MIT Mystery Hunt 2027MIT Mystery Hunt 2027MIT Mystery Hunt 2027MIT Mystery Hunt 2027MIT Mystery Hunt 2027MIT Mystery Hunt 2027MIT Mystery Hunt 2027

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 at puzzles.mit.edu.

The Hunt will begin with a live Kickoff event at 12:00 PM TIMEMITfor you that is. on Friday, January 15. Kickoff will be held in the Kresge Auditorium and livestreamed.

Student teams operating out of their living spaces are welcome to puzzle whenever, including overnight. For non-students, our current best guess is that campus access policies will be similar to last year. We will share more information closer to the date as we receive it.

Our Hunt HQ will be open when campus is open to all teams. Overnight, HQ will likely be closed; the Hunt website will continue to operate during this period (including hint requests being answered to the best of our ability), but solvers should not count on any events, live interactions, or physical puzzle pickups.

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

If you are a student, please reach out to [email protected] for help finding a team. Otherwise, please join the Puzzle World public Discord server and post in #mystery-hunt-solver-introductions if you are a solver seeking a team (or #mystery-hunt-team-introductions if your team is open to new solvers). If Discord is not an option for you, please email [email protected] and we can try to post a blurb on your behalf.

Yes there will! This year’s pre-Hunt will be written and hosted by the Nebula Explorers Society (NES).

This will be run 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 the rest of the MIT Mystery Hunt community, the puzzles will be released online in November. More information to come.

The pre-Hunt is a great opportunity to recruit your friends, hallmates, and labmates into the Hunt community. It will also serve as a sneak preview into this year's Hunt story. However, none of the puzzle content or answers will be used in Hunt, and solving the pre-Hunt will not be necessary or helpful towards solving the MIT Mystery Hunt itself.

With the exception of events and runarounds, this year's Mystery Hunt can be played through by a fully remote team. However, there will be some content where being in-person is helpful and potentially required, and only teams that can complete the final in-person runaround are eligible to win. We designed the hunt with on-campus presence in mind, and we strongly believe that being on campus will provide the best experience.

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 or would like some help reaching MIT students, please reach out to [email protected].

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. 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!

Minors participating on campus at Mystery Hunt must be accompanied by their parent or guardian at all times.

We strongly recommend that you do not use LLMs or generative AI to solve significant portions of puzzles in this hunt. These puzzles were written and tested by humans and are designed to be solved by humans. We believe that you will have a more fun and rewarding experience if you refrain from using AI to bypass parts of the hunt.

We specifically urge you not to paste puzzle content directly into LLM chat interfaces (This recommendation does not apply to using coding agents to write code for puzzles that require programming). Additionally, we will reject submission task content that is generated with AI.

We have arranged for hotel blocks at four hotels near campus. Details about each option, including reservation instructions, are provided below. Note that room types, rates, and availability may change as blocks reach capacity. We will update this page as new offers become available. Please note that rooms tend to fill up very quickly in prior years.

There is no official recommendation. We designed this hunt with the goal of making it exciting and fun for teams of all different sizes and experience levels, regardless of whether they finish or not. We'll be doing our best to meet this goal for every team throughout the weekend.

How big your team should be is dependent on your goals. We expect the amount of content available at one time and the total number of puzzles to be in line with hunts of the last decade. If your goal is to finish the Hunt, we expect you'd need, at minimum, a team of 30+ experienced solvers committing their weekend to the event. Large teams seeking to avoid overcrowding should use recent hunts as reference points.

If you have additional questions about team size, shoot us an email at [email protected].

This Hunt will involve the allocation of teamwide resources. Additionally, it will be particularly important to share puzzle information between team members compared to previous years. It may be helpful to take some time to think about how your team will keep track of important data, allocate resources, and coordinate decisions throughout the Hunt.

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. Your tax-deductible donations designated to the MIT Puzzle Club make this event possible.

We designed the hunt experience for the latest Chrome desktop browser. If you are currently defaulting to another browser, we encourage you to download Chrome desktop ahead of time.

No. Nothing on this site is a puzzle.

Some members from recent past Mystery Hunt writing teams will be holding a session to talk about what it takes on November 1st at 4PM TIMEMITfor you that is.! This is intended to be a mix of pre-prepared content and Q+A.

If you're interested in submitting questions (or letting us know that you're planning to be there), please fill out this quick form. The intended audience is team leads from teams that hope to win sometime in the upcoming years (and we'd recommend that you'd have participated in at least 1 mystery hunt prior to this).

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 [email protected].

This FAQ will grow as the event gets closer.