MIT Mystery Hunt Puzzle Index: Full Index

1, 2, 3 crossword

A crossword variant in which 1, 2, or 3 letters may be written into each square. There are variations of this variant, which may allow different numbers of letters in the squares (such as the jumping crossword where 0 or 1 letters are allowed), and double-or-nothing, which allows 0 or 2. When only a few squares contain multiple letters and the entries in those squares are related somehow, it is instead a rebus crossword.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Reflecting Pool
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Message From Above
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Crushed Petals

17th items

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 A Representative Sampling

“24” (TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Facebook

25-pair color code

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Crossed Wires
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Woofers and Tweeters

3-D modeling

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Mario Clash
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Eek!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Eclectic Spatial Geometry
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Cut and Tape
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Hole Wizard
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Triangular Intrigue
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Some Assembly Required (SAR)

3SAT (boolean satisfiability problem)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 SAT III

42 Essential 3rd Act Twists

This Dresden Codak comic

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Loony Playhouse Actors

69 Love Songs

(album by The Magnetic Fields)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Counting the Ways

7 Wonders (board game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Marvels of the Ancient World

“88 Lines About 44 Women”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Cross Breeding

A=1, B=2, ...

(In the 2004 hunt only, this commonly includes using mod 26 to reduce larger numbers)

ABBA

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Four-Part Harmony

Absolut vodka

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Frontal Lobotomy

academic regalia

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Infirmary

accounting

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Earnings Call
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Wall Street Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Growth and Fixed Costs

achievements in video games

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Console-Nation Prizes
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer DRIVE MY CAR

A Chorus Line

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Police Lineup

ACME's Have You Tried document

This document which provides a bunch of strategies for breaking into an unknown puzzle.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 Yeah, But it Didn't Work!

acronyms

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Instant Replay
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Satellite of Love
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Endgame

Ada programming language

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Prague

A Day in the Life

(an MIT photo-blogging project)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 One Day at a Time

Adventure (Atari 2600 game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Here Thar Be Dragons

AES cipher

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Read Between the Lines

airline codes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Now That's High Finance
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Astro Traffic Control
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Getting There is Half the Fun

airline travel

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Oh, to be in DC
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Getting There is Half the Fun
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Travels with Charlie

airplane call signs

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 I Can Haz Zyzzlburger?

airplane tail art

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Now That's High Finance
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 I Can Haz Zyzzlburger?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Getting There is Half the Fun

airport codes

(IATA unless otherwise specified)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Cartography
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Lost
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Take Three
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Sensitive Man Wearing a Cricketer's Uniform and a Celery Stalk on His Lapel
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Making Connections
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Space Elevator Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Air Traffic Control
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer YOUKILIS
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 General Aviation

Akari (Light Up) puzzle

The standard form of this puzzle consists of a grid where some cells are initially blacked in, and some of those contain numbers. To solve it, place lights (which illuminate all squares in a horizontal or vertical line from the light to the next black square or the edge of the puzzle) in some cells so that every square is illuminated by at least one light, no light is illuminated by another light, and the number of lights orthogonally adjacent to each number matches the number.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Puzzle Editing
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Lighten Up (variant)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND

album covers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Stakeout

Alchemist sculpture

Public art in front of the MIT Student Center, the top half of a man composed of letters, numbers, and symbols.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Campus Art from Z to A

alchemy symbols

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Mixed Drink
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Biological Garden
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 The Central Science
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Drafting Table

Alice in Wonderland

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Mock Turtle Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Mad Cocktail Party
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Curious INCIDENCE

aliens

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Buzz-Cut Man in a Leather Jacket
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Revenge of Yuki Nagato Episode 00

alliteration

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 The Goodwin Manuscript
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Fill in the ______

All-Star Games

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Round Tripper

alphabetic sequences

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Calmness Before the Storm
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Question Mark
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Behave
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Good Neighbors

Alphabet Song

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Now I Know My ABCs

alphabet subsets

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 5
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Round 5 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Any Old Puzzle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Spell Casting
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Sooner or Later

alphablock

The standard form of this puzzle consists of a square grid with a letter or group of letters in each cell. To solve it, spell words, phrases, or names reading left to right across the grid by taking one cell from each column. Each cell is used once. The items formed are members of some set or category, except for one answer which identifies the category.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 12
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Department Store
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Excalibur
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Don't Cross an Alpha Bitch!

Alphacipher

The standard form of this puzzle type is a list of words, along with their values in a cipher which applies a different value from 1 to 26 to each letter of the alphabet, and adds up the values of the letters in each word. It's similar to an alphametic but there's no interaction of place value, and usually the whole alphabet is used.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 22

alphagram

In the standard version of this puzzle type (also called Alphabet Soup in Penny Press magazines), there is a grid which has 26 rows and an odd number of columns (typically 11 or 13) and all the cells except the center column are pre-filled with letters. The solver must fill the letters A through Z into the empty cells so that each row contains a word of some minimum length in a group of consecutive letters.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 It's Play Time
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Half and Half

alphametics (encoded arithmetic)

These puzzles are essentially solved arithmetic problems (often long division or multiplication with all the partial products written out), with the entire problem encoded into letters with a simple substitution cipher. Sometimes the key (what 0123456789 encodes into) spells a final answer. A variant sometimes seen uses stars or blanks to indicate unknown digits.

Alpha Sleuth

This puzzle type consists of a criss-cross-style grid with some letters pre-filled. There are exactly 26 unfilled spaces which need to be filled in using every letter of the alphabet once, forming words that have something in common. Some unfilled spaces have a number. A set of numbered spaces (possibly with repeats) below the grid uses the letters in the numbered grid spaces as a key, producing a final answer word or phrase.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Alpha Sleuth

alt tags

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Hand Across the Water

Alvin and the Chipmunks

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Indecipherable

“The Amazing Race”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Subtraction
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Timecop

American Film Instutute's top 100 movies lists

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 The Zyzzlvarian Holovid Institute

America (the Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Land that I Love

amino acids

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 1C
MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Round 2 Meta Hint
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 BLAST from the Past
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Life Braid

anagrams

analogies

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Round 3 Meta Hint
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Set Theory
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Analogy Farm
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Locked In

anatomy

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Fantastic Voyage
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 You've Got Some Nerve
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Dammit, Jim

_ and _ phrases

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Down the Rabbit Hole 2: Super Magic Samurai Robot Ninja Police Force: Electric Boogaloo

Android apps

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Spot the Dog

Angband (Rogue-like game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Trophy Room

angelic hierarchy

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Holiness Meta

“Angel” (TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 This Puzzle Sucks

Anguished English

(a.k.a. Anguish Languish; heavily distorted homophones of sentences)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 27
MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 25: Attic
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Poor Constitution
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Paranoia
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Team Dynamics
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 I Can Haz Zyzzlburger?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Heard but Not Seen

animals

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Picture Time
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Soooo Cute!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Raw Bar
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 A Poem by Shell Silverstein
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Night of the Living Kraken
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 Warm and Fuzzy

Animals on the Underground web site

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Friends in Noble England

Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Jeweled Fowl
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Twosquare

The Animaniacs

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 World's Longest Diagramless

anime

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Kiaido
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Shogun Trivia (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 You Should Be Listening
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Revenge of Yuki Nagato Episode 00
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Puzzle Extravaganza

answer given for completing task

(These puzzles do not clue their answers; you get the answer after doing something the puzzle somehow asks you to do. See also creative tasks and intermediate tasks)

antipodes

Antipodes are positions on the Earth which are directly opposite one another.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer YOUKILIS

antonyms

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 6
MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Sao Paulo
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Rivalries
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Jekyll and Hyde
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Hang Ten
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Permuted
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Opposites Are Not Downbeats
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Caucus Race Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Atlantis Meta Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Soul-searching

apocalypse dates

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Hunt-Life 3 Confirmed!

Apples to Apples game

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Apples in Stereo

archipelagos

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 World Tour
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Island Warfare

area codes

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 10
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Calling You from My Cell

Arimaa

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Zugzwaang

Arrested Development (band and TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 The Stunted Growth Puzzle

art

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 The Thomas Crown Scare
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The White House or Bust!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Scenic Route
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Sleeping Gypsy Dream Fragment
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Master Pieces

arXiv academic paper preprints

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Practice in Theory
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Crackpot or Snackpot?

ascending and descending letters

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Track Meet
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Obstacle Training (Meta)

ASCII

ASCII art

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Nairobi
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 This SHOULD Be Easy...
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 ASCII Characters

ashtamangala

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Witness 3 Meta

Fred Astaire

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Now is the Time on Kronos When We Dance

astronauts

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Endymion Meta

astronomy

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Nyctophobia
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Trinity

Ataxx (video game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Battling the Gorgon

Atbash cipher

Atbash is a simple substitution cipher in which the first letter of the alphabet is replaced with the last, the second with the next-to-last, and so on. It can be used with any alphabet, but was originally used with the Hebrew alphabet; instances of it appear in the Hebrew Bible.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Leaning Tower of Sheshach

Athena (MIT computer system)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 13: Connecticut Suite (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Paranoia
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Some Trolleys Named Lust
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Logical Digits
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Computer Games
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Mythological Connections

Atlantic City

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Buried Treasure

atmospheric layers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 2 Meta

audio file manipulation

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Rant
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 --MESSAGE REDACTED--
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Pesky Bugs
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 This Page Intentionally Left Blank
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Pulse Pulse Wave Noise
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Time & Place
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Chromesthesia

Australian English

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Vocabulary quiz

autokey cipher

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Keeping Records

aviation

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Crash Course
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Astro Traffic Control

Aztec calendar

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Altar (Meta)

Babylonian numerals

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 A Scholarly Lesson

baby names database

The Social Security Administration in the United States has made available, from their database of every American born in about a century, a database that lets you look up the popularity of first names over time.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Thank Heaven for Little Girls

Bach cantatas

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Sacred and Profane

Back and Forth (puzzle type)

In the standard form of this puzzle, a grid is provided that has spaces for three letter groups to be entered on alternate sides of a central axis. The answers are six letters long, using two consecutive groups, and read in alternating directions, so that each answer begins with the last three letters of the previous answer, reversed. Standard crossword-like clues are provided.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 5: Attic

backsolving

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 The Impossible Tribar
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Round 3 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Meta testing!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Piercing the Veil
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer WILLIAMS
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 White Queen Meta

backswitch

A backswitch is a type of flat from the National Puzzlers' League. In this puzzle, the last letter of a word or phrase is changed and the remaining letters are reversed, resulting in another word or phrase.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer LYNN

Back to the Future movies

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Lightning Strikes Twice

backward talking

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Nina

the (Kevin) Bacon game

Also known as Six Degrees of Separation, this is a game where you try to link actors to one another or specifically to Kevin Bacon using movies and/or TV shows actors appeared in together as links. The Bacon number is the number of links needed to get from any actor to Kevin Bacon, with Bacon himself having Bacon number 0 and those who appeared in his films having Bacon number 1.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Hollow Man
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Round II Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Intersecting Personalities
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Meet the Loremipsumstanis

“The Bad Touch” (Bloodhound Gang song)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Unscrambled Cable Porn

balance puzzle

The standard form of this puzzle includes a set of two or more hanging beams marked off in equally spaced intervals, with weights and/or other beams hanging at some of the marked points. This structure, a bit like a mobile, is meant to balance by the torque rule - for each beam, the sum of (weight x distance to fulcrum) for all weights on one side of the fulcrum equals that sum for the other side, the fulcrum in this case being the point the beam hangs from. The beams themselves are weightless but convey the total weight of the weights they hold to the beam they hang from. The values of the weights must be filled in from a predetermined set, usually 1 to N where N is the number of weights.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 20: Art Gallery

ballroom dancing

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Ballroom

Bananagrams

Bananagrams is one of many fast-paced word-building games which all use the following general rules:

Each player draws some set number of tiles from a large supply at the start of the game.
At a signal, all players flip over their tiles and try to arrange them all into a legal Scrabble board. All letters must be used to form words, all the words must interlock into a single network, and all groups of adjacent tiles must form words reading left to right or top to bottom.
The first person who succeeds in doing this calls out some signal (like "Draw!") at which point each players draws two (or only one, in some games) more tiles from the supply.
All players rebuild their layouts to incorporate the new letters. You can rearrange the letters arbitrarily, but you are going to be faster if you can just add the tiles as a new word or extend an existing word.
The first player done calls out and more tiles are drawn.
Repeat until there are not enough tiles remaining for everybody to draw new tiles.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 My Socrates Note

bands

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Cockpit (original names)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Ten Times a Minute (members)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Red Meta (members)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Red Star Meta (members)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Large and in Charge (backup bands; __ & the ___s)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Sorry I Love These Big Wrong Musical Numbers (names with numbers)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Toto, I Have a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore (names from movies)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Meta Puzzle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Indie Audio Productions
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 1! 2! 3! 4! 4649!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Puppy Love

Barbie dolls

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Princess of South Africa
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Day 2 meta

baseball

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 6: Billiard Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Implements of Naivete
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Take Me Out
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Twenties
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Round III Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Let's Play Spaceball
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Crowd's Chant
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Round Tripper
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 White Queen Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Special OPS

bases other than ten

basketball

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Belle of the Ball
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Drafting Table
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 March Madness
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 New Bridge Art
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 AKA

basslines

The low frequencies in music, which often exhibit simple repeating themes that support the song.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Bottom of the Top

bathrooms

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 When Johnny Comes Marching Home

“Batman” (60s TV series)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Evil Empire
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Fight Choreography

Battle Line (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 War Game

battles

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Primate Conflict
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Message from Axayacatl

Battleship (board game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Ho Chi Minh City
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Commodore's Final Voyage (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Battleship
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Smiling Vessel

Battleships (puzzle)

The standard form of this puzzle consists of a grid with numeric clues outside the grid and possibly parts of the solution given inside the grid. You have to locate a fleet of ships (usually 1 of length 4, 2 of length 3, 3 of length 2, and 4 of length 1) in the grid, such that no two ships occupy adjacent cells (even diagonally) and the number of occupied cells in each row and column matches the given number. Givens may appear as a circle (length 1 ship), square (interior piece of a length 3 of longer ship), half-square-half-circle (end of a length 2 or longer ship), or wavy lines (no ship).

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 33: Board Game Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Battleships in Space!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Simple Unassuming Logic Puzzles
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Captain Red Herring's Buried Pirate Booty (variant)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Cloaked Battleships
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Let's Get Submersible
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Bigram Battleships

“Battlestar Galactica” (2000s TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Spoilers of War

Baudot code

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Reminder's World
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Open Secrets

Beanie Babies

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 New Orleans
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 Warm and Fuzzy

The Beatles

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Manila
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Old Man's Story
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Hand Across the Water
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Telephone Pictionary
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 White Queen Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The Misspelled Insects
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Rip Wan Winkle Dream Fragment

Beaufort cipher

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Keeping Records

Bechdel-Wallace Test

Sometimes simply called the Bechdel test, it attempts in a very simple way to rate movies based on whether they have meaningful female characters. The test has three conditions: (1) The film has at least two female characters. (2) They speak to each other. (3) They talk about something other than a man.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Girl Talk

beer

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 First Round Puzzle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 A Toast to the Fallen Warriors
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Suds
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Welcome to Dead Waters

beer pong

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Blub Blub Pub Trivia

bee waggle dance

A dance bees perform to indicate the location of a source of nectar to other bees.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Follow the Bees!

before and after

This is like the Wheel of Fortune category, where two phrases overlap by a common word. This is distinguished from word chains because here the parts are whole words or names and usually in short chains of 2 or 3 phrases (3 or 4 parts).

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Manila
MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Triple Feature
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Adapted for Television
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Smush
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Name, Rank, and Serial Number
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Talk to Me
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 The Rainbow Connection
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Before and After
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Before and After Mash

beheaded people

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Hopping Lock

Bejeweled (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Hot Ice

Ben & Jerry's ice cream

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Dead and Gone

Beowulf

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 The Goodwin Manuscript

beverages

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 No Silver Lining
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Dossier 5 Meta

Bhavacakra (Buddhist Wheel of Life)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 12-Step Program

The Bible

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 3C
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Eschatology
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Lame Puzzle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Hidden Passages
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Endgame

bifid cipher

The bifid cipher is a cipher based on taking indexes into a 5x5 square of letters, but instead of turning the text into numbers, the numbers are read in a different order and converted back to letters through the square. The link explains in more detail.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Security Theater

“Big Bang Theory” (TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 From the Earth to the Moon

“Big Brother” (reality TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Subtraction

bigrams

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Phnom Penh
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 MGM Grand (Red Meta) (repeated)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Round 1 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Round 7 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Altar (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Cardinal Rule's Chapel
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The French Armada (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Minus Man Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Behave
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Clockwork Oran.ge
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Go At It!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Back and Forth
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Bigram Battleships
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Get Her! Together!

binary/biliteral/Baconian cipher

This includes any 5-bit binary for letters in alphabetical order. The binary cipher usually goes from 00001 for A up to 11010 for Z. The Baconian cipher, and for Sir Francis Bacon, usually starts at 00000 for A, and classically (because of old Latin rules) combined I and J as one letter and likewise for U and V. Modern implementations often ignore the IJ/UV pairing and just work as an odd-by-one version of the binary cipher. Finally, either of these may be presented as a biliteral cipher, which means the binary is hidden as two variations of items within a cover text of some sort. It's up to you to figure out which variation is 0 and which is 1, but usually not hard to determine.

binary tree

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer NORWEGIAN WOOD
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 SKI Trees

bingo

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Envy event
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Medical Centaur

bird calls

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Calling You from My Cell

birds

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Caucus Race Meta

Birds of America

(John James Audubon book)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Song of Birds

bitcoins

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Cryptochains

bitwise OR

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Straight from the Horse's Mouth
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The Sun Will Come Out

black and white (logic puzzle)

In the standard form of this puzzle type, a grid is given with black circles in some squares and white circles in others, but mostly blank. To solve it you must fill in either a white circle or a black circle in each box so that all the white circles form a single orthogonally connected group, and the black circles also form such a group.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Polyglot

Black Box (game)

Black Box is a puzzle-like game where one player tries to determine the locations of hidden atoms in a grid by observing how the atoms reflect rays entering the box from various locations. It can also be solved as a puzzle, given a predetermined set of ray results.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Aria

black box (solver must figure out inner workings)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Blinkenlights
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Winning Conditions
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Pipe

blackjack

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Rules of the Game (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Witness 3 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Casino Lobdell

"The Blacklist" (TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Dogged Pursuit of Justice, AKA: Caught Red-Handed

Mr. Blackwell's Worst Dressed List

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Dressing Down

blank answer

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Facial Expression

blank puzzle

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 JFK SHAGS A SAD SLIM LASS

blindness

(Puzzles where you have to do something blindfolded or in the dark.)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 The Braille Witch Project

blogs

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Post Modern
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Geek Drama
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Stuff Nerd People Like

blood types

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Predator
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Pieces of Eight

blueprints

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Prints

Board Game Geek (web site)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 On Numbers and Games

Bob's Burgers (TV series)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Boston Burgers

body parts

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Cannery

Humphrey Bogart

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 The Joint of No Return

Boggle

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 3A
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Bogots
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Sixteen Blocks
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 DRUGGLE
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Zombies vs. Zombies Event
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 A Set of Words
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Contest

James Bond movies

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Common Bonds

Bongard problems

(Given two sets of items, what feature is shared by all the items in one set and none of the items in the other?)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Pattern Recognition

