Puzzles

I like puzzles, and sometimes I write them. Over the years, I’ve written quite a few. Puzzles are ordered in reverse chronological order by release date.

I have marked a few puzzles that I am particularly proud of in italics.

MIT Mystery Heist (2024)

MIT Mystery Heist was a set of puzzles written by the Providence Crime Syndication, as a prelude to the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt.

I worked on (i.e. helped fix) the post-production of puzzles for the website, and wrote for kickoff, the conclusion, and the other story bits.

I also wrote these puzzles:

Brown Orientation Hunt (2024)

This was small puzzle packet written for New Student Orientation at Brown in September.

Providence Potluck (2024)

Providence, the team I currently hunt with for the MIT Mystery Hunt, ran some internal potlucks where we wrote puzzles for each other. This is the puzzle I wrote for the July potluck.

(Formatting by Ricky Cruz.)

Brown Puzzlehunt (2024)

Brown Puzzlehunt was an in-person puzzlehunt, located in Providence, Rhode Island. I acted as Puzzle Construction Director, and so had editorial input on many puzzles, but I am listed as an author on:

I don’t know why they all ended up with titles starting with ‘the’. It’s a funny coincidence.

Shardhunt (2023)

Shardhunt was a puzzlehunt written by some members of the puzzlehunt team 17th Shard.

It takes place in the same canon as Shardhunt 0 (which has never been publicly released), but knowledge of that hunt is not necessary and will provide no advantage for explorers.

1 This puzzle won the Bravo Award for Best Interactive Puzzle of 2023!

Brown Puzzlehunt (2023)

I helped write many things for Brown Puzzlehunt in 2023, most of which are listed below.

A Very Metaphorical British Dystopia (2021)

This was a Christmas gift for a fellow puzzler, Rusty, as part of a Christmas gift exchange. The theme is based on the BBC show The Prisoner. After you’ve solved the first metapuzzle (Number Six), you can open the Green Dome.

A disclaimer: Number Nine is not solvable, as it was built in a Minecraft server that has since been deleted.

Arithmancy Set (2021)

At the request of a friend of mine, I wrote a puzzle for a puzzle set run by the Arithmancy community in June 2021.

I have mixed feelings on my involvement with this set. I have never majorly enjoyed the source material, and as time goes on I’ve done my best to actively distance myself from it. I also am in hindsight unhappy with one of the clues (66A). But I did write it, and this is supposed to be an archive of all my work, so here it goes.

The puzzle resolves to an instruction. Thanks to Deusovi for significantly improving the fill of this puzzle. He couldn’t stop the two-letter entries, but in fairness, neither could I.

Shardhunt 0 (2021)

Originally just called “Shardhunt”, this was a set written by some core members of the puzzlehunt team 17th Shard and shared with a small number of teams in February 2021.

These puzzles aren’t great. Not in general, I mean - there are actually some quite good puzzles in the set! - but these specific ones I’m linking below are somewhat inelegant in places. It’s probably not worth solving unless you’re some sort of freak completionist.

Sanderson Puzzlehunt (2019)

In my heyday of engaging with the fandom of a very particular fantasy author, I wrote several puzzlehunt-style sets based on the works of Brandon Sanderson. These are the earliest things I wrote and put on the internet: as a result, the quality is highly variable, the puzzles get more and more rudimentary the further back you go, and I’m of course highly embarrassed about all of them. There may be uncaught errata, general bad puzzle design, and unfun steps. Ye be warned.

These are also all buried in forum threads, so in the future, I may attempt to archive these myself. Or I may allow them to lapse into the dustbin of history. We’ll see.

A disclaimer: in the Roshar Round, Tidal Patterns involved changing patterns of data which have long since stopped.

That’s all!