MIT Mystery Hunt 2026 is live! The notorious puzzle hunt is a crown jewel of the world’s greatest puzzling events. Teams of the worlds best puzzlers get together and work around the clock to be the fastest to complete an extensive series of some of the world’s most complex puzzles.
Every year the flavor of the event is a little different, because every year, the previous year’s winning team designs the new game. Last year’s winner and this year’s designer is Cardinality, a powerhouse team with plenty of puzzle design and solving experience.
The puzzles always lead to a hidden “coin,” claimed by the winning team. For the first few hunts, the coin was an Indian Head penny, but more recent hunts have been using custom challenge coins specific to the hunt.
The experience is often quite complex. Puzzles could be as straightforward as a sudoku with an encrypted message or as complex as a sheet of blank paper with minute variations in thickness that contain hidden information. You might need to learn a new language or a new skill to solve some of the puzzles.
I’ve always been a big fan of over-the-top academic challenges like this one. My alma mater, the University of Chicago, may have taken the prize for that in 1999 when two students built a working nuclear reactor for the campus scavenger hunt. But the effort and energy put into MIT Mystery Hunt is pretty close to that, and it’s remarkable the effort and energy put into both creating and solving these mysteries.
I may not be able to join the festivities in person, but they’re generally remote-friendly for at least a partial experience. There’s no limit for number of members on a team, so if you’re interested in joining and open to making some new friends, ask around on Discord and you may be able to find yourself a team!
Registration information for the event can be found here: https://mitmh2026.com/
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