Bonza puzzles

Bonza is a puzzle app in which the puzzles consist of small segments (typically 2-4 letters) of a solved criss-cross puzzles which you have to reassemble like jigsaw pieces.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Bits of Nomenclature, Zoned Appropriately

book cipher

In the book cipher, a series of numbers are given which index into a known text to extract letters or words. The exact indexing mechanism varies, but it could involve pages, lines, words, and letters if the text has known pagination, or chapters/sections, words, and letters if the pagination is not known or consistent, or simply words and letters if the document is short.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Hamiltonian Path

book code

A type of cipher where a book or other widely available text is used as a key, and the message is encoded as a series of numbers which are indexes into the text. Indexes may be single (word or letter counts in the entire text) or multiple (indexing first by page, then by word, or first by word, then by letter, etc.) This is sometimes called a Beale cipher, in reference to a famous one which used the U.S. Declaration of Independence as a key.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 1207 1370

book covers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Cover Girls

Boston Marathon

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 X Marks the Spot

Boston University

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Terrier Parking

bourbon

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Top Shelf

David Bowie

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Hum a Few Bars

bowling

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Found in the Alley
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Frame of Reference

boxing

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Witness 1 Meta

“The Brady Bunch”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Witness 2 Meta

Braille

brain regions

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Encephalon

bridge (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Conventional Wisdom
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Parallel Universe
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Scrambling Attributes Yields Conundrum

bridges

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Running in Circles
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Attention Span

British and American English differences

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Betsy Johnson's Review
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Sam's Your Uncle

British Columbia

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Flat Head

Broadway theaters

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Where's Antoinette?

brothers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Hammer Time

B sides

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Studio
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Bumblebee Tune-a

“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Slay You, Slay Me, Slaying Together (board game)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 This Puzzle Sucks

bughouse chess

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Table for Four

building 16-56 floor code

The code is apparently 6 bit binary with 0=A, 1=B, ..., two characters per column, and boustrophedonic (direction of columns alternate). Codes above 25 are defined as various symbols, but not used here.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Pop Quiz
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Passageway

building 2 mathematical models

(a display case on the first floor)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Showcase

building 56 murals

Four panels in MIT's building 56, each 6 squares wide and 8 squares tall, with some of the squares containing pictures or text.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Barcelona
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Passageway

building 6C floor squares

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Crop Squares

buildings

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 I Can See for Miles

Bulls-Eye 20 Questions

In the standard form of this puzzle, a set of words are given in a set of concentric rings and there are a series of questions, often wordplay related, which can be answered with the given words.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Tree Rings

burr puzzles

These are physical puzzles where a set of solid pieces must be assembled so that the pieces interlock and form some tight shape (or alternatively, disassembled from that solved state). The traditional form consists of six 2x2x6 blocks with various cubes or other parts cut out of their middles, with a solution where two pieces run lengthwise along each of three perpendicular axes. Other forms of puzzles based on interlocking polycubes are sometimes included in this category.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Papyrophobia
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Worthy of Picasso

buses

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Round 4 Meta Hint

busy beaver Turing machines

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Halting Problem

"but I hardly know her" jokes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Charm School

Button Men (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 8 Puzzle Unlocking Mechanism
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 8 Meta

BuzzFeed

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Words Search

BWV numbers (Bach music catalog)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Toronto

Cabin Pressure (BBC radio show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Cabin Fever

Caesar shifts

calculatrivia

Long ago, back before the Internet made hard trivia easy and impossible trivia doable, Games magazine ran a series of contests which consisted of nothing but a zeries of trivia questions whose answers were all numbers and a complicated equation to plug all the numbers into.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Trivial Mathematics

calendars

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 12A
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Console-Nation Prizes
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Malthusian Catastrophes
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Endgame
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Round 8 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Indiana Jones Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Time is Out of Joint
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 All History is Local

call letters of TV or radio stations

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Elvis Travels to Peace Talks as Delegate of Switzerland!
MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Tbilisi
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Dictionary

Cambridge street cleaning schedule

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Plutonian Transport Agency

Camelot (board game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 It's Only a Model

capitals of states or countries

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 17
MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 12: Screening Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Orange Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Travelogue
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Capital Punishment

CAPTCHAs

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Please Prove Your Humanity
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Checkpoint

caricatures

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 On the Couch

car models

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Garage
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Car Math Chameleon
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Plutonian Transport Agency
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 How Hard Can It Be?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Road Trip

“Car Talk” (radio program)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Dictionary

Cartesian coordinates

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Modern Cubism Artist
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Crosswalks
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Luminance Shift
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 . . . Or Don't We?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Pentoku

cartoon rebuses

Cartoon rebuses are a type of puzzle made popular during the contest craze of the early 20th century and revived in Games Magazine. A single black and white comic-style scene conceals a name or phrase by breaking it up into parts which combine, phonetically, as in a rebus (but without subtraction) to form the answer phrase. Each part is depicted in the cartoon, possibly as a word in a dialogue, a letter on a shirt, a pictured object, or something strongly implied by the scene. These parts are hidden among other irrelevant bits to make a comic scene. A category and the enumeration of the letters in each word of the answer is given.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 34: Drawing Room

cartoons

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 2: Screening Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Warrant 1.2
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Shogun Trivia (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 It Could Be Worse
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Character Witness
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Confession
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Nurse Charnel's Reports from the Sickbay of the U.S.S. Parkerstone

Cash Cab

(TV game show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 The Cash Corridor

casinos

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 LSEA

cats

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 A Sudden Downpour
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Curiouser and Curiouser
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The Cat's Meow

celebrities' original names

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Rose By Any Other
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Soul-searching
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Chromesthesia

celebrity baby names

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Photo Album

celebrity deaths

MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 In Memoriam

celebrity photos

cemetery

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 A Walk in the... Cemetery?

censored words

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Dropped Quotes

cereal

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 1: Kitchen
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 The Mayor's Breakfast
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Get on with It

change ringing

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Method to the Madness

charades

Any sort of cluing words by parts, such as automobile + domestic animal = floor covering (car + pet = carpet). It may or may not be phonetic. It may or may not include cluing by gestures as in the parlor game of this name.

“Charlie on the MTA”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Let Me Tell You the Story

chatbots

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Shark Blood

cheat codes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Unfair Cryptogram

checkers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Spellcheckers
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 12 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Turnary Reasoning

"Cheers" (TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Precipice

cheese

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 30: Kitchen
MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Stuttgart
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Sweet Cheeses!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Sharp Senses

chemical elements

chemical reactions

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Return to the Blue Lagoon

chemicals (particular molecules)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 It's All Green to Me
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Nonmetal Cure
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Train Station
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Feed Your Head

chemistry

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 11
MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Overanalysis
MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Round 2 Meta Hint
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Mixed Drink
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Sage of the Arctic
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Par for the Course V
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Hot Ice
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Feed Your Head
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Bubbles

chess

chess variants/fairy chess

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson Meta

chewing gum

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Stick the Landing

Chinese five elements

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Biological Garden
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Mary Ka-Ching's

Chinese numerals

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Encoded
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Pictocryptolists

Chinese remainder theorem

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 All Geared Up
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 9 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Czar Cycle

Chinese zodiac/calendar

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 A Pile of Pictures
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Mary Ka-Ching's
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 March Madness
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 20 Questions
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Tea Party Meta

chiptunes

Retro electronic music which mimics the sound of early home computer and video game audio systems.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Pulse Pulse Wave Noise

chocolate ingredients

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Incredible Edibles

choose your own adventure

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Choose Your Own Misadventure

Christ figures

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The ___er of Men

Christmas carols

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 25: Attic
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Rhythms of the Season

Chromaphonoglyphics

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Brodie Electric

Chutes and Ladders

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Dossier 2 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Higher They Climb, the Farther They Fall
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Snakes and Ladders
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer AND I LOVE HER

Cinéman

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Vive la Différence

circular periodic table

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 King Arthur Meta

Cirque du Soleil

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 William S. Bergman's Review

cities

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The Hidden City
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Coins
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Time & Place
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Suns of China
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 On the Road
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Follow the Pipes
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Now Where Was I?

city address grids

Some cities, or parts of cities, have a rectangular grid of streets, with the street names in one or both directions being sequential numbers or letters, and often with the addresses matching cross-streets (so the addresses on a street between the intersections with 5th and 6th streets would be between 500 and 600). Although the distance between each pair of streets is not always the same, this provides opportunities to interpret the map as a Cartesian plane.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 I Left My Stomach in Salt Lake City

city and state names

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Madras
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Megrez Expedition
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Cookin’
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Local Shorts
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Opus Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Trivia

Clabbers (anagram Scrabble)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Stronghold Fire

cliches

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 9
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Collision in the Marketplace
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Picture Time

clickbait links

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Captain Planet

cloning

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Character Witness

Clue (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 40: Ballroom (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 D2: The Mighty Duck Konundrum
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 The Usual Suspects
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Son of the Realm of Unspeakable Chaos

Clue (movie)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Cluesome

cocktails

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Cubicle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Interstellar Basic Algebra
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Chaser

coins

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Senator Ridicules Proposed Elvis Coin: "Elvis is Not Dead Yet"
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Money Changer
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 De-Coins

The Colbert Report

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Word

collective names for animals

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 A Bunch of Boxes, a Collection of Clues
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Spades Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Merriweather Post Pavilion

college football bowl games

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 A Message from Our Sponsors

college sports team nicknames

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Mad Dogs
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Elf/Dwarf Brawl

color blindness

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Son of the Realm of Unspeakable Chaos

color palettes in image files

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 1B
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Encoded
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 This Page Intentionally Left Blank

colors

color separations

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 1B
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Much Paint, Many Numbers
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Number Two Pencil
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 White Noise
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 The Arena
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Ceres
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Toll Bridges
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Jackson Pollock

colors of the rainbow

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Optics Lab Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Aborigine Dream Fragment
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Chromesthesia

col (saddle point between mountains)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Sphere

combination locks

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Locks

comedians

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Killing the Audience

comics

Commander Keen alphabet

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Open Secrets

commercials

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 See Spot Run

Commodore 64

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Assemble Me

The Communards (band)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Endgame

communication

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 I Can Hear You
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Running Mates

Community Solar System (exhibit of the Museum of Science)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Terrestrial Planets
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 In Other Words

"Community" (TV Show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Introduction to Collegiate Notetaking

compass points

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 South Carmacks
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Just Follow Directions
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 I Bet I Look Good on the Dance Floor
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 The Obligatory Dance Video Puzzle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Panorama
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Following the News
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Cardinal Red
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Dismal Dungeon

completing the square

Completing the square is a mathematical concept used with polynomials. Given a polynomial such as x²+2x, you add a 1 to make it a square (in this case, (x+1)².

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 You Complete Me

composers of music

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 3B
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Digging Up Music
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Compose Yourself
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Is that Even Music?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Altered from the Original

computer architecture

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Nope!

concept intersection

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Set Theory

concordances

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Don't Make Me Say This Twice
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Eschatology
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Ski Slopes

Connect Four

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Connect Four
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Halting Problem

connect the dots

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 7: Observatory
MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Bill & Ted's Bogus Mystery Hunt
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 I Need to Connect With You, Baby
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Picture Puzzle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Ring Around the Music
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Up in the Air

consonantcies

Puzzles where words share the same consonants in the same order, with any vowels.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 1 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Obedience Training (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 1, 2, 3
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Lesser Works

constellations

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 15
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 A Bunch of Dots
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 6 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Mario 3 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Be a Star!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Star Search

Constitution of the U.S.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Revisions
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Unnatural Law

construction

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Cat's Combobulation
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Write-it Build-it

cookies

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Dublin
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Cookie Monster

cooking/bring us food

"Cooking with Dog" (YouTube show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Dog Food

corporations

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Pirates of the Tyrrhenian

Corral puzzle

The standard form of this puzzle is a grid with numbers in some cells. A single closed loop is to be drawn along the edges of the grid so that all the numbers are inside the loop, and the number of squares in the row and column through each number, going up to the first part of the loop encountered in each direction, and counting the cell with the number once, equals the number.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Chimera
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Portals
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Magic Mushrooms

Cosmic Encounter

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Cosmic Awareness

"Countdown" (British game show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Houston, We Have Liftoff

counties

Counties are divisions of U.S. states. Louisiana called them parishes but collectively across the states we still call them counties.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Opus Meta

counting shapes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Counter Culture
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 My Summer Vacation

countries

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 17
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Discworld
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Meta testing!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Dawn of a New Era
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Changing States
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Vertexillonomy
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Tuva or Bust
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Golden Tower Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Travelogue
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Trivia

country codes (any variety)

court settlements

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Showcases

covers (musical remakes)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Got it Covered
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 New and Improved

cowbell songs

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Behind the Music

Cow Parade (civic art projects)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Herd Mentality
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Raw Bar

Cracked magazine

Cracked is online

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Cut by Editorial

Craigslist

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 All the Wrong Places

Crayola colors

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Tickle Me Pink

creative tasks

(Build, write, or perform something, instead of solving a puzzle. Does not count those puzzles where you have to do some small thing at the end, but see answer given for completing task and intermediate tasks for those)

Creek puzzle

Creek is a Nikoli logic puzzle type. A grid contains circled numbers at some of its intersections. Blacken some squares so that of the 4 squares around each number, that number of squares are black, and so that the empty squares form a single orthogonally connected group.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Portals

cribbage

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Peg O' My Heart

cricket

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Sensitive Man Wearing a Cricketer's Uniform and a Celery Stalk on His Lapel
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 My Cup Runneth Over
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Cabin Fever
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Tricky Wicket

cricket (darts game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Tricky Wicket

criss-cross

In its standard form, this puzzle consists of a loosely interlocking grid and a list of words to be filled in. You must use logic and elimination to figure out where to place the words. See also disconnected criss-cross and diagramless criss-cross. This category includes puzzles where the word list is clued rather than provided, but if the clues are associated with specific entries, this becomes a crossword puzzle instead.

crocheting

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 What Do You Do With a Genteel Sailor?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Uncharted Territory

croquet

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Hedgehogs and Flamingos

cross-number puzzle

This is a crossword puzzle where the answers are numbers written with digits. These puzzles are usually full of cross-references and clues which limit their answers to certain subsets of integers, and usually follow the rule (as in many numerical puzzles) leading zeroes are not allowed.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Two MIT Students Claim Elvis Was Their 6.001 TA!

Cross Products (Cross Sums variant)

This is like a Cross Sums except the product of the digits in each entry is given, rather than the sum.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Cursed

cross-stitch

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Uncharted Territory

Cross Sums (Kakuro)

This is one of the most popular numerical puzzle types. In its standard form, a crossword-like grid has clues in the grid providing the sum of the digits to be entered in each entry. No zeroes are used and no entry contains any digit more than once.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 23
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Some Stars
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Express Yourself
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 The Joy of Accountancy
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Cross Something-Or-Others (numerous variations)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Technological Crisis at Shikakuro Farms (variant)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 The Signs They Are A-Changin’ (variant)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Kroskuro
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Stackuro

crossword puzzles

The standard American-style crossword puzzle, occasionally with a more open-form grid than usual. See crossword variants for those where words are entered in unusual ways, and cryptic crosswords for puzzles with cryptic or British-style cluing.

Modern crossword puzzles sometimes include one of a number of tricks, and naturally these show up in hunts as well. Among these are the rebus crossword in which more than one letter is written into a few squares of the crossword, and deletion or letter change themes in which the theme entries are modified in some way to fit into the grid.

crossword variants

Puzzles with crossword-like cluing and intersecting/overlapping words, but not in the traditional crossword fashion. Standard variants included within this keyword include:

crows

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Crow Facts

cruise lines

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Getting There is Half the Fun

cryptic crossword clues

(cryptic crossword clues whose solutions do not go into a grid)

cryptic crosswords

The standard British-style crossword or cryptic crossword, where clues usually consist of a straight definition and a wordplay clue concatenated in either order. This category includes cryptic double-crostics and the like, but see cryptic crossword clues for puzzles where the clues stand alone and their answers do not go into some sort of grid.

cryptocurrency

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Cryptochains

cryptograms

(all simple substitution ciphers, but see alphametic for cryptic math puzzles)

crystallography

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 The Blue Carr Bungle

cube nets

The hexominoes which you can get by unfolding a cube along its edges into a flat shape.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Curious Cube

Cuneiform numerals

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 A Scholarly Lesson

curling (sport)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer A HARD DAY'S NIGHT

currency ISO codes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 People and Places
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Finsey Gillhone
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Coins

cutting out shapes

(most, but not all, of these involve cutting out shapes to fold into 3-dimensional figures)

Cyrillic alphabet

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 In Soviet Union, Death Defies You
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Czar Cycle

Daedric alphabet (Elder Scrolls)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Open Secrets

Dance Dance Revolution

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Dingy, Dark Reality

dances (names for)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Puzzle Unlocking Mechanism

dancing

These puzzles also appear under their specific dance names, for example, square dancing, ballroom dancing, and swing dancing.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Barn
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Ballroom
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Do Sa Do
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 War Dances
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Now is the Time on Kronos When We Dance
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Where the Hell is Captain Blastoid?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Lobster Quadrille
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Smart Moves

Dancing Men cipher

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 A Message in Space
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Open Secrets
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Dancing Girls

Dante's circles of Hell

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Sinners

"Dare to Be Stupid" (Weird Al Yankovic song)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 It's So Obvious!

DARPA Network Challenge

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Sightseeing

Da Vinci's Notebook (band)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Paranoia

dead or alive

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Necromancy

dead things

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Colorful Tower Meta

Deal or No Deal

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Showcases

Dear Sriracha (comic in The Oatmeal)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Obsessive-Compulsive Dickishness

death metal

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 True Unholy Puzzle

deletions and insertions

(includes curtailments and beheadments, and some deletions of multiple letters)

“Desperate Housewives”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Side by Side by Side

desserts

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Fruitless

The Devil's Dictionary

A book containing satirical definitions of words, written by Ambrose Bierce, first published in the early 20th century, collecting his newspaper columns from the late 19th century.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 35: Library

/dev/joe's Mystery Hunt Index

This is for puzzles involving this web site.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Haddock Walk

Dewey decimal system

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 . . . Or Don't We?

diacritical marks

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Math is Hard!

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 The Voices in Your Head

diagonalizing

(reading an answer from a series of words by reading the first letter of the first, second letter of the second, etc.)

diagramless criss-cross

There are two standard versions of this puzzle. In one, you're given one starting word in a big open grid, and you are given not only the word list but also the list of words that cross each word, in order. In the other, you're given the word list, and the grid is pre-filled with all occurrences of one or more letters which are frequent in the word list (sometimes rebus-style, with a word of two or more letters written into the pre-filled cells, though the other squares are normal).

