At the MIT Mystery Hunt, Puzzlers Explored the World of “Bookspace”

How Team Palindrome crafted a wordplay-heavy realm of puzzles.

The mother of all puzzle hunts is the MIT Mystery Hunt, which for more than four decades now has attracted teams of solvers to tackle elaborate suites of devious puzzles for a long weekend each January. In pre-Covid times, the main action was at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., with the winning team finding the location of a coin somewhere on campus. Last weekend, the Hunt was all-virtual for the second year in a row. The creation of the Hunt is always the responsibility of the previous year’s winning team, and this year that team was Palindrome.

As the name suggests, Team Palindrome is particularly adept at puzzles involving wordplay. Captained by puzzlemaster Eric Berlin, Palindrome has many members who are active in the National Puzzlers League. This year, Palindrome offered a “prologue” of sorts before the Hunt officially kicked off, on a website with the palindromically appropriate name “Star Rats.” The prologue offered a mini-suite of puzzles (still available for solving) that was something of a tasting platter for the main event. Now that the Hunt is over (congratulations to “teammate,” the winning team!), you can see all of the puzzles that Team Palindrome came up with by going to mitmh2022.com and clicking “public access.”

When the Hunt kicked off, teams learned the actual theme of the event, which in a great bait-and-switch, had nothing to do with the “Star Rats” prologue or super-intelligent rodents infesting the MIT campus.

Jenny Gutbezahl, who appears in the kick-off video, also happened to be in charge of the video productions that Team Palindrome created for the event. We checked in with Jenny to hear the inside story about how those videos came together — including one with a special appearance by none other than “Weird Al” Yankovic. Jenny’s recap follows below. [Warning! If you’re still interested in solving the Hunt, the videos contain spoilers for the meta puzzles.]

One of the great things about the MIT Mystery Hunt is that for an entire weekend you are immersed in a world with its own rule, logic, and characters — and a lot of puzzles. The traditional Mystery Hunt starts with a staged opening ceremony at Kresge Auditorium, where the theme is revealed, along with some flimsy excuse why the theme requires teams to solve puzzles. Over the course of the weekend, teams may go to events which exist in-universe, or be visited by characters that are part of the theme. And at the end of the hunt, teams race all over campus with some of these characters, eventually finding a coin — the first team to find the coin wins. Palindrome wanted to find a way to keep the spirit of a self-contained world of puzzles, even though COVID meant teams were solving remotely. Furthermore, our hunt’s universe was the world of books, with solvers traveling from genre to genre. And what are books without characters?

To help create this new universe, I oversaw a large group of talented people who wrote scripts, acted, and edited together about two dozen videos. This includes the opening, which revealed that the true theme involved a dilemma with the MIT libraries, with each library personified as an idiosyncratic Minister.

The world of the Ministers is a complete puzzle hunt, with 5 metapuzzles, a meta-metapuzzle, and a final runaround where they learn how to stop the thing that caused the damage, culminating in a coin that all teams who reached this point received. We’re proud to say that more than half the individuals who participated in the hunt got to see this entire world.

But for larger teams, there was much more. The next stage of the hunt required teams to repair the damage to Bookspace. They did this by finding components of a Plot Device hidden throughout the various genre-aligned areas of Bookspace. As they entered each area, they received a letter from a resident, and when they solved that area’s metapuzzle, the character would visit them to thank them for their service. Of course, with the damage to Bookspace, some characters winked in and out of their videos! Our art team created ten very distinct worlds; the letters and videos reflected this. From the academic host of Whoston (puzzles, letter, video) to the hard-boiled detective in Noirleans (puzzles, letter, video) to the creepy tour guide through Lake Eerie (puzzles, letter, video).

We decided to open up casting beyond our team members for Recipeoria. The metapuzzle for Recipeoria involves lyrics to Weird Al Yankovic songs about food. Weird Al has been a standby at hunt, so this wasn’t so unusual. However, our team captain, Eric Berlin, had co-constructed a crossword puzzle with Mr. Yankovic. We all figured it was a long shot, but Eric reached out to ask him if he’d be willing to be our character for Recipeoria. And he said yes! We sent him a script and he went above and beyond our expectations with his video.

It is our sincere hope that these made up, in some small part, for the loss of human interaction during hunt, and we are all looking forward to being on campus together again.

Thanks to Jenny Gutbezahl for her report! We’ll be featuring more on the wordplay of the Hunt puzzles in the next Beyond Wordplay newsletter, so be sure to subscribe. Also, check out writeups on the Hunt from Palindrome members Eric Berlin and Ben Smith.

Finally, here are the credits for all the amazing work that the Palindrome crew put into the Hunt videos.

Credits

Art (including letters)
· Justin Ladia, Art Director, Design for Whoston & Recipeoria page maps; letter layouts
· Joe Cabrera: Design for Noirleans page map
· Christopher Benson: Design for Lake Eerie page map

Videos

Opening Video
Written by Eric Berlin
Performed by
· Eric Berlin: Dr. Carlton Sinclair-Jones
· Kevin Wald: Kevin W. Rockwell
· Steve Kaltenbaugh: Steve
· Jenny Gutbezahl: Not Genevieve Llandros
Edited by Susan Glass

Ministers Video
Written by Renee Ngan & Ben Smith
Animation by Justin Ladia
Performed by
· Maggi Rhodes: Danni Dewey
· Justin Ladia: Randy Rotch
· Mike Nothnagel: Riley Rotch
· Nic Rhodes: Billie Barker
· Ben Smith: Alexei Lewis
· Renee Ngan: Herschel Hayden
Edited by Aaron Feldman

Bookwyrm Transformation Video
Animation by Justin Ladia

Whoston Video
Written by Aaron Feldman
Performed by Alison Muratore: Host
Edited by Aaron Feldman

Noirleans Video
Written by Jenny Gutbezahl
Performed by
· Jenny Gutbezahl: Carlyle Anderson
· Eric Pinnick: Jason Shambles
Edited by Aaron Feldman

Lake Eerie Video
Written by Peter Gwynn
Performed by Peter Gwynn: Tour Guide
Edited by Aaron Feldman

Recipeoria
Written by Eric Berlin
Performed by “Weird Al” Yankovic