Mystery Hunt Roundup 2026
Feb. 23rd, 2026 06:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoyHey, they finally put up the public version! This post has been a bit delayed while I waited for the public version of Mystery Hunt to go up. Let's see what I still remember.
So I decided to stay home for Mystery Hunt this year and solve remotely. This is because I'd been to the JMM down in DC shortly before. Admittedly, these were two weeks apart, so yeah I probably could have swung it, but, eh. Easier to stay home. Fortunately for me this year wasn't very in-person focused like last year was.
Shaked joined our team this year! He actually went up to Boston for it though.
Do I have more to say about the Hunt overall? Eh I dunno. Maybe I'll just get to the individual rounds/puzzles.
Do They Have Chemistry? -- Not a puzzle I saw during the actual hunt due to starting late as usual, but, on seeing it looking through things, I was like, I have to show this to Ozy. :P
Three Dog Night -- By the time I got there, we'd figured out the "waters" part, but, IIRC, not the other two parts. I remember thinking maybe HH was the composer's initials. It was not!
Capoo's Diary -- I expect Shaked would have liked this puzzled but he did not see it! It took us a while to realize we had to check the webcomic, not the YouTube channel. Although we found it on a different website that was much harder to navigate...
Jumping to Conclusions -- I tried to solve the "web" portion of this, based on the fact that the first picture there is heavily limiting; however I got stuck because the answer to that first one was TINKERBELL, which wasn't on my word list. Trying any of the things that were yielded nonsense for the others!
Night Circus -- I couldn't complete some of these because I wasn't looking quite minor enough regarding some of these planets. :P Fortunately someone else filled those in...
Chemical X -- I didn't work on this one at all, I just think it's a nifty puzzle.
Tribute Puzzle -- Oh boy this one. This is obviously a mashed-up movies puzzle, but it took us a while to figure out just what is going on (the Dune/Dune clue made us look for other pairs of movies with the same name, which is not quite the right direction). Eventually though we got it... except for the final clue phrase, we were stuck on extraction for a long time. "Biopic where soldier raises creepy monster child"? What could that possibly be? Eraserhead (the only David Lynch feature film not used so far, aside from the Twin Peaks movie) fits "creepy monster child", but what about the rest? I tried even asking LLMs about it, they were no help (though they might have been with the first half of the puzzle). Eventually I realized, duh, we have to reapply the same idea -- it's not just Eraserhead, it's also Jarhead, which was the answer.
Electrical Circuit -- This one was entirely baffling. I don't think I've ever heard of the meme this one was based on.
Permutations -- I came in after the initial part had been solved, I was trying things with like reapplying the extracted permutations to something new, or something... yeah, turns out that wasn't it at all.
Sound Translation -- We unlocked this one late at night, so I and one other person worked on it even though neither of us spoke Mandarin. Unsurprisingly, we didn't get very far (basically just solving the clues and identifying the extraneous words). Thankfully eventually we got some actual Mandarin speakers on it! It still took a while though to figure it out. For quite a while we thought that "BACCARAT" was cluing that we should be looking at numbers mod 10. Turns out no.
Mixed Signals -- A "research task" rather than a puzzle, but one that one has to solve like a puzzle. Oy, we were stuck on this for a while -- I didn't manage to get it because I insisted at looking at the traffic lights *in pairs*, rather than individually. So I saw one pair that had a period of 6, and another pair that had a period of... well, it didn't seem to repeat! That's because [9,10]=90 which is pretty long. I said that it *sort of* repeats after 18, to which someone else was like, OK but it doesn't repeat after 18, and I'm like, but it *sort of* does, maybe there's some sort of almost-periodicity? Yeah no pairs was just the wrong approach. Thankfully eventually someone realized to look at them individually. Maybe I would have realized this sooner if I'd just paid more attention to the flavor text!