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 This Puzzle Has Been Formatted to Fit Your Screen
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Treasure Chest Meta

diagramless crossword

A crossword puzzle for which the grid is not given. In the standard form, the American crossword standards are enforced rigidly; there are no unchecked letters or two-letter words and the grid has 180-degree rotational symmetry. Numbers are sequential in lexical order.

dimension added

(any puzzle that takes a standard puzzle type and adds more dimensions than it usually has)

dinosaurs

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 BLAST from the Past

Diplomacy (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Diplomatic Victory

dirty words

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Sacred and the Mundane

disasters

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 CQD

disconnected criss-cross

This puzzle contains multiple criss-cross grids with just two words in each. Some additional relationship is necessary to constrain which two words cross in each grid.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Cross Breeding
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Teller's Window
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Now Let's Create Melodies
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The ___er of Men
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Missed Connections
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Crossing Your Arms

Discworld

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Discword

diseases

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Medical Centaur
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Bio Man Meta

Disney films

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Circle of Life
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Montages
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Dancing Girls

Disney princesses

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Dancing Girls

dissection (geometric)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Hot Shots
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Lost in Translation

diving

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Spongebob

DNA, RNA

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 1C
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Jewelry Thief
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Shotgun Wedding
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Paris Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Memo from Agent C
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Genetic Struggle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Sequencer
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Signalling Pathways
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 BLAST from the Past
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Knit Square
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Life Braid

DNS root servers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Follow the Pipes
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 King Arthur Dream Fragment

Doc McStuffins

A Disney Jr. cartoon about a girl who doctors the illnesses of her and her friends' toys.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 It Is What It Is

"Doctor Who"

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 12 mechanism for matching up puzzle parts
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Revisiting History
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer SULLIVAN

dog food

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Paddywhack

dog hybrids

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Half and Half

dogs

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Best Mate
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 A Sudden Downpour
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Cross-Breeding
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Paddywhack
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Half and Half

dog shows

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Paddywhack
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Ribbons (Meta)

Dominion (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Sovereignty

domino puzzle

(divide the grid into a set of dominoes)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 10B
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Simple Unassuming Logic Puzzles

Domino's Pizza

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Fair Trade

double crostic

In the standard form of this puzzle, clue answers are written on a set of numbered blanks, then transferred into a grid where words (usually spelling a quotation) read only across, wrapping around the ends of rows. Normally, each number appears only once among the answers and the grid contains the letter of the clue which uses that number, so that you can also work from the grid back to the clues. The initial letters of the answers, in clue order, spell out the source of the quotation (sometimes abbreviated).

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 13: Connecticut Suite (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 26: Sitting Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 According to Mafiosi, Mole Only Wanted a Scarf from the King!
MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Elvis a Trojan? "I Tortured Him Myself," Says 4000-Year-Old Spartan!
MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Seattle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Choice Hotels (Cyan Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 A Tribute to Seth Bisen-Hersh
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Print Room (Blank Check)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 On the Briny Deep
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 This Puzzle Sucks
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 The Scrambler
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 UN-Speakable
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 This Puzzle Needs a Title
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 The Campus Canvas event
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Casting Spells
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 This is a Recording
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Build Your Own Acrostic
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Yo Dawg, I Herd You Like Puzzle Hunts
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 You Will Not Go to Space Today
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 A Toast
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Getting Out of Line

double dactyls

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Counterintelligence

double letters

double-or-nothing crossword

A variant of the 1, 2, 3 crossword in which each square contains 0 or 2 letters.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Emergency Deportation

drawing letters and numbers

(Any puzzle where the solution provides lines or a matrix of pixels that form letter and number shapes.)

Dresden Files books

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Wizardly Tales

dress-up

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 America's Least Wanted
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Keep It Stylin', Stupid

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Dr Ox's Experiment

drill sizes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Hole Wizard

dropquotes

In the standard form of this puzzle, a grid is given with black squares to separate words (which otherwise wrap around the ends of rows), and the letters that go in each column are given, in alphabetized or scrambled order, above that column. The solution is a quotation (whose source is usually not given in the puzzle).

drugs

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Montevideo
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Locked In
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 DRUGGLE
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 For Whom the Bella Toils
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Sheila Sunshine's Review
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Feed Your Head

dubbing videos with parody dialogue

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Cone of Silence

Duck Konundrum

(see also following directions for similar non-Duck-Konundrum puzzles)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 The Duck Konundrum
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 D2: The Mighty Duck Konundrum
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 D3: The Fellowship of the Duck
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 D4: Ducks Playing Poker
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Amazing Juggling Troupe of Duckkon Undrum V
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Duck Konundrum VI: Now with Way Way Way Way Way Too Much Pepper
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Ye Olde Seventhe Duck Konunnndrum: The Cones of Duckshire

Dungeons & Dragons

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Campaign Speeches
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Sufficiently Advanced Technology
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 League of Legends & Lore

DVD region numbers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 The Continental DiViDe

Dwarf Fortress

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Lost in Translation

Easter dates

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 12A

George Eastman plaque in building 6

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Wise Guys

EBCDIC

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Eschatology
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Reminder's World

edge matching puzzles

A variety of jigsaw puzzle where the pieces are all the same shape (usually square) and they are to be joined so as to match halves of small images which appear split across each edge, rather than a single large image. As such, it is really more of a combinatorial matching puzzle.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 MIT Meta

eggcorns

Eggcorns are words or phrases that come to exist when people mishear or misunderstand other phrases. Eggcorn is itself an eggcorn of "acorn." The same phenomenon is called a Mondegreen when it occurs in song lyrics.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Picture an Acorn

electoral college

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Divided We Stand
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Recounting Former Glories

electrical engineering

(mostly analyzing circuit diagrams)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Less Engineering, Dammit!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Gnireenigne Lab
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Electric Soup
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Endgame
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 The Quantum Menace
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Logical Digits
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Radio Waves
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Trance State
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Da Vinci's Workshop Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Electronic Love
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Ben Bitdiddle Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 What Ben Bitdiddle Dropped (final runaround)

electric circuits

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The Resistance

elimination tournament

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Genetic Struggle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 March Madness
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The Acerbic Sixteen

Elvis movies

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Languedoc Culture Attributes Modern Civilization to Elvis!

e-mail clients

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Evolution

embassies

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Abducted!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Introductory Foreign Operations

emperors

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Land Grab

Encyclopedia Brown

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Let Me Tell You the Story
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Baddest Man

Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Everything Is Something
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 20 Questions

End View puzzle

Also called Easy as ABC, this is a kind of Latin square puzzle in which each row is to be filled with the same set of different letters and some number of blank spaces. Outside the grid, clues indicate the first non-blank at that end of that row or column.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Easy as ABC
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Sequencer
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Paint it Black

Enigma cipher

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Password Update (Marty Bishop meta)

Entertainment Weekly magazine

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 On the Couch

Epic Rap Battles of History

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Reaching for the Stars

episode titles

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The TV Puzzle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Before and After Mash
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Modern Journalism

epithets

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 The Fallen
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Rulers

eponyms (words made from people's names)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 That Which We Call a Rose

Equation Analysis Test (26 = L. in the A.)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 20000 = L. under the S.
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 21 Equations to Solve
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 All for One and One for All
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Screen Test

Ermahgerd! meme

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Graveyard Meta

errata

puzzles involving errata, not puzzles for which errata was issued

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Dory

error messages

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 A Satanic Message
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Badness 10000
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Apples in Stereo
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Nope!

errors

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Crimes Against Cruciverbalism

Escape from Zyzzlvaria

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 D2: The Mighty Duck Konundrum
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Theme and entire hunt structure
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Inner Meta-Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Round 2 Meta

esoteric programming languages

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Use of Gothicism Considered Harmful (various)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 What Do You Do With a Genteel Sailor? (Befunge)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Who's There (Whitespace)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 This Page Intentionally Left Blank
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Callooh Callay, World!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Sleeping Gypsy Meta (Piet)

estimation

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Physical Challenge
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Magnitude
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Katamari Supermeta

Etch a Sketch

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Drawing

etsy.com

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Trochees, Etc.

etymology

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Calumny Challenge
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Notes on a Century of English According to Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary

events

All teams come together for something that only happens once.

events staged multiple times

In the following events, teams interact with each other, but the event is staged multiple times as needed.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 It's a Bug-Eat-Bug World
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Slay You, Slay Me, Slaying Together
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Answer Fits the Puzzle

evolutionary tree

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Evolution

EXIF data

EXIF data is the metadata stored in JPEG images which can include information about the camera which took the image, when and where it was taken, a thumbnail of the image, and lots more.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Sleeping Gypsy Dream Fragment

experimental study group (ESG at MIT)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Eclectic Spatial Geometry

expired facts

Things that were true at one time, but which are no longer true.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 This Puzzle Has No Errata

ext2 filesystem

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Image

external publications and broadcasts

(these puzzles make use of material that the constructing team got published, or aired on radio/television, somewhere outside the Mystery Hunt, then referenced in a puzzle)

extra answers

"The Eye of Argon" (short story)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Argh

eye rhyme (visually similar non-rhyming word pairs)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Bad Poetry

fabrics

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Paper Jigsaw

factorization

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Ginormous
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Hey, Look, a Grid!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Round VI Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Another Small Collection of Immense Integers
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 20 Questions
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Halting Problem
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Replication

Fact Sphere (Portal 2)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Trivia Round

fake 404 page

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 A Satanic Message

fake answer callback

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Time Conundrum

fake solution link

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Resolutions

fake team

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Endgame

fake web site

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Haddock Walk

Fallout 4 (video game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 How I Spent My Pre/Post-Apocalyptic Vacation

false cognates

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Les Faux Amis Valent Rien

false negatives

A false negative is a word that begins with the letters that form a prefix which negates a word, for which the prefix letters may be removed to yield another word, but where the prefix is not actually a prefix and the words are actually unrelated. This is a specific puzzle type in the National Puzzlers' League (where it is generalized to other types of falseness) but the concept is used elsewhere as well.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Opposites Are Not Downbeats

"Family Feud"

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Knowledge

family tree

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Genealogy
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Family Ties

famous duos

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Missed Connections
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 It Takes Two

famous trips

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Trips

fashion designers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Blue Steel (floppy disk)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Rules of the Game (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Locked In

feast days for saints

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Chapel
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 O Blessed Day

Federal Reserve banks

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Federal Reserve

FedEx tracking numbers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Express Yourself

fences puzzle

In the standard form of this puzzle (also called slither link and many other names) a single closed loop is to be drawn along the grid lines, so that the number of sides of each numbered square used in the loop equals the number in that square.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Message From Above
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Nik-holey
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Portals
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Magic Mushrooms
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Cubism

Fermat's Last Theorem

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Halting Problem

Feynman diagrams

Feynman diagrams are representations of the interactions of subatomic particles.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Surely You're Hexing
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Text Adventure
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Take Home Final (Physics 101 Meta)

fictional books

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Lawman
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Yo Dawg, I Herd You Like Puzzle Hunts

fictional cars

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Master of the World
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Satellite Navigation

fictional characters' love interests

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Mario 2 Meta

fictional characters who attended MIT

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Alma Mater

fictional curse words

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Expletive Deleted
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 Cross Words

fictional definitions of words

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Eggsam

fictional dogs

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Something for Everyone

fictional objects

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Toad's List

fictional rooms

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Locked In

fictional train stations

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 My Summer Vacation

fictional weapons

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Excalibur

figure skating

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 In Soviet Union, Death Defies You

file extensions

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Hyperextensions

file reconstruction

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 A Problem with Printing
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Surgical Files
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Makefiles
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Encoded
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer CRONIN
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Image

Fill-a-Pix

This is a logic puzzle very much like the Minesweeper game but all the clues you are going to get are provided initially, and spaces with clues may also contain mines (in which case they include themselves in their count). Puzzles without this self-counting behavior are classified under Minesweeper instead.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Queasy Reaction

Fillomino puzzle

The standard form of this puzzle consists of a grid where some cells initially have a number. To solve it, fill numbers into the remaining cells so that each orthogonally connected group of the same number consists of as many cells as that number. There may be zero, one, or more than one number given for each group.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Puzzle Editing
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Nik-holey
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Magic Mushrooms

Final Fantasy video games

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Safer Sephiroth

find the differences

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Special Art Exhibition
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Counting Your Chickens...
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 I Want Some Popcorn and Cotton Candy And . . .
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 A Modern Palimpsest (a video find-the-differences puzzle)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Highlights
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Campus Art from Z to A
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Spot the Dog

find the list

(puzzles where a key step in the solution is to find a well-known list of items given the lengths or similar information)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Lions and Tigers and Bears!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Minor Inconsistencies
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Paranoia

finite fields

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Agricultural Operations

Firefly (TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Zhongwen? That's a Terrible Space Cowboy Name!

first aid kit

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Safety First

first and last letters of words

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Campfire Stories
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Betsy Johnson Meta

first ladies

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Girl

firsts

First ___, as in first woman to swim the English Channel, first animal to orbit the Earth, etc.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Motion Picture

fish

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 School of Fish Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Night of the Living Kraken

flags

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Abducted!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Banner Headline
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Dawn of a New Era
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Vertexillonomy
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The Resistance
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Foetid, Charnel Pie Charts

flats (NPL puzzles)

These are verse puzzles where the answers are words with some sort of wordplay relationship, and they are missing from the verse (typically replaced by other all-caps words, the cue words, which, when necessary, explain which word goes where).

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 1-1=2
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Flat Head
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Flat Containers
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Something for Everyone

Flesch-Kincaid grade level

(a measure of the "grade level" of a piece of writing)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Fascinating Kids

floating point roundoff

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Infinite Cryptogram
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The 10,000 Puzzle Pyramid

flower names

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Mario 2 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer CLEMENS
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Follow the Bees!

Fold-Ins (as in Mad Magazine)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Wrath event
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Get Smart (Meta)

following directions

(see also Duck Konundrum)

following paths

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Mullions (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Employment Assortment Assessment

fonts

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Far From Home
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 The Deadly Hobby of Murder
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Puzzle at the End of This Book

foods

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Dossier 5 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Woofers and Tweeters
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Cut and Paste
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Food for Thought
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Potlines
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Incredible Edibles
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Cookin’
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 A Rare Teak
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Wordsearches Are a Piece of Cake
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Spiky Tower Meta

food tasting

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Russian Brunch
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Sharp Senses

football

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Football
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Twenties
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Manual Transmission
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Condescending Man Holding a Brightly Colored Parasol
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Written Down
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 A Message from Our Sponsors

forms (word squares and others)

Forms are small crossword-like puzzles with grids in simple geometric shapes. Today, in English, these are almost exclusively found in the National Puzzlers' League, with the exception of common types like word squares.

Fortran

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Gibbous, Non-Euclidean Program

four horsemen of the apocalypse

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Atlantis Meta Meta

Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Build Your Own Acrostic

fractals

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Maze
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 In the Details

“Fra Lippo Lippi” (Browning Poem)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Where Was I?

fraternities

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Guest List

FreeCell (solitaire card game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Patience for the Bridge Builder

The Freedom Trail

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Thin Red Line

free puzzle

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Abigail Freebie

French Republican Calendar

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Round 8 Meta

frequency distributions

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Picture Store
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 50/50
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Frequency Distribution Tank

“Friends” (TV Show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Break Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Before and After Mash

Frontier Airlines

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 I Can Haz Zyzzlburger?

Funny Farm

The original Funny Farm is a game of graphical Word Association. Associated words are linked by a line, and all the words related to one that you have solved are indicated with boxes to be filled in. Due to there being many paths, you can sometimes get multiple clues to narrow down difficult words.

The first attempt to reproduce this in the Mystery Hunt was a puzzle called Funny Farm in 2011 that overloaded the Hunt server and had to be replaced by a backup puzzle.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Analogy Farm

Furby

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 UN-Speakable

futhorc

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Palimpsest

Futurama alphabet

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Winds of Confusion
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Open Secrets

gambling games

(see also specific games)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Craps Man Meta

Game of Thrones

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Crow Facts
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Housekeeping

games

game shows staged for solvers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Kakorrhaphiophobia!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Win Chris Morse's Money
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Greed event
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Gluttony event
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Intergalactic Pub Trivia event
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 The Sarge Answers to General Ignorance event
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 The Cash Corridor (Cash Cab)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Watch Your Back

game theory

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Games

"Gangnam Style"

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Sages Style

Garbage Pail Kids

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 You Don't Need No Stinkin' Cue Cards

Garfield

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Cat's Meow

“Gashlycrumb Tinies”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Wry, Ergo Dead
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Randolph Carter Dream Fragment

G-Code

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Sixty Degrees of Separation

gears

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 All Geared Up

Gemcraft

(tower defense video game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Tower House

Gen Con

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 A Most Congenial Odyssey

genealogy

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Family Affair
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Sport of Princesses (of horses)

generals

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer EIGHT DAYS A WEEK

genes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Life Braid

geocaching

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 6 Puzzle Opening Mechanism
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Out Huntin'
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 6 Meta

geoguessr

A web game based on identifying locations from their Google street view photos, located at geoguessr.com.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer GARCIAPARRA

geometry

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Beirut

GetFit@MIT

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 The Undiscovered Underground

G.I. Joe

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Knots and Crosswords

Gilbert and Sullivan

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Topsy Turvy

“Gilmore Girls”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Campsite

Girl Talk (musician)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Monster Potatoes

git repository

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Git Hub

"Glee" (TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Hap[p]y Days Are Here Again

Gnommish alphabet (Artemis Fowl)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Open Secrets

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 1C
MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 4B
MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 7B
MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 10C
MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 Gödel meta

Go Fish

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Go Fish!

go (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Invincible
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Ritual Yell Ceremony
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Black to Play

Going Too Far crossword

In this crossword variant, invented by Mike Shenk, some answers are too long for their spaces, but can be made to fit by writing a letter on a black square at the start or end of the word.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 How Far?

Goldberg variations

(musical compositions by Bach)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Quodlibet

"The Gold Bug"

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Open Secrets

golf

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Going Out Clubbing
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 St Andrews Links Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Missing Links

golf courses

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Missing Links

Good Will Hunting

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Good Will, Mystery Hunting

Google Maps user maps

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Condescending Man Holding a Brightly Colored Parasol
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Everybody's Got to Be Somewhere

Google Street View

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Pointillisme
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Zelda Warp Zone

googology

Googology is the study of enormous numbers, ones so big you can't write them out, and especially ones so big you can't even write the number in scientific notation, so towers of exponents or even more esoteric notations are required to write the numbers.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 identify, SORT, index, solve

Goosebumps books

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 EEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Graveyard Meta

goroawase

A form of Japanese wordplay in which numbers are represented by Japanese words which are represented by Japanese words which are homophones for part of all of names of the numbers.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 1! 2! 3! 4! 4649!

governors

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Nomarchs

Graffiti (Palm Pilot writing)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 EEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!

Sue Grafton novels

Most commonly, this means the Kinsey Millhone alphabet mysteries starting with 1982's "A" is for Alibi.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Squad Car
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Finsey Gillhone

grammar

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 No Child Left Behind
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Handbook Fragment
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Escapism
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Part of Speech
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Twosquare

Gray's Anatomy

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Fantastic Voyage

great circles

Great circles are the shortest paths between two points on Earth. Airplane flight paths are approximately great circles because this minimizes the distance flown.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer YOUKILIS

Greek alphabet

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Czar Cycle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Venntersections
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Time Suck

Greek mythology

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Frail Old Man with the Abrasive Personality
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Inspiration Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Time Suck
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Gods Must Be Carzy

group theory

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Representative Characters
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Great Tits!

