peak times, but this is still before most people had arrived.
Title: 14. Queue before the intro The kickoff for the Hunt traditionally involves some kind of setup for a story in which the Hunt takes place. This year, we had received a wedding invitation. This picture is the queue to get into the Kresge Auditorium for the kickoff.
Title: 15. Auditorium filling up pre-intro The auditorium was completely at capacity for the kickoff.
Title: 16. Wedding Invite The kickoff this time was a genuine wedding, between two long-time puzzle solvers. After the wedding, we were invited on their honeymoon, the setting of the Hunt.
Title: 17. The War Room The second of our two rooms was a conference room with a big table, projector, and blackboards. This picture is after the kickoff but shortly before the Hunt actually began.
Title: 18. It Begins Shortly after the Hunt began, and everyone is thinking very hard.
Title: 19. An Interaction Every so often, members of Hunt control come around to visit the teams, perhaps to advance the story. Here, a clown and an astronaut provide us with a story update.
Title: 20. Nighttime Puzzling happens through the night (although this year, in a change of policy, MIT kicked us out at 1am each night).
Title: 21. Duck Konundrum “Duck Konundrum” was a puzzle in 2010, which was a convoluted series of instructions to be carried out by multiple people simultaneously. The title has (against the wishes of the inventor) become a generic term for the kind of puzzle where lots of people have instructions in a kind of madcap play, each person reacting to what the others are doing according to some predefined rules. After everyone stops moving and the dust settles, you have enough information to extract an answer. This picture is the initial setup of the 2020 version, themed around some unnamed wizards going by bus to an unnamed Scottish school of magic.
Title: 22. Casa C This year, to get around the fact that we were being booted off campus at night, we rented “Casa C” (what else could it be called, since we are Team Palindrome). The picture is probably around 4am; I am just about to sit down and write a nonogram solver.
Title: 23. Morning Shift Shortly after 7am, our rooms on campus fill up again.
Title: 24. Nursery Rhyme Jigsaw One of the puzzles involved writing the words of nursery rhymes onto jigsaw pieces and then fitting them together.
Title: 25. Metapuzzles Progress on the metapuzzles of this hunt. In the foreground is Foggy Brume, creator of P&A magazine and long-time Palindrome member.
Title: 26. Kresge Auditorium It snowed and was very cold (about -9 degrees most of the time).
Title: 27. A Coin Throughout the Hunt, solving metapuzzles led us to press pennies; the pennies themselves formed a puzzle when we had collected them all.
Title: 28. More Solving Rather late in the Hunt, everyone still frantically solving.
Title: 29. Acids and Bases One of my favourite puzzles was a metapuzzle in which various of the answers we had collected could also be associated with the words “acid” and “base”. This led us to pair up those answers in certain ways, ultimately to obtain another phrase.
Title: 30. More Acids and Bases The blackboards covered in feverish solving.
Title: 31. Final Meta Here we have much of the team crammed into the conference room trying to work out the meaning of the pennies.
Title: 32. Final Interaction Having solved the mystery of the pennies, we got a long denouement, featuring some impressive props which you can’t really see because of all the people.
Title: 33. Final Interaction, 2 Another shot of the final interaction, barely any more visible.
Title: 34. Performance In order to complete the Hunt, we had to do various things like yodelling and yoga, staging a reenactment of a regicide, and reciting Jabberwocky.
Title: 35. Performance, part 2 This is a rendition of some of the cast of Harry Potter, to the tune of “Modern Major-General”.
Title: 36. Performance 3 I don’t even remember which performance this was - I think there is yoga going on in the foreground.
Title: 37. Tidying up Very rapidly packing up the room after the end of the Hunt.
Title: 38. More tidying up Everything is nearly packed away.
Title: 39. Team Photo All of us who were not solving from across the Internet had a photo at the end. This is Team Palindrome! (I am almost unrecognisable with my head popping up at the back on the middle-right-hand side.)
Title: 40. Final Meta, revisited Another shot of many of us trying to work out the last puzzle. (Featuring me looking vacantly into the distance, although I’m actually looking at the blackboard behind the camera.)
Title: 41. Final Meta, again This is the view I had while we were solving the final puzzle.
Title: 42. Outside the Auditorium Everybody waiting to get into the auditorium for the wrap-up.
Title: 43. Wrapup Team Left Out (the creators of this year’s Hunt) explaining how some of it worked. Visible is the contraption that finished the hunt.
Title: 44. Left Out’s control interface Left Out had a cool tracker for keeping tabs on who was where in the Hunt.
Title: 45. The plane home Self-explanatory, really.
Title: 46. Solving progress graph All the teams, grouped by number of puzzles solved. (Palindrome came second despite being only in third place for number of puzzles solved; that’s because we were able to deduce some of the answers to metapuzzles without having all of their lead-in answers.)