Strand-Type Game -- This one I did a bunch on. In particular I pointed out that "Strand-Type Game" was a reference to Death Stranding, which other people apparently hadn't noticed (one person was like "no it's a reference to Strands!" and I'm like obviously it's both, that's how puzzles work). However this one still took a while with quite a bit of confusion. None of us had actually played Death Stranding, so we didn't initially know what the "knot" thing was referring to; once we had all the theme words, and were staring at what was left over, I eventually went looking up cities from Death Stranding and got that part, but at first it was like, are knots words that cross over themselves? The fifth one is made more confusing by the fact that the knot -- "LAKE" -- could also be a theme word, so it appears to have one too many theme words until you've figured out what's going on. Also confusing was that in the second one, "DOGGIES" appears in places other than the designated one (though I'm not sure the others touch two opposite edges), raising some doubt as to whether it was really the intended spangram, although I don't think there was actually a *lot* of doubt about this.
Eland Islands -- Past the first few, I did all of the puzzle-discovery here (it was late at night). At first I made the mistake of trying to do it without automated solvers, which, whew, not very doable. The crosswords were generally quite easy, and the logic puzzles were sometimes doable, but the sudokus were seemingly almost always brutal. Of course sometimes you'd get lucky and get a question where you could read the answer right off the game board (I mean, beyond the first few that were always like that), but, not always. Basically, you had to use automated solvers to handle the logic puzzles and sudukos. Finding solvers for the logic puzzles wasn't too hard, but the problem was finding an automated solver that could handle all the things the sudoku might possibly throw at you -- not just 5x5 with irregular regions, but also cages and thermometers. Fortunately I found one, but I still had to get a bit lucky with the questions in order to complete all 12 rounds. (The crosswords I stuck to doing by hand, but those were generally easy, as mentioned.) One odd thing: One question asks about the possibility of a barred crossword, but as best I could tell, there don't seem to have been any barred crosswords. That seems to have been purely a distractor. (Which means that in a sense the question was actually not ternary, as it presented itself, but actually binary, like the rest.)
A Fake Artist Goes To Eland Islands -- This puzzle I had to show to Nick. :P
Gerrymandering -- Oy, this one took a while. Initially we thought that the majority rule applied horizontally while the mean rule applied vertically, which led us down an incorrect path. I feel like the examples there didn't explain it well -- we ended up getting a hint explaining, no, it's based on whether there's a majority or not. At first we were putting words into boxes in reading order, then I was like, I think they should go in in whatever order makes it work. Other people were like, really? And I was like, the puzzle is called "Gerrymandering", of course the idea is to do something artificial to get predetermined results! That's why they gave us clues for three grids instead of just one; if it was completely predictable we'd only need the initial grid. But yeah we got stuck for a while due to misinterpreting the mean vs majority rule.
Loch Mystic -- I didn't work on this puzzle, but everyone I talked to about it seems to have hated it. :P
Serpentine Hills -- We got here late at night, so I ended up doing all the puzzle discovery (and bell-ringing) myself.
I Do (Not) -- So the first part of this is, of course, figuring out which TV show it's referring to. I don't really watch this sort of show, but I was the one on this at first, so I had to try to figure it out. "Love Island" seems to be the currently popular one, but that didn't seem to make sense at all. Then I hit upon "Are You The One?" -- and I thought that was it because there was a contestant with the initials "ZJ", which I thought as a pretty distinctive pair of initials! Except other things didn't make sense -- guess that's not as distinctive as I thought. Thankfully eventually someone else figure out that it was "Love Is Blind", but then we didn't manage to solve the logic part.
MIT Mosaic Lab -- We got the letters, and then had for a long time had absolutely no idea what to do with them. Of course we didn't have the title until much later...
Almost -- Just a nifty puzzle I wanted to highlight.
Game, ???, Match -- Oy. We got the train/plane/boat thing pretty quickly, but the rest...? Of course, once again, knowing the title would have helped.
Had -- Heh.
Stray Child -- We didn't manage to solve this one I'm pretty sure because we had no idea what to do about the conflicts.