GROW web games

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Summonings

guns

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Choose Your Weapon

hacking (MIT pranks)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Pennybags Lives!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Propaganda
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Your So-Called Second Life
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Road Trip
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Mythological Connections
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Scenic Route
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 All History is Local

haiku

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Hell Hath No Rhyme Scheme

Hamilton (musical)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Hamiltonian Path

Hanayama disassembly puzzles

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Sculptural Disassembly

hangman

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Don't Let Me Down
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Execution Grounds
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Hang Ten
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Colorful Tower Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Believe

Harry Potter

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Trophy Rater
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 A Mud-Soled Lubber
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Escapism
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Encoded
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Wizardly Tales
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Wizard meta

Harvard

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Home Suite Home
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 6 Puzzle Opening Mechanism
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Doors of Cambridge

Harvard Sentences

(a set of sentences used to measure the quality of an audio signal)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Sound Quality

Harvard spectral classification

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 6 Meta

hash algorithms

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Cryptochains

hashiwokakero

The standard form of this puzzle consists of a set of circled numbers aligned to a grid (which is not otherwise given). To solve it, add some horizontal or vertical "bridges" between the circled numbers such that the number of bridges terminating at each number is the same as that number. At most two bridges may extend in each direction from a number, and bridges never intersect or jump over numbers.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Round 11 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Nik-holey
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Magic Mushrooms
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Hashi It Out
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Toll Bridges
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Attention Span

haunted places

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 CPPC

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft game

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Ysera Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Ysera Dream Fragment

Hebrew gematria

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Encoded

helpmate

A helpmate is a chess problem where both sides cooperate to achieve a checkmate.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Watch Me Blow This!

heraldry

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Charges
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Cruciform Heraldry

Here-There (MIT Media Lab art)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Wanderer

Hermes Conrad (Futurama character) "Sweet X of Y" phrases

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Luna Park

heteromino (logic puzzle)

In this logic puzzle type, a grid is provided with some black squares. You must divide the white squares into groups of three (triominoes) so that two triominoes of the same shape and orientation do not touch orthogoanlly.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Polyglot

heteronyms

Heteronyms are words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations and meanings. They are the opposite of homophones, and are a subset of homographs (which are words with the same spelling and different meanings, but not necessarily different pronunciations).

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Complaint Letter

hexaflexagons

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 A Mind-flexing Exercise

Heyawake

This puzzle consists of a grid with heavy outlines dividing it into a set of rectangular regions of various sizes. Some of the individual cells are to be shaded, such that no two adjacent cells are ever shaded, all the unshaded cells form a single orthogonally connected group, and in regions with a clue number, the number of shaded cells equals that number.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Puzzle Editing
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Nik-holey
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Portals
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Magic Mushrooms

hidden puzzle

A puzzle which is hidden inside another puzzle or in an unexpected place where solvers do not expect to find puzzles.

hidden tracks on albums

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Sound of Silence

hidden words

Generally, this puzzle type works like the hidden word style of cryptic crossword wordplay: Answers appear among consecutive letters of words in a phrase, ignoring word boundaries and punctuation, as WORD appears in new order.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 18
MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 40: Ballroom (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Metapuzzle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Inner Meta-Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Megrez Expedition
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Meta testing!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Keeping Records
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Disorder of Operations
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Beth
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The Hidden City
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Zodiac Quest
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Opus Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Cannery
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Thrilling Thespians
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Above Your Pay Grade
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Puzzle at the End of This Book

hieroglyphics

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 A Scholarly Lesson
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Nomarchs
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Luxor

High Fidelity (book)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Favourites

high school CEEB codes

These codes are used to identify your high school when taking the SAT and in college applications.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Senior Superlatives

highway numbers

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Shark Detaches Anchor; Elvis' Yacht Drifts Into Freak Tropical Iceberg!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Sightseeing
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Road Trip

hill words

Hill words have letters in alphabetical order up to a point, then in reverse alphabetical order for the rest of the word.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Wordplay

hip-hop music

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 No Accounting for Taste

hiragana (Japanese script)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Even the Blossoming Flowers...

Al Hirschfeld (caricatures with "Nina")

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 The Line King

historical events

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Wandering Stars
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 All History is Local

historical markers

These markers can be found in cities all over the world, and mark historic and sometimes not even all that historic places, perhaps providing a very brief explanation of the significance of the place.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Stand
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Tenebrous, Stygian Test of Knowledge

"A History of the World in 100 Objects"

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Worldly Possessions

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Combatant's Guide to Zyzzlvaria

Hitori

The standard form of this puzzle consists of a grid initially filled in with a number in every cell. Some of these cells are to be shaded such that no two adjacent cells are shaded, all the unshaded cells form a single orthogonally connected group, and no two unshaded cells in the same row or column contain the same number.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Puzzle Editing
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Witness 1 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Nik-holey
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Magic Mushrooms

hoaxes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Everything You Read

hobbies

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 The Deadly Hobby of Murder

hockey players

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Formulating Teams

holidays

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 O Blessed Day

"Hollywood Squares"

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Stage Select

Sherlock Holmes stories

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Frritt-Flacc
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Watson 2.0's Review

Homestar Runner

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Property of Ones

home worlds

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 3 Meta

homophones

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 4
MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Elvis Warns that Wind and Cold Erode Our Precious Resources; Calls for Global Warming!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Mad Liberation
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Tune in, Rock Out
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Sphere
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Teller's Window
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Whodunit?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 The Cash Corridor
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 The Measure of All Things
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer AND I LOVE HER
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Great Collapse
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Crimes Against Cruciverbalism

horse racing

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Peach Winslow (Kentucky Derby)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Sport of Princesses (Thoroughbred genealogy)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Ride 'Em In

house of cards

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Witness 2 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Nothing But a House of Cards

House of Representatives

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Elmo's First Wife
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Let's Meet in the Middle

“House” (TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Frritt-Flacc

Huffman coding

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Blowing Down the House
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Evolution

huge numbers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 identify, SORT, index, solve
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Digital Display

Hugo awards

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Second Game

Hunt the Wumpus

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Making the Possible Impossible
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Say Cheese and Dive!

hurricanes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Stratosphere

i before e except after c exceptions

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Complaint Letter

I Can Has Cheezburger

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Little Rascals

I Ching

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Stained Glass
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 At the Beach

ID3 tags

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 All Ages

identify text from stress pattern, prosody, or poetic meter

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Award-Winning Poetry
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Argh

idioms

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Collision in the Marketplace
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Picture Time

Ig Nobel Prizes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 A Research Puzzle

IHTFP

IHTFP is an acronym for I Hate This F**king Place, coined at MIT decades ago, and often referenced by forming original backronyms for the five letters.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Freshman Physics

Ikea

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Math is Hard!

Illuminati

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Round IX Meta

image manipulation

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Read Between the Lines
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Shunned, Cyclopean Postcards
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 A Message from Our Sponsors
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Chromesthesia

impossible puzzles

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Bill & Ted's Bogus Mystery Hunt
MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Runaround from Bogus Hunt
MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Elvis Slips Through Wormhole; is Imprisoned in Alternate Reality!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Endgame

The Improper Bostonian

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Local Coverage

Indian numerals

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Fabrics Booty Meta

The Infinite Corridor

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Supercollider
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 The Cash Corridor
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Field Scribe

Infocom games

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 A Superbrief Note
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Subterranean

infographics

These are pictorial representations of a set of data.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 New Bridge Art

information missing

Parts of these puzzles are missing from the archive. Please contact the current Mystery Hunt team if you have information to add.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 1
MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 2
MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 2: Screening Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 8: Dining Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 10: Study
MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 12: Screening Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 27: Hall
MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 31: Lounge
MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 32: Angularium
MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 2C
MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 3B
MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 4A
MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 5A
MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 6B
MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 9B
MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 New Orleans Vice Cop: "I Ate More Than Elvis in 1986!"
MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Chihuahua
MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 San Francisco
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Logomania
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Dossier 7 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Sunken Treasure
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Top of the Tallest Tower
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Race Around the Block Again
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 To Serve and Protect
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Test Your CHARISMA
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Test Your CONSTITUTION
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Test Your STRENGTH and DEXTERITY
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Test Your WISDOM and INTELLIGENCE

Ingress glyph language

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Some Light Hacking

initials

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Job Performance Predictor
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Initial Reactions
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Confirmed Machine 925
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Initial Public Offering
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Initial Impressions
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Worrying Ziggurats
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 It's A Long Story

In-person interview

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Rats
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Bringing Stars Together

insult swordfighting

(from the Monkey Island games)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Pirate Party Event

integer sequences

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 4C
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Betsy Johnson Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 20 Questions
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Integers and Sequence
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 You Complete Me

interleaved words

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Sledgehammered
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Ready Set Go
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Meshed Together
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Tracking (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Life Braid
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Crossing Your Arms

intermediate tasks

These puzzles do not directly clue their answers. They give you a task to complete, and when that is done, you are given another puzzle which does clue the answer. See also creative tasks and answer given for completing task.

Internet RFCs

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 This SHOULD Be Easy...
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Slash Fiction

internet top-level domains

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Lost Dream
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 International Holdings

intersections

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Crosswalks
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Funny Shapes

Invader (street artist)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Pointillisme

invented languages

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 The Realm of Unspeakable Chaos
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Scientology
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 The Road Signs of Unspeakable Chaos
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Genealogy
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Shoe-Buckling
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Son of the Realm of Unspeakable Chaos
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Sounds Good to Me
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Grandson of the Realm of Unspeakable Chaos
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Lost in Translation

inventions

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 7C

invisible ink

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Get Smart (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Watch Your Back
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Treasure Chest Meta

IPA (international phonetic alphabet)

Phonetic puzzles which are not strictly IPA are listed under phonetic puzzles

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Itinerant People of America
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Welcome to Dead Waters

IP geolocation

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Trips

iPhone apps

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 All-Purpose Device

Iraqi Most Wanted playing cards

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Dogged Pursuit of Justice, AKA: Caught Red-Handed

“Iron Chef: America”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 East Meets West

Irregular Webcomic!

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Stick Man

I Saw You MIT

The web site isawyou.mit.edu, a "missed connections" web site just for the MIT community.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Missed Connections

ISBNs

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Division of Labor
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 What Do You Do With a Genteel Sailor?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Making the Possible Impossible
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Numbers

islands

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 World Tour
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Island Warfare

isobars

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Gone with the Wind

isomorphic graphs

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Course 7E
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Git Hub

"It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)"

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Apocalypse

Java programs

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Blather

JavaScript

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Open and Shut Case

jazz

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Having Fun

"Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats" (song from Cats)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Listicle

Jelly Belly jellybeans

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Santa Had Rough Toboggan Accident; Elvis Delivers Toys in His Stead!

Jenga

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Edge of your Seat FUN!

“Jeopardy!”

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 According to Mafiosi, Mole Only Wanted a Scarf from the King!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 What's Wrong?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Mystery Hunt Puzzle 3000
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Watson 2.0 Meta

jersey numbers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Shooting Stars
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Formulating Teams
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Special OPS

Jewish sabbath laws

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Eight Not-So-Deadly Sins

jigsaw puzzles

(most of these are reconstructions of an image divided into rectangular pieces, rather than traditional jigsaw shapes)

jigsaw quote

The standard form of this puzzle consists of a 16x16 grid divided into 4x4 sections, into which a quote is to be written, with words wrapping around the ends of lines and black squares separating them. The letters to be filled in are provided, but the words and part-words within each 4x4 block are provided in sorted order, and the resulting groups are also provided in sorted order. Usually the different black squares in different sections distinguish most, but not all groups, and likewise the unique lengths of some letter strings within their groups allow some strings to be placed uniquely. Beyond that you have to figure out how to fit things so that they spell words.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 3: Conservatory

John Hodgman's hobo names list

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Itinerant People of America

jokes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Punchline
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Comedy Planet, Featuring Sid!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Funny Story

Jonathan Coulton

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 --MESSAGE REDACTED--

Jotto

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Scientology
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Data Analysis

juggling

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Recombination

Jumble puzzle

This puzzle, which is syndicated in many newspapers, consists of a set of scrambled words and a row of boxes to enter each one in, some of them containing circles. The circled letters can themselves be anagrammed to form a final answer, usually a punny punch line to complete the joke caption for an accompanying cartoon image.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Endgame
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 Lets Get Ready to Jumble

jumping crossword

The jumping crossword is usually not a crossword in the conventional sense at all, since the word list is given. It's more like a criss-cross puzzle but with the extra rule that some squares will be left blank, with words simply reading across whichever letters are used (as opposed to a diagramless crossword where the unused squares mark word break). If there are black squares, they separate entries in the same row or column. In the original logic puzzle type jumping crossword, blank squares are not allowed to touch along an edge.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 A Pile of Letters
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Mind the Gaps

“Kaiju Big Battel”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Fight Club

karaoke

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Dream On

Keccak-256 hashes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer CRONIN

KenKen

The standard form of this Latin square puzzle consists of a grid divided into a number of heavily outlined regions, each of which contains a small clue number and a mathematical operation. The grid is to be filled in with the numbers from 1 to N, not repeating a number within a row or column, such that the result of applying the operation in each region to the numbers filled into that region equals the clue number.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Holding Pattern
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Agricultural Operations
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Fire Swamp

John F. Kennedy

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Croctograms

Kenny's deaths on "South Park"

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Nurse Charnel's Reports from the Sickbay of the U.S.S. Parkerstone

Key and Peele (Comedy Central show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Elf/Dwarf Brawl

keyboard

Killian Court names

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Weird Science

Kingdom of Loathing

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Unsound Effects

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 A Letter to the Prince of Kong

kings and queens

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 The Art of Succeeding
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 The Fallen
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Rulers

Stephen King

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Celebrity Scrabble™

knights (British titles)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 This Puzzle Needs a Title
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's Review

knight's tour

As a purely mathematical puzzle, this is simply a challenge to cover each square of a grid once with a series of knight moves (as in chess). But more commonly this same sort of knight's tour occurs on a grid pre-filled with letters, so that words are spelled out along the path.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 28
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 This Puzzle Needs a Title
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 The Arena

knitting

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Knitting
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Do You Know Where Your Needles Are?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Quick Paws
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Uncharted Territory
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Knit Square
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Worrying Ziggurats
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Arsenic

knitting patterns

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Arsenic

knot theory

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Knots and Crosswords
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Slinking Slumber
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Please Remain Seated

"The Knowledge" (London black cabs)

This is the course of study required to become a driver of a London "black cab", which consists of knowing how to get between any two points within six miles of Charing Cross, and being able to recite the whole route, essentially requiring memorizing the entire map of this region.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Tenebrous, Stygian Test of Knowledge

Konami code

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start, a code for activating Easter eggs in many video games.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Gaming the System

laddergrams

A laddergram is a puzzle where sets of three words are clues. In the standard form, the sets are transdeletions and spaces on the left and right of the grid let you enter the dropped letters to form words reading down.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The Accumulator
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Ladder Dogs

landmarks

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Attic
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 South Carmacks
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Atlas Shrugged
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Around the World in 80 Days
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Slash Fiction
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Panorama
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Only Carmen Sandiego Explores Nigh Unstoppably

languages

(see also invented languages)

Lao numerals

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Pictocryptolists

last words

The last words spoken by people before they died

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Famous Last Letters

"La Terre vue du ciel" (photograph series by Yann Arthus-Bertrand)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Up in the Air

Latin phrases

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Timbales

Latin squares

A Latin square is simply one where the same set of letters, numbers, or other symbols appear in each row and each column. A number of standard puzzle types (see End View, KenKen, skyscrapers, star battle, and sudoku) are based on forming a Latin square under additional constraints, and those puzzles are listed under those categories.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Isn't It Romantic?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Twosquare
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Roller Coaster

Latke vs. Hamentaschen debates

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Provision

"La Vie Boheme"

Song from RENT

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 A Toast

Learned League

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 A League of Their Own

legislative text

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Tax... In... Space

Lego

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Assembly Line
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Growth Involves Reconstructing Legos
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Master Pieces
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Tricks with Bricks

letter adjacency graphs

The letters in some text are nodes in a graph, and each pair of letters which occurs consecutively in that text is connected by an edge (directed or undirected). See also Namystics.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Too Precious For Words
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Bouncy Bouncy
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 At Sea
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Island Warfare
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Computer Games
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Vertexillonomy (colors and land borders, not letters)

“letter and word” phrases

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 22: Lounge
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Drawing Conclusions I (Phonetic)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Orange Star Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Manual Transmission
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Well-Coordinated
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Medical Centaur
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Letter Head
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Calling Bingo
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Treasure Chest Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Mind Your Peas

letter banks

A letter bank is the set of letters that appears in a word, with all duplicates removed, especially when these letters are anagrammed to spell another word. This category includes puzzles where each letter is given or used only the first time it appears in some answer, even though this does not spell a word.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 9
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 The Invisible Man
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Shadow of a Doubt
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Writer's Bloc
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 I Love These 80
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Write-Offs
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Sorry I Love These Big Wrong Musical Numbers
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Puzzle Box
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 R.E.S.P.E.C.T.
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Imba

letter changes

(many variations are included here, but see also misspellings)

lettered dice

In the standard form of this puzzle, you are given a set of 4-letter words (containing, collectively, 24 different letters) which have been rolled using a set of 6-sided dice with different letters on each side. You have to determine which letters appear on each die.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 23

letter links

What is the correct name for this puzzle type? It is the one where a list of related words must be discovered, where a set of boxes is given for each word, and between each pair of consecutive words in the list, all repeated letters are connected by lines.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 2: Screening Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Killing the Audience
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Common Thread
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Matchbox Twenty

letter pairs that look like another letter

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Gravitational Pull

letter shifts

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Eschatology (in modification)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Edge of your Seat FUN!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The Wheels Go Round and Round
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Spotted Tower Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 Unfortunate Al

letters in same positions

letters shared, adjacent words/squares

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Piercing the Veil
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Mirrorball

liar logic puzzles (and self-referential statements, etc.)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 21
MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 38: Butler's Quarters
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Endgame Logic Puzzle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 True and False
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Paranoia
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Sexaholics of Truthteller Planet
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Diplomatic Victory
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Quest for the Truth

library catalog numbers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Time's A-Wastin'
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Bookworm
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Literary Collection (LC classification system)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Numbers

license plates

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 License to Kill
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Master of the World

Life (cellular automaton)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 12C
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Helminthophobia
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Get on with It (also Life cereal, Life magazine, Hasbro's Game of Life)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Creature Discomforts
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Tragedy
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Eternal Struggle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Mind the Gaps

linguistics

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Time Flies

Link-a-Pix

Link-a-Pix is a puzzle type invented by Conceptis. A grid contains scattered numbers in various colors. Like numbers are to be connected using orthogonally connected paths which don't overlap, each as long as the number they connect, and colored the same as the numbers they connect, with the result forming a picture.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Transit Links

Link's Awakening trading sequence

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 A Round at the Golf Course

lipograms

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Where Was I?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Great Gadsby

Li Po poems

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Pavilion (BoPoMofo)

lip reading

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Temple of Macuilxochitl

literary devices

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 In a Manner of Speaking

literature

(All novels, stories, plays, children's books, etc., regardless of their literary value)

