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A website which I found quite helpful in building that one -- and which you might find helpful in solving it -- is here.
Level 25 Mixist
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1st/7
mystery
3rd Σ5.136
logic
3rd Σ5.683
elegance
11th Σ4.289
a-ha moments
5th Σ4.665
smarty pants
6th Σ4.833
Clash of the Conundra (a mini puzzle hunt)
5th/20
Σ24.605
May 4th 2025 3:12pm
One of my favorite activities (and an inspiration for this battle proposal) is a puzzle hunt: a casual team event oriented around solving a wide variety of challenging puzzles as fast as possible. The most famous and largest example is the MIT Mystery Hunt.
The types of puzzles that appear in puzzle hunts have a few distinguishing features:
- They usually lack explicit instructions: figuring out the rules of the puzzle is a key part of the puzzle.
- There's always a final answer which is a (usually English) word or phrase. This often means the last step of solving is an "extraction" step, where you have to figure out how to turn what you've found so far into letters.
- There's at least one "metapuzzle", which requires knowledge of other puzzles' answers to solve.
- The use of outside tools like search engines is not only allowed but encouraged.
All of these features are reflected in the puzzles here! They're fairly small-scale (I was repeatedly distracted from this by needing to write exams, which is like puzzle design but awful) but should hopefully give a sampling of the puzzle hunt experience.
Feel free to compare notes with others and ask for hints if you're stuck!
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quite difficult but very doable (after a couple hints to clear up some misunderstandings). "gold rush" in particular was fun to figure out