OK I think that's all I have to say, or that I can remember anyway. I think I had more to say at the time, but, oh well, I've forgotten.
-Harry
So I decided to stay home for Mystery Hunt this year and solve remotely. This is because I'd been to the JMM down in DC shortly before. Admittedly, these were two weeks apart, so yeah I probably could have swung it, but, eh. Easier to stay home. Fortunately for me this year wasn't very in-person focused like last year was.
Shaked joined our team this year! He actually went up to Boston for it though.
Do I have more to say about the Hunt overall? Eh I dunno. Maybe I'll just get to the individual rounds/puzzles.
Do They Have Chemistry? -- Not a puzzle I saw during the actual hunt due to starting late as usual, but, on seeing it looking through things, I was like, I have to show this to Ozy. :P
Three Dog Night -- By the time I got there, we'd figured out the "waters" part, but, IIRC, not the other two parts. I remember thinking maybe HH was the composer's initials. It was not!
Capoo's Diary -- I expect Shaked would have liked this puzzled but he did not see it! It took us a while to realize we had to check the webcomic, not the YouTube channel. Although we found it on a different website that was much harder to navigate...
Jumping to Conclusions -- I tried to solve the "web" portion of this, based on the fact that the first picture there is heavily limiting; however I got stuck because the answer to that first one was TINKERBELL, which wasn't on my word list. Trying any of the things that were yielded nonsense for the others!
Night Circus -- I couldn't complete some of these because I wasn't looking quite minor enough regarding some of these planets. :P Fortunately someone else filled those in...
Chemical X -- I didn't work on this one at all, I just think it's a nifty puzzle.
Tribute Puzzle -- Oh boy this one. This is obviously a mashed-up movies puzzle, but it took us a while to figure out just what is going on (the Dune/Dune clue made us look for other pairs of movies with the same name, which is not quite the right direction). Eventually though we got it... except for the final clue phrase, we were stuck on extraction for a long time. "Biopic where soldier raises creepy monster child"? What could that possibly be? Eraserhead (the only David Lynch feature film not used so far, aside from the Twin Peaks movie) fits "creepy monster child", but what about the rest? I tried even asking LLMs about it, they were no help (though they might have been with the first half of the puzzle). Eventually I realized, duh, we have to reapply the same idea -- it's not just Eraserhead, it's also Jarhead, which was the answer.
Electrical Circuit -- This one was entirely baffling. I don't think I've ever heard of the meme this one was based on.
Permutations -- I came in after the initial part had been solved, I was trying things with like reapplying the extracted permutations to something new, or something... yeah, turns out that wasn't it at all.
Sound Translation -- We unlocked this one late at night, so I and one other person worked on it even though neither of us spoke Mandarin. Unsurprisingly, we didn't get very far (basically just solving the clues and identifying the extraneous words). Thankfully eventually we got some actual Mandarin speakers on it! It still took a while though to figure it out. For quite a while we thought that "BACCARAT" was cluing that we should be looking at numbers mod 10. Turns out no.
Mixed Signals -- A "research task" rather than a puzzle, but one that one has to solve like a puzzle. Oy, we were stuck on this for a while -- I didn't manage to get it because I insisted at looking at the traffic lights *in pairs*, rather than individually. So I saw one pair that had a period of 6, and another pair that had a period of... well, it didn't seem to repeat! That's because [9,10]=90 which is pretty long. I said that it *sort of* repeats after 18, to which someone else was like, OK but it doesn't repeat after 18, and I'm like, but it *sort of* does, maybe there's some sort of almost-periodicity? Yeah no pairs was just the wrong approach. Thankfully eventually someone realized to look at them individually. Maybe I would have realized this sooner if I'd just paid more attention to the flavor text!