LITS puzzle

LITS is a Nikoli logic puzzle type. A grid is initially divided into several heavily outlined regions. Within each grid you must blacken 4 squares forming one of the tetromino shapes L, I, T, or S such that no 2x2 grid section is completely blackened (thus, the O tetromino is not allowed), all the tetrominoes form one orthogonally connected group, and no two tetrominoes of the same type touch along an edge.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Portals
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Changing Rooms

lobby 10 Memorials

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Measure of Devotion

lobby 6 periodic table

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Warrant 4.1

lobby 7 Inscription

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Crosses at the Crossroad
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Measure of Devotion

logical deduction

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 The Prodigious Riddle of Juno
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 QED
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Build Your Own Sudoku
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Mad Cocktail Party
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Polyglot
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Pernicious Revenge of Juno

logical operators

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Ben Bitdiddle's Review
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Thank Heaven for Little Girls
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 False Prophets

logic puzzle based on elimination

This is the logic puzzle with wordy clues and usually the big grid used to keep track of which identifiers (names, pets, colors, whatever) can or cannot belong to each other. The grid may or may not be given.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 21
MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 6: Billiard Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 11B
MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Elvis' Anorexic Lover Saved by the King's Miracle Pills!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Drawing Conclusions II
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 The Case of Southeast Jerome's Trip to the End Zone
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 A Midterm Progress Report to the Enron Board of Directors, July 2000
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 War Game
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Let Me Tell You the Story
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Endgame
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Welcome to Probistis Mu
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Professorial Fellow Playing the Spoons
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Side by Side by Side
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Holding Pattern
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Expeditions
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Two Heads Are Better Than One
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Bowser's Castle (Mario Supermeta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Bringing Stars Together
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Eclectic Spatial Geometry
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Ocean Meta Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Honey, I Shrunk the Hunt!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Advisor's Nightmare

Logo (programming language)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Drafting Table

logos

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 30
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Logomania
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Round IV Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Now That's High Finance
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 And Now, a Word from Our Intergalactic Corporate Overlords
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Correspondence (with symbols in place of letters)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Drafting Table
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Charges
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Boxes(TM)

Lojban

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Lojicomix

lolcats

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Little Rascals
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 I Can Haz Zyzzlburger?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Listicle

longitude and latitude

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Port of Call
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Gems Booty Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Sphere
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Around the World in 80 Days
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Terrier Parking

“Look Around You” (British TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Doctor of Thinkology

Lord of the Rings

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Too Precious For Words
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 D3: The Fellowship of the Duck
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Fellowship Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Stronghold Fire

Lost Cities (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Expeditions

H. P. Lovecraft

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Randolph Carter Meta

LSC movies

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Film Screening

machine code

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Assemble Me

MacOS voices

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Hearing Voices

Mad Libs

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Mad Liberation
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Space Invaders
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Ski Slopes

magazine covers

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 30
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Get on with It
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Round IV Meta

magazine writing styles

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Modern Journalism

magic squares

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Twosquare
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 W♄ite Magic
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND

Magic: the Gathering

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 18: Billiard Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Convocation
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 I'm Your Magic Man
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Sufficiently Advanced Technology
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Piercing the Veil
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Turnary Reasoning
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Magic: The Tappening
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Blocks

magic tricks

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Twosquare

magnet logic puzzles

In the standard form of this puzzle, a grid is broken up into 2-cell regions, some of which are to be filled in with a + in one cell and a - in the other, so that the total number of +s and the total number of -s in each row and column equal the numbers given outside the grid, and two of the same symbol are never in orthogonally adjacent cells.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Monopoles

Mah Jongg

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Merchant's Courtyard
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Despondent Dynast

"Major General's Song"

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 General Knowledge

M&Ms

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Bloodbath at the Rainbow Room

mangled clues

In this puzzle type, a set of clues are given without spaces and with some of the words modified according to a rule you have to figure out. Then solve the clues. Typically, you will have to apply the rules again to the same or other clue answers, perhaps in reverse, to get a different set of answers.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Trubled Monicas
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Stick the Landing

manner of death

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Wry, Ergo Dead
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 For Whom the Bella Toils (drug overdoses)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Life of the Party

The Mapparium

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 A Journey to the Center of the Earth

maps

Marching Bands

In this crossword variant, clues are given for two or more words which are entered directly after one another in each row, without black spaces, and another set of clues are given for words entered similarly in concentric bands indicated by shading and a letter where each band starts. If the size of the grid is odd, the center square is usually black and, in that row only, the black square separates the two words written there.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Ordering a Round
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 At the Beach (variation)

maritime signal flags

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The French Armada (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Cambridge Ante
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Son of the Realm of Unspeakable Chaos
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 English Expectations (meanings when used alone)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Redundant Obsolescence
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Vertexillonomy

Markov models

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Shark Blood
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Crackpot or Snackpot?

Marvin the Martian

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Our Favorite Martian

mascots

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Give Me an M! Give me an A! . . . Give me a Y!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Elf/Dwarf Brawl

mashups

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Monster Potatoes
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Girl Talk
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 An Hunt MIT Mystery Puzzle

Massachusetts Avenue (street near MIT)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 State Dinners

Mastermind

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Change of Clothes
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Pride event
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Bulls and Cows
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Guess What I'm Thinking
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Crafty Criminal

Masyu

In the standard form of this puzzle, a grid is provided with empty or filled circles in some cells. A single closed loop is to be drawn through some cells so that the loop passes through every circle, turning in each filled cell (but not turning just before or after the filled circle), and going straight through empty circles (but turning before and/or after the empty circle).

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Puzzle Editing
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Evil Influence
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Oyster Card
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Polyglot
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Sleeping Beauty Meta

matchmaker puzzle

This puzzle type consists of two columns of things with dots next to each, and stuff in the middle. When you pair up the things correctly and draw lines between the matches, the stuff in the middle crossed by the lines spells out an answer. Many variations are possible depending on the things matched and what is in the middle; it's also possible the uncrossed middle-things are used (especially if letters). Mike Selinker uses this name for this puzzle type in Puzzlecraft.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 1, 2, 3

math

math maze

Math maze is a path puzzle with Battleships-style clues that tell you how many squares in each row and column are part of the path. This makes it a relative of the snake puzzle but in math mazes only the head and tail are given and the path is allowed to visit squares adjacent to other parts of the path. The grid may have holes which divide rows and columns into parts; in this case clues apply to each part separately. Random Walk contains an example puzzle.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Random Walk

Matoran alphabet (Bionicle)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Open Secrets

matrices

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Disarray
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Interstellar Basic Algebra

Walter Matthau roles

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Role-Playing Game

Mayfield Handbook (writing reference)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Handbook Fragment

mazes

McMaster-Carr catalog

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Manual Transmission

MD5 hashes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer CRONIN
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Cryptochains

meat

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Fleshed Out

Mega Man video games

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Dr. Wily's Fortress (Mega Man Supermeta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Circuitboard
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Stage Select
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Blue Bomber

memes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 lol
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Graveyard Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Time Suck
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Most Interesting Puzzle in the World

memory

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 I'm Wet! I'm Hysterical and I'm Wet
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Watch Your Back
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Goldfish Memory
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Perception

mental disorders

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 The Voices in Your Head

mergers and acquisitions

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 And Now, a Word from Our Intergalactic Corporate Overlords

Merriam-Webster dictionaries

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Share and Share Alike
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Notes on a Century of English According to Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Ski Slopes
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Worrying Ziggurats

message encrypted multiple times

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Keeping Records

metapuzzle

The puzzle(s) at the end of almost every round, using the answers and/or other information collected from the puzzles to yield a final round answer.

meta solving

These are not the actual find-an-answer-for-the-round puzzles, but puzzles which give you sets of answers that you have to solve in the manner of metapuzzles.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Meta testing!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Finsey Gillhone

microdots

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Invasion of the Micronauts
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Magic Mushrooms

Middle Earth (Tolkien setting)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Stronghold Fire

middle names

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Three's the Charm
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Puzzling is My Middle Name

midpoints

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 I Know That's a Pisser Baby

Nightmare on Elm Street films

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Randolph Carter Meta

military pay grades

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer EIGHT DAYS A WEEK
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Above Your Pay Grade

military ranks

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Above Your Pay Grade

MIME types

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Slash Fiction

Minecraft game

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Steve's Parable

minerals

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Geological Garden

Minesweeper game

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 11B
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Snowfield
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Feel Your Way
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Captain Red Herring's Buried Pirate Booty (variant)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Bad Eggs
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Treasure Island
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Quantum Minesweeper
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 School of Mines

minimalist art

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Rectangles

minipuzzles

minor planet numbers

Also known as asteroids, the thousands of small bodies in our solar system are cataloged and numbered.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Time Suck

mirror logic puzzles

In the standard form of this puzzle, you have to determine where to place two-sided mirrors at either or two diagonal directions in some cells, so that each pair of identical clues outside the grid is connected by a path of orthogonally connected cells through the grid which bends at (and only at) mirrors, in the directions which do not cross the mirrors. A path may use the same cell twice (either passing straight through an empty cell twice in different directions, or bouncing off both sides of the same mirror)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Hall of Mirrors
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Reflecting Pool
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 The Cult of Helios
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Space Ghosts, Coast to Coast
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Sequencer
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Light World
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Sheila Sunshine Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Mirrorball

misheard lyrics

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Benny Lava

misspellings

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 5C
MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Beirut
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Old Man's Story
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Reminder's World
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Winning is Everything
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Special Delivery
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Doctor of Thinkology
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Keyboard Cat
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Trubled Monicas
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Believe

MIT Board of Chaplains

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Manipulating the Masses

MIT brass rats

This refers to the designs on MIT class rings (which feature their mascot, the beaver).

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Rats

MIT building names

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Snap Judgment
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Across the Hall

MIT building numbers and room numbers

MIT campus phone numbers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Worship of Zacazontli
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Scriptor Ecclesiae
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Call Me

MIT classes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Pleasures of Poetry
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Classroom (Institvte of Diversified Obscurity)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Life in First Class
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Course Load
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Basic Knowledge
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Freshman Physics
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 You Will Not Go to Space Today
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Find Your Way Across
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Let's Get Physical!

MIT course bulletin

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 22: Lounge

MIT courses (departments/majors)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 An MIT Dialog
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 I Need to Connect With You, Baby
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Fantasy Magnoball League
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Song of Birds
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Pernicious Revenge of Juno

MIT door inscriptions

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 Bach Meta

MIT fire extinguisher numbers

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 Gödel meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Mullions (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 What Ben Bitdiddle Dropped (final runaround)

MIThenge

MIThenge is an even that occurs each year when the sun aligns with the Infinite Corridor.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Indiana Jones Meta

MIT history mural in Kendall Station

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Tea Time

MIT homepage "Spotlight" images

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Spotlight Dance

MIT ID cards

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Quest for the Truth

MIT Library Access Music Project

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Tune in, Rock Out

MIT named rooms

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Prints

MIT Nerdopoly (edition of Monopoly game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Day Tripper

MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Out in the Open

MIT people (staff, alumni, etc.)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Song of Birds
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Rats

MIT professors

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Lounge (Geek Love)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Fantasy Magnoball League
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Honey, I Shrunk the Hunt!

MIT public art

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Scenic Route
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 A Beauty Cold and Austere

MIT student groups

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 There Was a Young Man From Cambridge

MIT theatrical productions

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Encore! Encore!

MIT theses

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Sankore

MIT tree numbers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Nature Walk

MIT trivia

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 20000 = L. under the S.
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Keeping Records

MIT Virtual Tours

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Supercollider

mnemonics

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Our Unfortunate Aunt Edith
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Memory Lane

Mobius strip

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Welcome to Probistis Mu
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Strip Mind

Mohs scale of hardness

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Geological Garden
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 The Blue Carr Bungle

money

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 3
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Now That's High Finance
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Let Me Tell You the Story
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 People and Places
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Fill in the Blanks

Monopoly game

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Theme and structure of the entire hunt
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 I Only Get a Measly $200?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Around the World in 80 Days (Here and Now editions)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 How to Succeed in Real Estate Without Really Buying
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 High Rollers

monsters

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Campfire Stories
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Puzzle at the End of This Book

month abbreviations

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Red Star Meta

Monty Python

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 30: Kitchen

Mooninites advertising Aqua Teen Hunger Force

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Suspicious Material
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Endymion Dream Fragment

moon names from Farmers' Almanac

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Tea Party Meta

moons

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 9 Meta

Moon type

A writing system for the blind using embossed, simplified letter shapes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Endymion Meta

Mornington Crescent

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 World Series of Mornington Crescent

Morse code

The Most Interesting Man in the World

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Most Interesting Puzzle in the World

mountains

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Sphere
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Mountain Pass (Rocky Mountains ranges)

movie or TV show remakes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Bad Poetry
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Impostors

movies

MP3 metadata

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Sound of Silence

Mr. Men

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Little People

MS Paint Adventures

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Edits

multiple answers to logic puzzles

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Simple Unassuming Logic Puzzles
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Puzzle Editing
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 A Quick Sudoku

multiple crossword solutions

Crossword-like puzzles where the same clues and grid have multiple solutions, as opposed to Siamese Twins where there are two different clues for each space.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Criss-Cross

multiple meanings of words

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Nesting Instinct
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Eight Digits

Muppets

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Muppet Theater
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 The Rainbow Connection
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Now Let's Create Melodies

the Muses

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Inspiration Meta

mushrooms

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Mario 1 Meta

music adapted from classical music

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Altered from the Original

musical instruments

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer LOVE ME DO
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 It's Play Time

musical modes

The seven modes (Ionian, Dorian, Phyrgian, Lydian, Mixoltdian, Aeolian, and Locrian) correspond to starting scales on each of the seven notes A-G, are related to the familiar concepts of major and minor keys, and have names derived from ancient Greek music (and named for regions and subgroups of the ancient Greeks and their neighbors) which were reused in the development of western musical theory in medieval times.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Modest Minstrels

musicals

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 A Tribute to Seth Bisen-Hersh
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Tea for Two and Two for Tea
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Sorry, Wrong Number
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Dashing Chap with Bouts of Amnesia
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Everybody's Got to Be Somewhere
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Award-Winning Poetry
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Movie-Musicals
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Headstones

music (identification from audio samples)

music (identification from clues or lyrics)

music (other)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 4A
MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Athens
MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Round 4 Meta (album titles)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Morale Booster (song writing and performing)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Crowd's Chant (relative major and minor keys)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Crank It Up To 7
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Puzzle Your Puzzle Could Smell Like
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Rhythms of the Season
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Matchbox Twenty
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 Freak Out

music (sheet music, transcriptions of notes, or solfege)

music videos

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 I Want My Mystery Hunt Puzzle!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 I Love These 80
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Subservient Chicken Loves the '80s
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Amateur Hour
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Sages Style
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Montages

mustaches

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Headshots

My Little Pony

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Sport of Princesses
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Missing the Mark
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Fashionable Friends

Myspace

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Friends You Can Count On

Mystery Hunt

Mystery Science Theatre 3000

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Claustrophobia
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Satellite of Love

“Mythbusters”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Don't Tri This at Home

nail polish colors

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Blood of the Creatures
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 I Came Across a Japanese Rose Garden

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Ecolocation

Namystics

Namystics are a puzzle type similar to letter adjacency graphs in that the letters of a name are connected in order, but any enclosed regions are filled in, hiding some of the lines. This name for the puzzle was used in Games Magazine.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 15: Drawing Room

narrative charts

(as in this xkcd strip)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Plotlines
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Potlines

NASCAR

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Space Race

nationalities

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Can + Tab + Rig + Ian

Navajo code talk

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Talk to Me

NCAA basketball tournament

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Belle of the Ball
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 March Madness
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Mad Dogs

neighborhoods

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Blocks and Blocks

nerdy pastimes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Stuff Nerd People Like

Nethack (rogue-like game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Endgame

neurons

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 A Potential Problem
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 You've Got Some Nerve

The Neverending Story

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Ad Infinitum

"Never Not Funny" (Jimmy Pardo podcast)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Always Amusing

New England Aquarium

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Field Trip

New Jersey Turnpike

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Witness 4 Meta

New Orleans

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Crescent City Blues

newspapers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Elderly Gentleman Who Wants to Reverse the Polarity of the Neutron Flow

New York Times crosswords

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 A Case of the Monday Crosswords

NFPA 704 fire diamonds

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Hot Ice

nicknames

MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 AKA

nicknames for playing cards

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Dogged Pursuit of Justice, AKA: Caught Red-Handed

nim

Nim is a mathematical game. The basic version has several piles of chips, and each player in turn picks any pile and removes one or more chips from that pile (including possibly taking the whole pile). There are many variations of the game and a whole area of mathematics based on finding the best strategies for these games.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 2B
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 On Numbers and Games

ninepin bowling

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Rip Van Winkle Meta

no four in a row (logic puzzle)

In this logic puzzle type, a grid is provided with black or white circles in some squares. You have to fill circles in the empty squares so that nowhere is there a line of four circles of the same color horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Polyglot

Norinori puzzle

Norinori is a Nikoli logic puzzle type. A grid is initially divided by heavy borders into a number of regions. Within each region, blacken two squares so that every black square shares an edge with exactly one other black square (not necessarily in the same region).

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Portals

not alone (logic puzzle)

In the standard form of this puzzle type, you are given a grid in which some squares contain a white circle or a black circle. You are to fill in white or black circles in the empty squares so that nowhere does a white circle have black circles both on its immediate left and right, or both immediately above and below. A single circle "alone" on the edge of the grid is allowed. In addition, each row and each column has exactly half its circles black and half white.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Polyglot

NP-hard problems

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 SAT III

NPR News

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Heard but Not Seen

nudity

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Keeping Abreast of the Issues
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The White House or Bust!

Number Link puzzle

In Number Link, a grid is given with two of each number. You have to connect the matching numbers with paths connecting squares orthogonally, so that no paths overlap. Generally, all the squares must be used.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 A Round at the Golf Course

numbers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Non-Local Anesthetic

numbers associated with or in words

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Blue Star Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Round VI Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 This is a Recording
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Execution Grounds
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Yo Dawg, I Herd You Like Puzzle Hunts
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Not All There
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Zodiac Quest
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Lesser Works

Nurikabe

This is the most common "island" puzzle. In the standard form, a grid is provided with numbers in some cells. Some of the unnmubered squares are to be shaded so that the shaded squares form a single orthogonally connected group, and each orthogonally connected group of unshaded cells contains exactly one number, which is the size of that group.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Puzzle Editing
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Chimera
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Nik-holey
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Blackout
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Portals
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Magic Mushrooms
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Lion and the Unicorn

nursery rhymes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Dirty Kid

nyan cat

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Any Old Puzzle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer CRONIN

obsolete technology

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Redundant Obsolescence (misc)

odd man out

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Unprecedented Discovery
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Parrrrty
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Lost in Translation
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Odd Man Out
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Road Trip
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Snap Story

offline

(Events where team members are brought somewhere to solve puzzles without electronic assistance)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Data Analysis
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Sloth event
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Case Study
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 The Campus Canvas event

"_ of the _" phrases

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Denizen of the Deep

Old Spice

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Puzzle Your Puzzle Could Smell Like

Olympic Games

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 In Soviet Union, Death Defies You
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Cheaters Never Prosper
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Slay All Day

On Beyond Zebra

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Guys'll Eat Ivy, Too
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 On Beyond Zyzzlvaria
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 I’ll Teach You

One Piece (manga)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Speak of the Devil Fruit

one-time pad, Gronsfeld cipher, or Augustus cipher

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 Gödel meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Two Timer
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Keeping Records

one time pad used multiple times

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Two Timer

“One Week” (Barenaked Ladies song)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Seven Days

Operation (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Cleric meta

opponents

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Meta testing!

optimization problems

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 SAT III
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Zodiac Quest

opus numbers

Classical composers often numbered their works in addition to given them names, so a particular work might be that composer's op. 5. These are called opus numbers.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Is that Even Music?

ordered sets

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 I Know That's a Pisser Baby

ordering logic puzzles

(given a list of actions, put them in the only logically consistent order in which they could take place)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 31: Lounge
MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 Gödel meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Gross Solitaire
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Bowser's Castle (Mario Supermeta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Assemble Me
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Locked In
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Advisor's Nightmare

O'Reilly covers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Shapeshifting

origami

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 TA Elvis' End-of-Term Oral is Travesty, According to Students!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Folderol
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Commodore's Final Voyage (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Cross-Pollination

Oscars (Academy Awards)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Purple Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 These Ain't No Underpants Gnomes
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Endgame
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 TUO YRREJ PEEK
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Dressing Down
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer LOVE ME DO

Othello (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Helsinki
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 You Shall Understand What Hath Befallen

"over 9000" meme

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Magnitude

overlapping rings

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Nagano

overlays

oysters

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Another Puzzle with the Answer SULLIVAN

packing polyominoes

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Freetown
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Professorial Fellow Playing the Spoons
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Worthy of Picasso (polycubes)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 N-tris
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Caterpillars
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Blue Bomber

paint by number (coloring book)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 20: Art Gallery
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Picture Puzzle 2
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer CAN'T BUY ME LOVE

paint by numbers (logic puzzle)

In the standard form of this puzzle, a large empty grid is provided, along with a set of clue numbers on each row and each column. Some cells are to be shaded so that each row or column contains groups of shaded cells, separated by one or more blank cells, with the lengths of these groups matching the provided clue numbers, in order. There are common variants where cells may be shaded in different colors or half-shaded with triangles; in these variants, the different colors or triangles in each row are normally given in the clues, and the requirement of a blank cell between groups is waived if they are different types, or any types of triangles.

paintings

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Art Gallery
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Interior Decorating
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Gallery Tour
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Paris Ante

pairing up matching things

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Purple Star Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Odd Man Out
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Stage Lines
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Headshots
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Puzzling is My Middle Name

pairs ( & )

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Drawing
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 pluHarmony
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Woofers and Tweeters
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Pure and Simple

palindromes and palindromic sequences

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 26: Sitting Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Sequined Elvis Cloak Enshrined in Smithsonian!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Boston Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 For Gearheads Only
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Pimp Your Starcrafts
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Ben Bitdiddle Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Wordplay
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Day 4 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Upon Reflection

Palm Pilot application

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Runaround

pangrams

A pangram is text that contains every letter of the alphabet.

paper shredder

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Shredded What?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Obsessive-Compulsive Dickishness

paradoxes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Lojicomix

paragraph puzzles

(as the term is used on Grey Labyrinth - you have to figure out the secret rule that determines what words or sentences are valid)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Space Invaders
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 What Incarnation of Palindrome are You?

