Mystery Hunt 2022 Team Statistics

With MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 (wrap up video, stats summary) having come to a close, the second year that Mystery Hunt was completely virtual, I am also winding down the second year that I helped out with a portion of the behind-the-scenes tech stack for team I’m not a planet either… and sometimes less “behind the scenes” when things go awry! It is a unique position to be in, with goals driven by a mixture of what automated tools I would like to make use of, what support the team needs so that people can puzzle together uninterrupted, and what surprises the hunt organizers throw our way.

Being in this position also lets me piece together some statistics on the team’s progress on the hunt, which I also did last year. First, how many puzzles were available to our team, and how many of them had been solved at any time:

Like all images here, click to zoom. Note that this year events were not considered “puzzles” and are not in the statistics. We see that for a period of about 4 hours on Saturday afternoon we were reduced to just three open puzzles, and briefly only two. The story behind this is apparent when separately track puzzles by round:

The Investigation was the first round of hunt, and solving its meta unlocked the second round. Two puzzles from this round went untouched for a very long time until they were backsolved near the end of the hunt, using the solution of the meta to work backwards to determine their answers. They were also the first and third most popular puzzles for other teams to request the solution to.

The Ministry was the second round of hunt, containing 25 puzzles, 5 metapuzzles, 1 metametapuzzle, and a run-around. Completing The Ministry was intended by the hunt organizers to serve as an intermediate goal that would be feasible for non-competitive teams to accomplish, so was structured like the ending of hunt. 60 teams successfully finished The Ministry.

As a result, progress was bottle-necked on completing The Ministry: unlocking the third round required completing the run-around, which was unlocked 15 minutes after completing the metametapuzzle, which itself was unlocked by completing all 5 metas. The only other puzzles available at the time were the two from The Investigation.

The third and far the largest round was Bookspace, containing many “subrounds”. We were steadily working our way through it when time was called. One puzzle from this round was recorded as being unlocked long before it actually was, because we were given information about it at the beginning of The Ministry.

Below is the list of every puzzle solved by the team. Some of the solution times of early puzzles were inaccurate as we had to manually record puzzle solutions in the beginning of the hunt. In total we gained access to 84 puzzles, of which we solved 65.

The longest two puzzle solves were backsolves; we received the solution to My Dinner With Big Boi as a bonus; and Book Reports was recorded in our system as available long before it actually was unlocked. The five longest puzzles from The Ministry were all metas, so the longest standard puzzle solution was Trickster Tales.

Compared to last year, we solved a much higher fraction of the puzzles accessible to us, and the slowest ordinary solutions were much faster; although conversely there were no 3 minute puzzle solutions this year. Many fewer puzzles were open at any time, possibly due to some combination of each individual puzzle being “bigger” and the hunt being much more linear.

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