Strand-Type Game -- This one I did a bunch on. In particular I pointed out that "Strand-Type Game" was a reference to Death Stranding, which other people apparently hadn't noticed (one person was like "no it's a reference to Strands!" and I'm like obviously it's both, that's how puzzles work). However this one still took a while with quite a bit of confusion. None of us had actually played Death Stranding, so we didn't initially know what the "knot" thing was referring to; once we had all the theme words, and were staring at what was left over, I eventually went looking up cities from Death Stranding and got that part, but at first it was like, are knots words that cross over themselves? The fifth one is made more confusing by the fact that the knot -- "LAKE" -- could also be a theme word, so it appears to have one too many theme words until you've figured out what's going on. Also confusing was that in the second one, "DOGGIES" appears in places other than the designated one (though I'm not sure the others touch two opposite edges), raising some doubt as to whether it was really the intended spangram, although I don't think there was actually a *lot* of doubt about this.
Eland Islands -- Past the first few, I did all of the puzzle-discovery here (it was late at night). At first I made the mistake of trying to do it without automated solvers, which, whew, not very doable. The crosswords were generally quite easy, and the logic puzzles were sometimes doable, but the sudokus were seemingly almost always brutal. Of course sometimes you'd get lucky and get a question where you could read the answer right off the game board (I mean, beyond the first few that were always like that), but, not always. Basically, you had to use automated solvers to handle the logic puzzles and sudukos. Finding solvers for the logic puzzles wasn't too hard, but the problem was finding an automated solver that could handle all the things the sudoku might possibly throw at you -- not just 5x5 with irregular regions, but also cages and thermometers. Fortunately I found one, but I still had to get a bit lucky with the questions in order to complete all 12 rounds. (The crosswords I stuck to doing by hand, but those were generally easy, as mentioned.) One odd thing: One question asks about the possibility of a barred crossword, but as best I could tell, there don't seem to have been any barred crosswords. That seems to have been purely a distractor. (Which means that in a sense the question was actually not ternary, as it presented itself, but actually binary, like the rest.)
A Fake Artist Goes To Eland Islands -- This puzzle I had to show to Nick. :P
Gerrymandering -- Oy, this one took a while. Initially we thought that the majority rule applied horizontally while the mean rule applied vertically, which led us down an incorrect path. I feel like the examples there didn't explain it well -- we ended up getting a hint explaining, no, it's based on whether there's a majority or not. At first we were putting words into boxes in reading order, then I was like, I think they should go in in whatever order makes it work. Other people were like, really? And I was like, the puzzle is called "Gerrymandering", of course the idea is to do something artificial to get predetermined results! That's why they gave us clues for three grids instead of just one; if it was completely predictable we'd only need the initial grid. But yeah we got stuck for a while due to misinterpreting the mean vs majority rule.
Loch Mystic -- I didn't work on this puzzle, but everyone I talked to about it seems to have hated it. :P
Serpentine Hills -- We got here late at night, so I ended up doing all the puzzle discovery (and bell-ringing) myself.
I Do (Not) -- So the first part of this is, of course, figuring out which TV show it's referring to. I don't really watch this sort of show, but I was the one on this at first, so I had to try to figure it out. "Love Island" seems to be the currently popular one, but that didn't seem to make sense at all. Then I hit upon "Are You The One?" -- and I thought that was it because there was a contestant with the initials "ZJ", which I thought as a pretty distinctive pair of initials! Except other things didn't make sense -- guess that's not as distinctive as I thought. Thankfully eventually someone else figure out that it was "Love Is Blind", but then we didn't manage to solve the logic part.
MIT Mosaic Lab -- We got the letters, and then had for a long time had absolutely no idea what to do with them. Of course we didn't have the title until much later...
Almost -- Just a nifty puzzle I wanted to highlight.
Game, ???, Match -- Oy. We got the train/plane/boat thing pretty quickly, but the rest...? Of course, once again, knowing the title would have helped.
Had -- Heh.
Stray Child -- We didn't manage to solve this one I'm pretty sure because we had no idea what to do about the conflicts.
OK I think that's all I have to say, or that I can remember anyway. I think I had more to say at the time, but, oh well, I've forgotten.
-Harry