Paris

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Pointillisme
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Slash Fiction

party

(Puzzles where you have to get information at the traditional party, usually on Friday evening)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Christchurch
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 The Two Faces of Evil
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 How to be a Millionaire
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 That Mixer
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Parrrrty
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Cocktail Party
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Special Art Exhibition
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Costume Ball
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Lust event
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Dream On
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Alien Mixer event
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Pirate Party Event
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Casino Lobdell

pasta

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Cut and Paste
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Carb Pool

patents

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Blinkenlights

pathfinder crossword

A crossword variant in which words may meander around the grid on orthogonally connected paths. Conventionally, each square is used in exactly two entries. The Pipe Dream crossword is a variation on this where additionally each edge between squares is crossword once, and the words can be colored red and black so each letter is part of one red and one black word.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 The Path of the Argo
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Pipe Dream
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Pipe Dream 2: Rapid Transit

path puzzles

There are many other standard puzzle types which are path puzzles, where the point of the puzzle is to determine a path through a grid from given clues. This puzzle type is used for ones that don't fit into any of the standard types.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 11C
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Numerology
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Build Your Own Sudoku
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Cube
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Ocean Meta Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Roller Coaster
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 A Learning Path

patron saints

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Chapel

Paul and Storm

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Production and Supply

Penrose tiles

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Pen Rose

pentominoes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Dossier 7 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Pentoku

Pentomino Minesweeper (logic puzzle)

This is a variation on the standard Minesweeper puzzle type where the mines are forced to lie in groups of 5 orthogonally connected mines, usually all different and without the groups touching, even diagonally.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Blackout

people executed by hanging

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Don't Let Me Down

Percy Jackson and the Olympians books

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Gods Must Be Carzy

periodic behavior

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Orbits

periodic table parodies

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Chemistry Lab
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Fifth Element (and 35 More)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Doctor of Thinkology

Perl

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 A Nugget of Wisdom
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Knitting
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Who's There
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Blather

permutations

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Decode This
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Keeping Records
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Golden Images
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Permuted
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 A Puzzle Consisting Entirely of Random Anagrams
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 identify, SORT, index, solve

petal puzzle

This crossword variant features a grid which is twisted into a flower shape, with all the words being the same length and entered from the outside inward, but some bending clockwise and some bending counterclockwise. It is equivalent to a crossword puzzle with a single stairstep diagonal which wraps around in both directions.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Crushed Petals

Peter's evil overlord list

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Dr Ox's Experiment

pets

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 I'm Feeling a Little TwitterPetted

PGP encryption

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Show Me the Proof

philosophers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Thinking Caps

phobias

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Phobophobia

Phoenician alphabet

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Palimpsest

phone keypad

The telephone keypad differs from the keypad on a computer keyboard (which itself is derived from calculators and similar devices) in that the telephone has 1, 2, 3 in the top row while the computer has 7, 8, 9 in the top row.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Cutting the Cord

phone phreaking

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Making the Possible Impossible

phonespell (2 = A,B,C)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Worship of Zacazontli
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Rant
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Lost in the Boiler Rooms
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 783658
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Cambridge Tea Party
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Round 4 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Famous Faces
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Redundant Obsolescence
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Phantom of the Operator Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Mad Cocktail Party
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Cutting the Cord

phonetic alphabet

These puzzles use the NATO phonetic alphabet (alpha, bravo, ...) or another similar standard code where a word is used to clearly communicate each letter through an audio channel. For the International Phonetic Alphabet used for phonetic transcription of speech, see IPA (international phonetic alphabet)

phonetic ambiguity

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Asymmetry

phonetic letters and numbers (NV = envy or single letters)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Shop
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Buenos Aires Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Well-Coordinated
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Absolute Power
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Powder Monkey
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Payroll

phonetic puzzles

(phonetic versions of puzzles commonly based on letters rather than sounds)

phony Scrabble words

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Mumbo-Jumbo
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Till You Make It
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Stronghold Fire
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Case of the Dangerous Game

photomosaic

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Grounded for Life

Photoshop

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Picture Store

phrase structure grammar

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Time Flies

phrases with a set of words

physical education (P.E.)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Let's Get Physical!

physics

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Rhabdomancy Honkies
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Surely You're Hexing
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Text Adventure
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Practice in Theory
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Student Simulator

picking locks

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Queen of Hearts
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Locks

Pic-Tac-Toe

Pic-Tac-Toe is a puzzle type from the early days of Games Magazine in which a 3x3 grid of pictures is provided and you have to determine the common theme in each line of three pictures.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Round 2 Meta

Pictionary

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Telephone Pictionary
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 The Campus Canvas event
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Teamwork

Piet programming language

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Sleeping Gypsy Meta

pigeonhole principle

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Winning Conditions

Pig Latin

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 The Duck Konundrum
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 WAT?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Eh?

pigpen cipher

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Dirty Laundry
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Safari Park
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Open Secrets
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Guess What I'm Thinking

pinball

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Instant Replay

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Uncharted Territory

pi (number)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Cambridge Tea Party
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Halting Problem

Pixar films

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Precipice

places with the same name

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 So Good They Named it Hull
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 A Walk Around Town

planets

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 1 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Wandering Stars

plants

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Condescending Man Holding a Brightly Colored Parasol

Playboy playmates

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Keeping Abreast of the Issues

Playfair square cipher

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Languedoc Culture Attributes Modern Civilization to Elvis!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Behave

playing cards

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Santiago
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Uncharted Territory
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 MIT Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Dogged Pursuit of Justice, AKA: Caught Red-Handed
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Quest for the Truth

playing cards code (assigning letters to specific cards)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Prestidigitation
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Cards
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Dogs Playing Poker
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Gross Solitaire

PLU codes

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Warrant 4.3 (Vegetable Surprise)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Apples in Stereo

poetry

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Stay Out of the Trench

Pokémon

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Lions and Tigers and Bears!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Old Man's Story
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Magnetic Poetry
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Piercing the Veil
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Underbrush
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Choose Your Language
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Puzzle at the End of This Book

poker

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Secular Fun with Pentagrams
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Dogs Playing Poker
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Bad Beat Jackpot
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Card Tricks

polarization of light

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer WILLIAMS

Polcari's Italian Restaurant in Tech Square

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Temple of Macuilxochitl

The Police (band)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Hum a Few (More) Bars

polyominoes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Lion and the Unicorn

Poor Richard's Almanack

An almanac published by Benjamin Franklin 1732-1758

MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 Unfortunate Al

popes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Round 1 Meta Hint
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Scriptor Ecclesiae

popup ads

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 CLICK TO WIN!!!

Popy Chogokin robot toys

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Unutterable, Antediluvian Robots in Disguise

porn

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Keeping Abreast of the Issues

Portal (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Endgame
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Puzzle Box

portmanteaus

A portmanteau is the combining of two words or phrases by taking part of each to make a new word or phrase. Commonly, the beginning of one word is welded onto the end of another word in a portmanteau.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Reading Comprehension

port scanning

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Call and Response

postage stamps

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Lost in Translation

postal barcodes

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 9C

Postscript

The printer language which is a full-fledged programming language, and sometimes abused because of it.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Block Party
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Grape Clusterbomb
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Tax Puzzle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Choice Hotels (Cyan Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 A Problem with Printing
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Glazing Over

Power Grid (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 National Power Grid

prefixes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Gods Must Be Carzy

presidential also-rans

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Losers

presidents

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Unprecedented Discovery
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 In the House
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Witness 5 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Confirmed Machine 925

prime numbers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Halting Problem
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Pipe
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 ASCII Characters
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Jackson Pollock

Prince (musician)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Heirplay

The Princess Bride

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Giant Game
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Fire Swamp

printers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Mythological Connections
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Finsey Gillhone

printer's devilry

(This is sort of the opposite of the hidden word type of Cryptic Crossword clue. Sentences that make a sort of half-sense are given; they make better sense when a word is inserted somewhere within the sentence, possibly changing word breaks and punctuation.)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Eoanthropus dawsoni
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Dossier 4 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 pluHarmony
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Loss by Compression
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Wait, What Did You Say?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Travelogue

probability

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 LSEA
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Bad Beat Jackpot

produce PLU codes

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Warrant 4.3 (Vegetable Surprise)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Apples in Stereo

programming languages

(see also esoteric programming languages and perl)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Badness 10000 (various)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Tragedy (C)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Shapeshifting (python)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Efficiency (scheme)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Halting Problem
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Callooh Callay, World!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Open and Shut Case

proofreading marks

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Editor

proverbial sayings

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Pernicious Revenge of Juno

provinces, states, divisions of countries

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Changing States
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Funny Shapes
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Foetid, Charnel Pie Charts

Pset (MIT homework set)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Student Simulator

punch cards

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Gibbous, Non-Euclidean Program

puns

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 9: Laboratory
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Timbales (Latin malapropisms)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Charm School ("but I hardly know her" jokes)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 You've Got Some Nerve
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Feeling Bluefin
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Be a Star!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Choose Your Language
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Losers
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Typecasting
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Capital Punishment

Puns and Anagrams crossword

This crossword variant usually uses a standard American-style grid, but the clues are neither standard American-style nor British-style. Instead, each clue either clues the answer in a punny way, or contains an anagram of the answer within the clue (not segregated from the clue with an anagram indicator as in anagram cryptic crossword clues).

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Safari Park

puzzle relay

In a puzzle relay, a series of solvers each get a puzzle, but each puzzle except the first is not solvable without the previous puzzle's answer. Typically solvers can only communicate by passing answers to the next solver in line.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND

QI (British game show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 The Sarge Answers to General Ignorance event

QR code

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Queasy Reaction
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 N-tris
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Snap Judgment
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 ...fixes the wavy zigzag jumble
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Black and White
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Honey, I Shrunk the Hunt!

“Quantum Leap” (TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Machine Room

quantum superposition

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Quantum Minesweeper

quarks

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Invasion of the Micronauts

Questions (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Charlotte Amalie

questions with two answers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Who?

quilting

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Metrology
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Uncharted Territory

quipu

Quipu was a native South American record keeping system in which numbers are recorded in a base-ten system using groups of knots in a string as the digits.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Ropes

Quora (web site)

Web site located at quora.com

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer NORWEGIAN WOOD

quotations

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Endymion Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Cabin Fever
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 More Merry Wives: Beyond Windsor

quote square

In the standard form of this puzzle type, you get a grid with three letters in each square, with clues for words to be eliminated, one letter per box, in a row or column for you to determine, with the remaining letters (one per box) spelling a message.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 3
MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 35: Library
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Another Dimension (Round 4 Meta)

racing

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Mario Kart Event

radio broadcasts (localized)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Radio Waves

Radiohead songs

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Body of Work

radio shows

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Puzzle-Regarding Vehicle

radio stations

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Elvis Travels to Peace Talks as Delegate of Switzerland!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Dictionary

rail fence cipher

The rail fence cipher, also called zigzag cipher, is a particular transposition cipher where a message is encoded by writing it in a zigzag pattern across the page, then reading the letters row by row.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Security Theater

Railroad Crossing puzzle

The standard form of this puzzle consists of a grid with the numbers 1 to N in some squares and crosses in some other squares. You must draw a path through all squares in the grid, going through the numbered stations in order and going straight at each station, and only crossing itself at the marked crosses.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Sampler

railroad interlocking (switches and signals)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Our Fates are Interlocked

Rainbow Serpent

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Aborigine Dream Fragment

Ramsey numbers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Halting Problem

John Ratzenberger characters

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Precipice

“The Raven” (Poe poem)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Weird Poem

Razzie awards

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Warning: This Puzzle Contains Bad Language

"Real Housewives" (TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 More Merry Wives: Beyond Windsor

Real Men of Genius (Bud Light ad campaign)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Genius Test

rebus

The most common kind of rebus is the one from the Concentration game show: A word or phrase is clued, partially or completely phonetically, via a series of smaller words, with plus and minus signs indicating how to combine the parts; they are combined in order, so the material to be removed by a minus part must exist in the result of the operation immediately before the minus sign. Any manipulation of words involving both adding and subtracting parts is classified here; for ones where parts are only added, see charades.

rebus crossword

A crossword puzzle in which more than one letter is to be written into some spaces, the rebus squares. Usually all the rebus squares are the same sequence of letters, or they are related somehow. Usually there are only a few of these (less than 5%), though they are not necessarily limited to long theme entries; if many squares contain multiple letters and there's no theme to those squares, it is a 1, 2, 3 crossword. The letters in rebus squares are usually meant to be read the same way across and down. This gimmick is usually not clued; solvers have to figure it out while solving.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 17: Sitting Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Warrant 4.1
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Dealing With Change
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Girls, Girls, Girls
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Fusion
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Creature Discomforts
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Labyrinth
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Cross-Pollination

reduplications (like yo, yo-yo)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 At the Canyon

Reese's Pieces

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Bloodbath at the Rainbow Room

regular expressions

Regular expressions are a technique for specifying a collection of strings using a syntax in which special characters allow matching any of certain characters or groups of characters. They were popularized by several Unix programs which allow you to find, select, and/or replace text using regular expressions.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 A Regular Crossword

remote solvers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Nationwide Hunt
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Coming to a Location Near You

Renfield (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 It's a Bug-Eat-Bug World

repeated letters

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Warrant 1.2
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Wall Street Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Clockwork Oran.ge
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Pod of Dolphins Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 It's A Long Story

repeated words

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Speak of the Devil Fruit

resistor color code

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Resistance is Fuchsia
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Paint Store
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Da Vinci's Workshop Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 March Madness
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Megamix
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 I Came Across a Japanese Rose Garden

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 IHOPE

restaurant menus

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 The Price is Right
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Food for Thought

restaurants

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 I Left My Stomach in Salt Lake City
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Munchies

restricted solving

Any activity where teams are asked to solve a particular puzzle without use of some or all types of external references. This is done to make some puzzles possible which would otherwise be too easy.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Eggsam

restrooms

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 When Johnny Comes Marching Home

reuse@mit

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Prague
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Reduce, Recycle

reversals

words or phrases that are reversed by letter, sound, or word

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 12: Screening Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Stuttgart
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Stage Lines
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Get Your Dog Back...
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Crimes Against Cruciverbalism

reverse word search

(The puzzle where you are given the words and have to figure out how to fit them into the mostly blank grid in straight lines, and variations.)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Adapted for Television
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 New Zoo Revue
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Negative Ad Campaign
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Mos Eisley Spaceport
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Disappearing Act

reviews of products

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 One Starry Night

revolutions

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Lost in Translation

RGB color values

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Stained Glass
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Marooned Man's Pants
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Kuala Lumpur Ante
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Dossier 1 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 --MESSAGE REDACTED--
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Mario Clash
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Light World
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Safety First
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Luminance Shift
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Chromesthesia

rhyme schemes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Reflections on a Milky Steed Who's Quite Amphibious, Indeed

rhyming words

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 19: Laboratory
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Dialects
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Giant Game
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Chatterbox
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Betsy Johnson Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Bad Poetry
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Chemistry Lab Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 A Poem by Shell Silverstein
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Cabin Fever

ribbons (substitute military medals)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Stripes

Rickroll

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Elderly Gentleman Who Wants to Reverse the Polarity of the Neutron Flow

Ricochet Robots

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Bogots

riddles

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Jack and Jill or Janet

riddle trails

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 The Domino Theory
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Crow Facts

rigged dice

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Game

Right Angles puzzle

A crossword variant where words may read in any of the four orthogonal directions, and each answer takes a 90-degree turn somewhere in the answer (for you to determine).

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 That's Right
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Sharp Turns
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Blazing Trails

Risk (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Conquering the World
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Golden Tower Meta

River Crossing logic puzzles

This is for variations on the classic puzzle where a farmer is trying to cross a river with a wolf, a goat, and a basket of cabbages. He can't leave the wolf unattended with the goat, since it will eat the goat, nor can he leave the goat unattended with the cabbages, but his boat can only carry one of the three things besides himself. Even classically there are many variations on this.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Our Crew is Replaceable. Your Package Isn't.

