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 planned construction. 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 in 26-100.

Kickoff will not be in Kresge Auditorium this year due to planned construction. There will be 3 simultaneous live kickoff events in 10-250, 34-101, and 45-230. Teams can go to any location to receive equivalent kickoff experiences, and we will also be live-streaming kickoff. The combined capacity of these rooms is somewhat less than that of Kresge; for those who enjoy experiencing kickoff in person, we will do our best to support load-balancing the 3 locations. If you would like to watch kickoff from the comfort of your HQ, we can promise that the live-streamed version will be an equally high-quality experience.

Team captains (or a team representative) will be required to pick up nametags and other materials for your team. If you are picking up for your team, you should go to kickoff in 34-101 or 45-230; material pickup will be in the building 34 first floor lobby immediately after kickoff.

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 there will not be any events, live interactions, or physical puzzle pickups during this time.

Hunt registration is now open! Team contacts can register their team by completing the registration form or by clicking the button above. If you are not already part of a team, you can sign up as an individual here.

If your team will be hunting in person, please register before December 21st, even if you have to guess at some of the information, and even if you are not requesting that we find space for your team. Most fields can be updated any time before Hunt starts. While we will do our best to accommodate requests for space after that date, we cannot make guarantees.

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. Please fill out this form to register as an unattached hunter. We will do our best to help match you to a team. 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, approximately 15% of the puzzles in this year’s Hunt will be physical, on-campus, interaction-driven, or activities that can only be done in person. We will not be producing or running alternate forms of puzzles during the Hunt. 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, this is still a student event, and Hunt this year is heavy on puzzles and interactions that fully remote teams cannot complete. Because figuring out that a puzzle requires MIT knowledge or campus presence is often part of the puzzle, they will generally not be labeled as such. Approximately 15% of the puzzles in this year’s Hunt cannot be completed by fully-remote teams. We expect that fully-remote teams and teams with fewer than 10 members on-campus will not be able to finish the hunt, and we will not be producing or running alternate forms of puzzles or other in-person interactions for the exclusive benefit of remote teams.

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. 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!

Mystery Hunt attendees who are not affiliated with MIT will use the Atlas mobile app for campus access through an Event link that will be shared to registered teams. Note that this is different from the TIM Tickets system that was in use last year and will require new setup.

We strongly recommend installing and registering through the Atlas mobile app prior to arrival on campus, since access will be blocked until your Atlas registration is complete. Your campus access will silently fail without telling you why if you have not completed any of the steps in the linked guides below.

MIT alumni may use the Atlas mobile app to activate a digital version of the MIT Alumni ID by following these instructions from the MIT Alumni Association.

Those who are not MIT alums should follow the detailed instructions published by IS&T for how to set up Atlas and an MIT Guest account for campus access.

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

MIT has removed its specific COVID and Flu guidelines, and is deferring to the CDC guidelines around respiratory viruses.

The CDC guidelines strongly recommend getting vaccinated for COVID and Flu, and above all else, staying home if you believe you might be sick. Wearing masks is an additional precaution that you can consider depending on circumstance.

This is a big event, and we are excited to interact with you all frequently throughout the weekend — please don’t get us sick!

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.

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.