Roadkill Buffet

Improv show formerly held at MIT on Saturday night during Mystery Hunt.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Monterey

road rallye

A road rallye is a puzzle that takes place either on real roads or virtually, via a map, with a complicated series of instructions that may involve standing conditionals (from now on, if this ever happens, do that), different levels of instructions with a designated order of precedence for deciding what to do when different instructions conflict, and other trickery.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Mystery Rallye

robots

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Please Prove Your Humanity
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Stage Select

Rock Band (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Hiigara Dome
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Amateur Hour

rock climbing

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Rocky Horror

rocketry

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 You Will Not Go to Space Today

rock, paper, anything

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 One, Two, Three, Shoot!

rock, paper, scissors

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Genetic Struggle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 From the Earth to the Moon
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Zombies vs. Zombies Event

rock, paper, scissors, lizard, spock

Expansion of rock, paper, scissors made popular on Big Bang Theory

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The Acerbic Sixteen

Ginger Rogers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Now is the Time on Kronos When We Dance

Roguelike games

Rogue was the original in a line of games which famously includes Moria, Nethack, Angband, and ADOM, among others. What these games have in common is an ASCII-art interface where each character represents a type of monster, object, wall, etc., and turn-based movement in 4 or 8 principal directions.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Walk Across Some Dungeons
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Lost in Translation

role-playing games

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Character Test

roller coasters

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Please Remain Seated

Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Track 12

romance novels

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Literature's Other Half

Roman mythology

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Wandering Stars

Roman numerals

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Caesar's Palace (Green Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Measure of Devotion
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 When (Not) in Rome
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Our Unfortunate Aunt Edith
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Pirates of the Tyrrhenian
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Watson 2.0 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Pictocryptolists

ROT-13

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Spoiler Warning!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Keeping Records

rotated letters

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Directions in Writing

Rows Garden

This crossword variant contains a grid of triangular cells. The standard grid size has a broken row of 9 spaces at the top and bottom, and every other row contains 21 spaces. The triangles are shaded in groups of 6 into hexagons (roses or blooms) of three different colors, no two same-colored hexagons touching. Clues are given for one word in each short row and usually exactly two words across each long row, and for the 6-letter words in each bloom. You must determine both the starting point and direction for the blooms, as well as which word goes into each bloom. The bloom clues are sorted by bloom color, and usually alphabetically by answer within each color.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 A Mind-flexing Exercise
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Safecracking
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 I Never Promised You a Rows Garden

RSA cipher

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Noise in the Air
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Ask Ye Silly Question...

RSA Factoring Challenge

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Halting Problem

rubbings

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Phnom Penh
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Rubber Baron
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Graffiti

Rube Goldberg machines

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Cat's Combobulation

Rubik's Cube

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Cubology
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Directions
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Losing My Nerve
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Cryptocube (Ernő Rubik meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Covert Tops
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Cube

rum

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Rums Booty Meta

Rummikub

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Answer Fits the Puzzle

runarounds (and photo identification of MIT)

runes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Palimpsest
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Sleeping Beauty Dream Fragment

Rupaul's Drag Race

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Subservient Chicken vs. Tim the Beaver

sabermetrics

Sabermetrics is the application of statistical analysis to baseball records in an attempt to better understand how to play and manage the game.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Special OPS

SafeRide (MIT shuttle system)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Guest List

saints

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Chapel
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 O Blessed Day

Salt Lake City, UT

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 I Left My Stomach in Salt Lake City

same title, different work

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Making Tracks
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Something in Common

"Saturday Night Live"

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Some Nutty Lines

Scattergories

In Scattergories, you are asked to think of items that belong to various categories beginning with specific letters of the alphabet.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 The Big Bopper, Jim Croce, and Elvis Found Running a Pizza Hut in Beirut!

scavenger hunt

scholar's mate (chess game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Day 5 Meta

Schubert's music

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Yoda Sings Schubert!

science fiction

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Second Game
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Just a Jump to the Left
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 3 Meta

scientific constants

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Dating

scientific formulas

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Fun with Formulae

scientific laws

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Unnatural Law

scientific names for organisms

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 King Philip
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Witness 6 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Mary Ka-Ching's
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Mario 1 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Bio Man Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer CLEMENS
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 General Aviation

"Scooby Doo, Where are You!"

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Zoinks!

Scotland Yard (board game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Mr. Y Hunt

Scrabble

sculpture

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Interior Decorating

scytale

The scytale is a cipher where a narrow ribbon is wrapped around some cylindrical object and a message is written across the windings of the ribbon rather than along it. The right size cylinder (or a lot of patience) is required to decipher it.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 9B
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 First Round Puzzle

seas

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Vertexillonomy

Second Life

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Your So-Called Second Life

Secret Service codenames

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Robots in Disguise

security questions

These are the questions you can use to reset your password on many web sites, truthful answers to which are sometimes seen as a huge security flaw allowing people to specifically target you.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Show Me the Proof

Seeking Syren (logic puzzle)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Seeking ~~Syren~~ Scotchy

selfies

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Friendship
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Peter is the bomb!

self-modifying programs

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer RICE

semaphore

Senate

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Round VIII Meta (seating chart)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Higher They Climb, the Farther They Fall (seniority)

Senior House entry names

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Reminder's World

sentence diagrams

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Part of Speech
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Schoolhouse Rock

sephiroth (tree of life)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Biological Garden
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Safer Sephiroth

Set (card game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 No Child Left Behind
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Trouble in Triplicate
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Alien Mixer event
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 A Set of Words
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Shipwreck

sets

Settlers of Catan (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Highlights
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Ye Olde Seventhe Duck Konunnndrum: The Cones of Duckshire
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Hexed Adventure

Dr. Seuss

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Guys'll Eat Ivy, Too (On Beyond Zebra)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 On Beyond Zyzzlvaria
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 I’ll Teach You
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Chemistry Lab Meta

seven-segment displays

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Less Engineering, Dammit!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Seven Days
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Writing on the Wall
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Substitutes

sex-related terms

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Toasting the Bagel

sex toys

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Good Vibrations

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

A song by The Beatles, and the album containing it, which features a collage of various notable people on its cover.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Rip Wan Winkle Dream Fragment

SHA-1 hashes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer CRONIN
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The 10,000 Puzzle Pyramid
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Cryptochains

Shakespeare

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 15: Drawing Room
MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 The Play's the Thing
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Necromancy
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Don't Make Me Say This Twice
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Old Man's Story
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Succeeding Men in Youth Do Count Things Rare (sonnets)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Writing Nerds
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Stagecraft Man Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Dear Abby
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Thrilling Thespians

George Bernard Shaw

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Squiggles

Sheep and Wolves

Sheep and Wolves is a variant on Fences (Slither Link) invented by Dave Tuller. In addition to the usual numerical clues, you can get clues which are sheep (which must lie inside the fence) or wolves (which must lie outside).

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 To Serve and Protect

sheep breeds

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Construction

shifting letters

(like Caesar ciphers or Vigenere, but with separate shifts provided for every letter)

shikaku

In the standard form of this puzzle, you must divide the given grid along the grid lines into rectangles so that each rectangle contains exactly one of the given numbers, which is the area of its rectangle.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Technological Crisis at Shikakuro Farms (variant)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Marking Territory
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Quilt by Association

ship names

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Another Puzzle with the Answer SULLIVAN
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Smiling Vessel

shoes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 The Last of Sheila

shortened forms of words

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Hold Your Tongue

shortlex order

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Any Old Puzzle

Will Shortz

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 May the Shortz Be With You

Siamese Twins puzzle

The standard form of this puzzle is a crossword with two identical grids and two clues at each number. You have to figure out which clue goes with which grid, i.e., which clues lead to words that interlock in the same crossword. This can be extended to crossword variants and more than two grids.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 With Robin Gone, Elvis Doubles as Batman's Partner! (variant; only Across clues given for one puzzle, only Down clues for the other)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Joined at the Hip
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Two Out of Three Ain't Bad
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Sharp Turns
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Dual Singularities
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Two Heads Are Better Than One (logic puzzle instead of crossword)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Strip Mind
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Transit Links (Siamese Link-a-Pix)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Linked Pairs
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Sledgehammered
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Siamese Quintuplets
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Triptychs
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Stackuro

signal loop (logic puzzle)

In this logic puzzle type, a grid is provided with black or white circles in some cells. You must draw a loop through all the cells except the ones with black circles. The loop cannot turn on squares with white circles. In the variant Antisignal Loop, the loop avoids squares with white circles and turns in squares with black circles.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Polyglot

Sign Language

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Quagmire
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Louder than Words
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Manual Transmission

silent letters

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 28: Hall of Ancestors
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Round 1 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Complaint Letter
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Whistle Training (Meta)

similes

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Elvis' Siamese Cat Discovers Ionized Presleyium on the Moon!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Collision in the Marketplace

Simmons Hall (MIT Building)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Fun Sized

“The Simpsons”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 A Disturbing Universe
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Croctograms
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Season Changes; No One Ages
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer SULLIVAN
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Repeated Punishment

simulated computer

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Replication

"Single Ladies" (Beyonce song)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 How Far?

SI prefixes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Katamari Small Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Katamari Medium Meta

sister cities

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Meta testing!

sitcoms

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Shunned, Cyclopean Postcards

size of objects

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Charitable Collection
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Katamari Supermeta

SKI combinator calculus

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 SKI Trees

ski trails

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 SKI Trees

skyscrapers puzzle

In the standard form of this Latin square puzzle, you must fill in the numbers 1 to N in the cells of the NxN grid so that no number is repeated in a row or column. Additionally, if the numbers are taken as the heights of buildings, the numbers outside the grid tell how many buildings can be seen in that row or column from that side of the grid, where taller buildings hide shorter buildings that are behind them.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Simple Unassuming Logic Puzzles
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Clash of the Titans
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Growth Involves Reconstructing Legos
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Magic Mushrooms

slang

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Toasting the Bagel

slide puzzle

One of the standard puzzle types with this name is one like the 15 puzzle, where a set of square blocks are able to slide around in a frame which has a hole exactly as large as one of the pieces, and the object is to get the pieces into some sort of order. There are also similar puzzles (sometimes called sliding block puzzles) in which the hole may be two or more cells in size, and the blocks may be more than one cell also; in this type, often the object is to get one particular block to a particular location.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 6C
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Rotating Slider

slogans

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Negative Ad Campaign
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Initial Public Offering
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 One Starry Night
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Corporate Chains

Small World (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Highlights

Smithy code

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Round V Meta

smooth numbers

N-smooth numbers are those with no prime factors greater than N

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 p1ctures

Smoots

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 From A to B
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Ecolocation

S-M-R-T smart meme

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 So Smart

snack foods

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Dessert Party

snake puzzle

The standard form of the snake puzzle contains a single snake whose segments are numbered 1 to N, of which certain segments are filled in initially, including the head and tail. The snake cannot touch itself, even diagonally (only squares with consecutive numbers may be orthogonally adjacent, and only ones with numbers that differ by 2 may be diagonally adjacent). Clues indicating the number of snake segments in certain rows and columns are are given. Black squares indicating spaces the snake cannot pass through may be given.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Sampler (variant)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Let's Put on a Hit (spotted snake variant)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Portals
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Snake (variation)

Snake (video game)

Snake is a classic video game where you direct the head of a snake to eat food in marked locations within a grid. Each time the snake eats, it gets longer. When the snake runs into another part of its body, the game ends.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Slinking Slumber

Snapchat

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Snap Story

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Downsized Plutonians

soap operas

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Warrant 3.2

soccer

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Three-Mile Debut
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Substitutes

Sokoban game

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 A Push in the Right Direction

Solitaire (encryption algorithm from Cryptonomicon)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Patience for the Bridge Builder

solitaire hangman puzzle

This is a hangman game designed for you to play without direct interaction by the word-chooser. The number of letters is given, and a pair of lookup tables provide a way for you to check whether and where in a word a particular letter appears, without spoiling yourself by seeing the results of nearby letters.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Hang 'Em High

solution missing

The solutions for these puzzles are missing. Please contact the current Mystery Hunt team if you have the solution.

Some Assembly Required

In the standard form of this crossword variant, clues are given for two or more words that read across each row, without any black spaces between them, and for a set of snaky jigsaw pieces, where the clue for each piece is given but you must determine how to arrange the pieces to fill the grid.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Picture Puzzle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Picture Puzzle 2
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Build Your Own Acrostic (double-crostic variant)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Password Reminder (Meta) (variation)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Changing Rooms

something different crossword

A something different crossword looks like a standard American crossword puzzle but the grid is usually wide-open with few black squares, and the entries are usually contrived phrases (with equally contrived cluing).

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Erraticism

Stephen Sondheim

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 A Tribute to Seth Bisen-Hersh
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Side by Side by Side

songs with lists

The order of the items in the list may be important as an indexing or ordering mechanism in puzzles that use songs with lists.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Cross Breeding
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Seven Days
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Unscrambled Cable Porn
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Space Monkey Mafia

Aaron Sorkin shows

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 A Few Good Actors

sound changes (phonetic letter changes)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Making a List, Checking it Twice
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Least You Could Do Is Phone Me

Soundex

Soundex is an algorithm for very loosely classifying words phonetically based on their initial letter and consonant pattern.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Sound X

“South Park”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Nurse Charnel's Reports from the Sickbay of the U.S.S. Parkerstone

space groups (crystallography)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Ahuitzotl's Art Gallery

space shuttle

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Houston, We Have Liftoff

Spam Haiku Archive

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Cans and Donations Gratefully Accepted

spatial perception

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Let's Ask the Dead Guy
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 In Other Words

spectrograms

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 White Noise

speeches

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Part of Speech

spelling bee

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Believe

spelling bee winning words

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 English Class

spelling out letters

Spelling out names of letters, like ay, bee, see.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 President Clinton: "I'd Like to Meet God, or, If I Could, Elvis!"

spelling songs

These are songs that spell out a word or phrase in the lyrics, like BINGO in the song about the dog.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Orbits

spices

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 11 Secret Herbs and Spices

spiral puzzle

In the standard form of this crossword variant, a set of clues is given for words to be entered from 1 to 100 along the spiral, without skipping any spaces, and for another set of words to be entered from 100 to 1. Thus, the second set of answers is collectively a reversal of the first set of answers.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 The Spiral
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Spin Control
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 This is a Recording

Split Decisions puzzle

This is the standard puzzle type where you have to fill in a criss-cross style grid with words you have to figure out on your own, based on bigram changes where both versions of the changed letters are given beside each other in the grid.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Data Analysis
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Split Second Decisions

spoilers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Spoiler Warning!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Spoilers of War
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Escape from the Classroom

Spongmonkeys

A really annoying viral video of two "monkeys" singing.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Time Suck

sponsor names in 10-250

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Christchurch

Spontaneanation with Paul F. Tompkins (podcast)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Spontaneous Reactions

spoonerisms

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 6
MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Sao Paulo
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Passive Muzzle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Gag Me
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Spittle Loon
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 A Turn of Phrase

Sporcle (trivia web site)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Mentally Stimulating Diversion

sports

(see also specific sports: baseball, basketball, bowling, boxing, cricket, football, golf, soccer)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Twenties
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Shooting Stars (jersey/car numbers)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 The Sports Report (sports movies)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Rewriting the Record Books (memorable plays)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Energetic Man Sporting a Very Long Scarf (retired jersey numbers)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Rivalries (major league team names)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Cheaters Never Prosper (infractions)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 March Madness
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Local Shorts

square dancing

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Barn
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Do Sa Do
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Square Routes
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Lead Right

squares (named road intersections)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Square Routes

stalking

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Stalk Us Maybe

stamps (postage)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Lost in Translation

Star Battle (logic puzzle)

The standard form of this puzzle works as follows: A square lattice is divided into irregular polyomino regions. Enter some stars so that each row, each column, and each region contains exactly two stars, and no two stars are adjacent, even diagonally.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Equal Billing (variant combined with sudoku)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Reaching for the Stars
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Changing Rooms

StarCraft

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Course 7E
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Imba

stars

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 A Bunch of Dots
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 In Other Words
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 6 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Mario 3 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Star Tours

“Star Trek” (all series)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Have You Been Here Before?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Alien Species
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Son of the Realm of Unspeakable Chaos
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 5 Meta

Star Wars

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 I Stumbled Across a Recording
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 May the Shortz Be With You

Stata Center lockers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Trance State

state abbreviations

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 10
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Recounting Former Glories
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Round 1 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Funny Shapes
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The 10,000 Puzzle Pyramid
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Economist meta

state birds

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Calling You from My Cell

state machines

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Nuptial Date Announced
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Blinkenlights

state nicknames

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Word

state quarters

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Financial Report
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Economist meta

Statue Park puzzle

Statue Park puzzles are an original invention of Palmer Mebane. A set of polyominoes are to be placed into a grid. They can touch at a corner but not along an edge. The unused space must form a single edge-connected unit. Black circles must be covered by polyominoes; white circles must not.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Portals
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Polyglot

steganography

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Reminder's World
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Long Division
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Words Get in the Way
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Crypt
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Read Between the Lines

stereograms

Stereograms are pairs of images intended to be viewed one with the left eye and one with the right eye while focusing so that the two images appear to lie in the same space. Small differences in the images create the illusion that some parts are above or below other parts. In the 1990s there was a popular series of what are called autostereograms - single images with repeating patterns that create the same sort of illusion; this is what usually appears in puzzles.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Warrant 1.3
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Have a Migraine
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Special Ops
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Mario Clash

stock symbols

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Agoraphobia
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Islamic Pilgrimage Omura
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Round VII Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Pirates of the Tyrrhenian

“The Straight Dope”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Gearbox

Strava (cycling and running app)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Swedish Strivers

streetcars

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 A Streetcar Named...

streets

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 On the Road

stress patterns

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 A Short Transmission

Strongbad e-mails

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Property of Ones

Student Center elevator directories

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Success Stories

subway (the T or other cities' systems)

sudoku (number place)

In the standard form of this puzzle type, a 9x9 grid is divided into 3x3 sections with heavy bars. The grid is to be filled with the digits 1 to 9 (some initially provided) so that no number is repeated in a row, column, or outlined region. There are popularly many variants on this puzzle type, including ones where the diagonals have to contain 1 to 9, ones where the regions are not square, ones where there are restrictions on which numbers can be adjacent, and many others.

sun and moon (logic puzzle)

In this logic puzzle type, a grid is provided with white or black circles in some squares. You must draw a loop through all the cells so that when the loop goes through two cells of the same color in a row, it doesn't turn between them, and when it goes through two different colored circles, it turns exactly once between them, The loop may turn on a circle.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Polyglot

superposition

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Student Simulator

Supreme Court cases

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Washington Meta

SureType keyboard

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Blackberry Man Meta

“Survivor” (reality TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Subtraction

Sweethearts conversation hearts

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 It Takes Two

Taylor Swift

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Black and White
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Swifties

swimming

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 I'm Wet! I'm Hysterical and I'm Wet
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Sunken Treasure

swing dancing

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Ballroom

Switzerland

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Cruciform Heraldry

Swype keyboard

Swype is a keyboard program for smartphones and tablets which lets you enter whole words by swiping your finger through all the letters on screen, using a word list and other techniques to guess which word was meant.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Sneaky Fox

SyFy original movies

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Most Dangerous Night

syllables

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 8
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Cthulhu

syllogisms

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 25th Annual Putnam County Debate Tournament

symmetry

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Curious INCIDENCE

synonyms

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 19: Laboratory
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Nesting Instinct
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Minus Man Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Letter Bank
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Betsy Johnson Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Caucus Race Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Great Collapse
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Curious INCIDENCE
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Corporate Chains

taiko

A Japanese drumming art form

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Check Out This Sticked Asiatic Music

Tamil numerals

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Pictocryptolists

tangible objects given to teams

In most cases, these tangible objects will not be available to those solving old Hunts from the archives, though sometimes electronic reproductions of them are possible.

tangrams

A classic puzzle consisting of 7 pieces, where the challenge is to form them into various shapes. The unit cell for these pieces is a 45-45 right triangle; two of the pieces consist of a single unit cell. One of the pieces is a square made of two unit cells, one is a triangle of two cells, one is a parallelogram of two cells, and the last two pieces are triangles made of 4 unit cells each.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Zombies vs. Zombies Event
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Lost in Translation

Tapa

In the standard form of this puzzle, a grid is provided with one or more numbers in some cells. To solve it, shade some empty cells in an orthogonally connected group so that among the 8 cells orthogonally or diagonally adjacent to each numbered cell, the connected group(s) of shaded cells have the size(s) of the number(s) in that cells. (Like paint by numbers except the clues apply to these 8-cell rings instead of rows and columns.)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Blackout
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Portals

tap code

Tap code is an unencrypted 5x5 cipher with C & K combined, rather than I & J or U & V, as is common in other such ciphers.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Magic: The Tappening

tarot cards

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Taipei
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Runaround
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Dealing With Change
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Rite Awaits Myth
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Quest for the Truth

tattoos

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Skin Grafts
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Missing the Mark

tcpdump

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Trips

The Tech

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Drive-Time Shift
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Propaganda
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Good Auspicious Hunting
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Get Smart (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Cross-Pollination

Technique (MIT Yearbook)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Stalk Us Maybe

tectonic plates

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 At Sea

TED talks

TED is a popular conference whose presentations, called TED Talks, are widely viewed on YouTube. They also publish other videos on YouTube, such as TED-Ed on various educational topics.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Basic Phrenology

telephone calls

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 39: Ballroom (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 "I Don't Control Ledgers," Accountant Says. "Elvis Does it for Me!"
MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Overanalysis
MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Mothers Know Best
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 The Alchemist's Workshop
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Phone Tag

telephone exchange words (like 55 = Klondike)

(see also phonespell)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Fair Trade
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Phantom of the Operator Meta

Telephone (game)

Telephone is a traditional game in which one person tells a secret to another, and that person repeats it to a third person, and so on. The final person reveals what they were told and the players find humor in how the message mutated in retelling.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Shoephone Construction

Television Without Pity web site

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Sparing the Snark

ternary cipher

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 A Satanic Message
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 A Toast to the Fallen Warriors
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Reminder's World
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Missing Seven Fingers
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Don't Tri This at Home
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Turnary Reasoning
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Czar Cycle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Oyster Card
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Advisor's Nightmare

TETCBN (answer appears as part of puzzle)

In the National Puzzlers' League, the phrase The Error That Cannot be Named is used in errata to say that the answer, or part of the answer, appears in the puzzle, without giving away what that answer is. In the Mystery Hunt this technique is used on purpose once in a while.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Elvis, Mediator, Solves Labor Deregulation Crisis!
MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Tbilisi
MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 An Exercise in Futility
MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Triple Feature
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Quagmire
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Do Sa Do
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Plead the Fifth (the answers to the clues appear elsewhere in the puzzle)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Operator Test
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Crimes Against Cruciverbalism

Tetracross puzzle

A tetracross is a crossword puzzle which, like the jumping crossword, skips over some squares. In this case, the skipped squares form tetrominoes.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Triptychs

tetragrammaton appears in puzzle

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 The Lame Puzzle

Tetris variations

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Elvis Nabbed After Scaling Round Sphere Atop Green Building!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Pentris
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 N-tris
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Falling Into Place

tetrominos

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Growth Involves Reconstructing Legos
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Triptychs

Texas Hold 'Em

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Dogs Playing Poker
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Bad Beat Jackpot

text adventures

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Badness 10000
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Embezzler's Quest
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 The Dungeon
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Endgame (audio text adventure)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 InventoryQuest
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 The Undiscovered Underground
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Text Adventure
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Nautilus's Duplicated Quest
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Say Cheese and Dive!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Hexed Adventure

textbooks

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Basic Knowledge

text messages

Those short messages teenagers send each other constantly on their phones.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Crow Facts

Thai numerals

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Pictocryptolists

Thermo Fisher white powders library

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Powder Monkey

Thermometers (logic puzzle)

In the standard form of this puzzle, a grid is provided filled with thermometer shapes (ovals which lie within a single row or column, with a bulb at one end). Shade in some cells, but within each thermometer, only a connected group starting at the bulb, so that the number of shaded cells in each row and column matches the clues outside the grid.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Blackout

They Might Be Giants

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Study Materials
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Nina

things shaped like letters

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 The Alphabet Book

Threadless T-shirts

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 No Strings Attached

three letter acronyms

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Satellite of Love
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 The Last Airbender
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 1, 2, 3

three-named people

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Three's the Charm

Tichu

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 That'll Tichu to Mess with Us
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 I’ll Teach You

Ticket To Ride game

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Toll Bridges

tic tac toe

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 The Dungeon
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Exotic Tactics
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Blue Ox
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Stage Select
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Pod of Dolphins Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Woeful Warlord

tilt mazes

The standard type of this puzzle is a mechanical puzzle where you have to maneuver a ball through a maze, trying to get it from a starting point to a goal, without falling through any of the other holes in the maze. You can only manipulate the ball by tilting the entire maze, using gravity to move the ball.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Grid with a Hole in the Middle

time-sequence puzzles

(putting pictures in chronological order based on clues in the pictures)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Elvis Nabbed After Scaling Round Sphere Atop Green Building!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Cubicle
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 World of Comics
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Time Conundrum
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Ex Post Facto
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Around the World in 1 Day
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 My Cup Runneth Over
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Lojicomix
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Wait, What Did You Say?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Hamiltonian Path

time travel

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Just a Jump to the Left
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Writing on the Wall (various)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Time Conundrum
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Revenge of Yuki Nagato Episode 00
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Nautilus's Duplicated Quest

time-varying puzzles

(when you reload the puzzle later you get something different)

time zones

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Atlas Shrugged
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Timecop
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Travels with Charlie
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Around the World in 1 Day
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Clockwork Oran.ge

toki pona (conlang)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Sounds Good to Me

Tom Swifties

A Tom Swiftie is a pun involving a quotation from a character usually named Tom, which is followed by a dialogue tag of the form Tom said ___ly. The pun is that the adverb chosen is appropriate in some way to the message he said.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Chatterbox
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Swifties

tongue twisters

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Gibberish and More Gibberish

Tony Awards

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Where's Antoinette?
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Award-Winning Poetry

"Top Gear" (TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 How Hard Can It Be?

topology

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 CrossWord Complex
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Say Cheese and Dive!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Blocks and Blocks

toponyms (words derived from place names)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Trail Goods

Touch Tone dialing tones

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Rant
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Calling You from My Cell
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Redundant Obsolescence
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Making the Possible Impossible

tower defense game

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Snow Day

Tower of Hanoi

The Tower of Hanoi is a classic puzzle with a set of disks of different sizes and 3 posts on which to place the disks. In the standard form of this puzzle, you are asked to move the entire stack from one post to another, but you can only move one disk at a time, and you can never place a bigger disk on top of a smaller disk.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Eschatology
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Towers

trademarks

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Trubled Monicas

train lines (rail)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Getting There is Half the Fun
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Our Fates are Interlocked

TransAmerica game

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Train Station

transdeletions and transadditions

A transdeletion is a combination of deletion and anagram, deleting one letter from a word and rearranging the rest to spell another word. A transaddition is the opposite operation.

transliteration into different writing system

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Sounds Good to Me

transposition cipher

This is any kind of cipher where the identities of the letters remain intact, but they are arranged into a different order. There are many names for specific variations of this cipher, but a typical case is for a text to be split into a number of equal rows, then read down the columns.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 25
MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 The Impossible Tribar
MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 Escher Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Security Theater
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Great Tits!

traveling salesman problem

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Phone Tag

tree numbers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Nature Walk

tree of life (cabbala)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Biological Garden

Tribond

The object of Tribond is to determine the common bond between three given things. For example, if the clues were crossword, jigsaw, and sudoku, the answer would be puzzle.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Elvis a Trojan? "I Tortured Him Myself," Says 4000-Year-Old Spartan!

trigrams

Although trigrams can refer to any manipulation of groups of three letters, there is a common puzzle type where you have to unscramble and reassemble messages which have been broken up into trigrams after removing any spaces and punctuation. If the message does not have a multiple of three letters, the final one or two letters are typically left as they are and placed at the end of the list of trigrams (which is typically alphabetized). In other cases the message(s) may be crafted to have a multiple of three letters so that there is no leftover. In still other cases, the puzzle may not be restricted to groups three letters long, but works in a similar way.

trivia

Trivial Pursuit game

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 D2: The Mighty Duck Konundrum
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Trivia

trochees

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Trochees, Etc.

Turing machines

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Halting Problem

Tuva or Bust! (Book about Richard Feynman)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Tuva or Bust

TV shows

(see also cartoons)

TV themes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Variations on a Theme
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 More Variations on a Theme
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Name that Show Tune
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Before and After Mash

TV Tropes

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Stick Man
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Will Ruin Your Life [I'm Feeling Lucky]

“The Twelve Days of Christmas”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 You'll Understand
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Tea Party Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Twelve Grids of Pictures

Twister game

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Runaround

Twitch

Twitch is a web site that lets you broadcast your play of a video game.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 A Push in the Right Direction

Twitter messages

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 I'm Feeling a Little TwitterPetted
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Song of Birds
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Travels with Charlie (imitation)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Straight from the Horse's Mouth
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Puzzle Your Puzzle Could Smell Like
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Back on the Move
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Hash

two-hit wonders

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 One More Try

typing

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Keyboard Cat
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Eight Digits
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 JFK SHAGS A SAD SLIM LASS

Undertale

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Puzzle Extravaganza

UNESCO World Heritage Sites

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Only Carmen Sandiego Explores Nigh Unstoppably

Unicode

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Standard Excuses
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Words Get in the Way
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Squared Key
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Encoded
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Watson 2.0 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 This Page Intentionally Left Blank
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 I CAN'T SPELL YOU
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Takeout Ordering
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Unimaginably Twisted Files
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Dispatches from the Foreign Service Units

units of measure

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Two MIT Students Claim Elvis Was Their 6.001 TA!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Mixed Drink
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 In Other Words
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Intergalactic Sanitarium Unit
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 The Measure of All Things
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Contest

universities

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 9C

university mottos

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Truth
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Wisdom is Eternal

Unix commands

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Makefiles

Unix services

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 At Your Service
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Call and Response

Unix timestamps

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Whoa-I Know Dating
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Another Small Collection of Immense Integers
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Trips

unpowered record player

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Duchess

UPC barcodes

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Stuttgart
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Bars of Soap
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Checkout Lines
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Numbers

upsets

An upset in sports is when a player or team considered far worse or less likely to win actually wins a sports event.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Mad Dogs

URL manipulation/guessing

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 p1ctures

US states order of entry

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Master of the World

UTF-8 overlong sequences

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Unimaginably Twisted Files

valley words

Valley words have letters in reverse alphabetical order up to a point, then in alphabetical order for the rest of the word.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Wordplay

Vampire: The Eternal Struggle

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 The Eternal Struggle

vaulting (gymnastics)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Puzzle with the Answer CAN'T BUY ME LOVE

vector norm

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Bars of Soap
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Guess What I'm Thinking

Vegas Showdown (game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Highlights

vending machines

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Head of Sales

Venn diagrams

MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Venntersections
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Honey, I Shrunk the Hunt!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Vennder Bender

vice presidents

MIT Mystery Hunt 1997 Says Ross Perot: "I Can't Believe Elvis Snubbed Me!"

video games

vi editor

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 In Vivo

views of a solid object

These are the 2-dimensional forms that appear when you view a solid object from different sides. It may be based on the overall shape of the object, or on markings on or inside the object.

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 4B
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Janus
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Easy as ABC
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Bad Eggs
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Roller Coaster
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Some Assembly Required (SAR)

Vigenere cipher

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 First Things First
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Runaround
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Who's There
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Far From Home
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Round V Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Keeping Records
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Caesar's Palace
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Famous Last Letters
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Spy Who Read Me
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Image
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Indecipherable
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Repeated Punishment
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Tricky Wicket

Viking River Cruises

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Epic Raft Battles of History

Vikings

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Epic Raft Battles of History

villains

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Cheat Codes

viral videos

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Elderly Gentleman Who Wants to Reverse the Polarity of the Neutron Flow
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Dr Ox's Experiment
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Any Old Puzzle

“The Vitruvian Man”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 A Message in Space

voice actors

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 You Should Be Listening
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Circle of Life
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 See Spot Run

vowel/consonant pattern

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Behave

vowels, phrases containing all

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 7 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Behave

Voyager Golden Record

the golden records sent into space aboard the Voyager spacecraft

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Golden Images

Wacky Packages trading cards

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Collect Them All

wacky wordies

Wacky Wordies are an old Games Magazine feature. Words or phrases are clued in which part of the answer suggests a way to write letters, and the remaining part of the answer is written in this way. It is possible that those letters are written in two or more groups whose relationship is indicated by the unwritten words. For example:

STAND
I

represents "I understand."

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 The Obligatory Wordsearch

Waiting for Godot

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 An Exercise in Futility

“Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me” (NPR show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 No Police Record

walkthrough

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Walkthrough
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Escape from the Classroom

Wally Wood's 22 Panels that Always Work

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 100% Reliable

war (card game)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Casino Lobdell

Washington Nationals presidents race

An event at Washington Nationals home baseball games.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Notes from the Campaign Trail

Watchmen by Alan Moore

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 The More the Merrier

weapons

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 790.06 Crossword Puzzles and Other Word Games

Webby awards speeches

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Don't Cross an Alpha Bitch!

web tricks

Welcome to Night Vale podcast

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Worrying Ziggurats

“Well-Tempered Clavier”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Go Bye-Bye, Whinging Muchacha!

West Coast Swing Dancing

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Ballroom

Westminster Kennel Club

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Ribbons (Meta)

“The West Wing” (TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Wire Stories

what3words

What3words is a web site which offers a geographic coordinate system based on three words taken from a large set of common words. This system maps the earth down to the level of 3 meter squares.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Words Search
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 location.location.location

"What Does the Fox Say?" (Ylvis song)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 Horse Code

what is it?

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Winds of Confusion
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Subterranean
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Downsized Plutonians
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Invasion of the Micronauts
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Potlines
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 This Page Intentionally Left Blank
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Circuitboard

Wheel of Fortune

This puzzle type is named for the game show, and is based on the idea of being able to guess some puzzles immediately, with no letters in it, based only on the lengths of the words and the punctuation provided. Various kinds of clues may accompany the blanked-out messages.

"Wheel of Fortune" (game show)

The game show Pat Sajak and Vanna White are famous for, which has run for decades. It's basically multi-player hangman for money and prizes. See also Wheel of Fortune for the related puzzle type.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 It's So Obvious!

Wheel of Time (Robert Jordan series)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Breezeway

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Watch Your Back

Where's Waldo

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Dossier 6 Meta

Wikipedia

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Editor
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Walkthrough
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Coming to a Location Near You
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Everything You Read

Wilhelm scream

MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Free Willy Wonka

Wil Wheaton

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Geek Drama

Windows programs

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 The Braille Witch Project
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Eschatology
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Another Dimension (Round 4 Meta)

“Winterreise” by Schubert

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Yoda Sings Schubert!

“Wonderfalls” (TV show)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Space Madness

Woodstock performers

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Into The Woodstock Meta

word association

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Warrant 4.4
MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Out of Sight, Out of Mind
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Set Theory
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Mergers
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Quilt by Association

word chains

(the end of one word overlaps the beginning of the next; see before and after when the overlapping parts are words)

word functions

Discovering operations that convert a word or string of letters to a different one.
One puzzle type that relies on this displays a series of clues, each of which has been modified by some rule. When you determine the answer to the clue, it has to be modified in the same way to make another word.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Functions
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Disorder of Operations
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Changing States
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Battleship
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Across the Hall

word ladders

A word ladder is a series of letter changes with the goal of getting from one word to another, with each step forming a valid word.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 To a Monster
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Grizzly Ale
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Snakes and Ladders
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 The Broken Bridge

word lists

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 UKACD

wordplay (other)

word search

The standard word search is a grid of letters, within which a provided list of words is hidden, each one in a straight line in one of 8 directions (orthogonally or diagonally). Frequently the unused letters spell a final message.

Word Search board game

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Advisory Boards

words on winding paths

(word searches that can change direction, or a whole quote spelled in this way)

MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 9: Laboratory
MIT Mystery Hunt 1995 39: Ballroom (Meta)
MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Freetown
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Helminthophobia
MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Round 4 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Whirlwind
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Post Modern
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Ecolocation
MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Give Me an M! Give me an A! . . . Give me a Y!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Mos Eisley Spaceport
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Crop Squares
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Round 11 Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Conquering the World
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Piercing the Veil
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Common Bonds
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 A Thousand Words

“Words” (poem by Dana Gioia)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Reorganization

word stack

A word stack is a grid for a list of related words arranged so that some matching letters fall in the same columns; these letters get a single tall box to indicate the repetition. The words may be arbitrarily staggered left or right, and sometimes arbitrarily ordered, in order to increase the number and height of these shared letter boxes. Usually only a few letters are initially given.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 The Art of Succeeding
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 A Rose By Any Other

Words with Friends

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Case of the Dangerous Game

word wrap

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 The Dungeon

working with other teams

MIT Mystery Hunt 1999 Charlotte Amalie
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 The Mayor's Breakfast
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Commencement Ceremony
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Beach Party McMurdo
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 I'm Wet! I'm Hysterical and I'm Wet
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Dancing with the Vars
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 My Socrates Note
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 Auditions for the WonderMusical
MIT Mystery Hunt 2014 The Cat's Combobulation
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Matrix
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 Trivia

works inside other works

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Yo Dawg, I Herd You Like Puzzle Hunts
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Screen Test
MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Beth

world leaders

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015 Atlantean Graves

World of Warcraft

MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 War Dances
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Running Around In A Blizzard

World Puzzle Championship

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Puzzles from Loremipsumstan

World's Strongest Man

MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 The Contest

wrestling

MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Round 5 Meta Hint
MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 Ringside Seat
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Gold Rush
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Wipe the Floor with Him!
MIT Mystery Hunt 2007 Legal Men
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 The Equipment Locker
MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Google Bodyslam
MIT Mystery Hunt 2018 Lets Get Ready to Jumble

X11 color names

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 Dossier 1 Meta

X and Y coordinates

MIT Mystery Hunt 1994 13
MIT Mystery Hunt 2001 Scientology
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Well-Coordinated
MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Space Madness

“X” anime

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Crossed Swords

X-Box

MIT Mystery Hunt 2009 Console-Nation Prizes

X-Box achievements

“The X-Files”

MIT Mystery Hunt 2003 Round 6 Meta

XKCD

MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Stick Man
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Plotlines
MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Unlikely Situations
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 You Will Not Go to Space Today
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 Trochees, Etc.

x-ray emission lines

MIT Mystery Hunt 2002 X-Ray Vision

Xzibit

Xzibit is the celebrity associated with the Internet meme "Yo dawg, I heard you like X so I put a X in your X so you can Y while you Y." It's based on his time as host of the MTV television series "Pimp My Ride" in which he said similar things about what he had installed in cars (where the last X was usually "car" and the last Y was usually "drive"). The meme version makes all the Xs the same, so that you're putting something inside itself, or another of the same thing.

MIT Mystery Hunt 2012 Yo Dawg, I Herd You Like Puzzle Hunts

MIT Mystery Hunt 1996 9C
MIT Mystery Hunt 2000 Art for Art's Sake
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Xipe-Dee-Doo-Dah
MIT Mystery Hunt 2004 Fair Trade
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005 Junk Mail
MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Boston Ante
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 Bulls and Cows
MIT Mystery Hunt 2017 A Lengthy Journey

Zoolander

MIT Mystery Hunt 2006 Blue Steel

zoos

MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 Soooo Cute!

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