What are puzzles? There are many kinds of puzzles. The kind I'm into, sometimes called "hunt puzzles", are puzzles following in the tradition of the MIT Mystery Hunt, often given as part of a larger, multi-day event called a puzzle hunt.

It's difficult to describe exactly what a puzzle is, since uniqueness is often seen as one of its defining features. Usually, a puzzle presents the solver with some amount of information, from which a word or phrase, called an "answer", may be extracted. Most of the time, puzzles do not contain explicit instructions for how to extract these answers, but instead rely on flavor text and patterns in the puzzle content to hint towards the intended solve path.

For this reason, puzzle hunts are often compared to more well-known puzzle activities like escape rooms, ARGs, and scavenger hunts. However, most would agree that there is "something different" about puzzle hunts. I believe this comes down not so much to the content of the puzzles themselves, but to the kind of experience that puzzle hunts aspire to provide.

In particular, puzzle hunts do not treat puzzles as barriers to be overcome, but rather as experiences to be enjoyed. Hunt puzzles are specifically designed to be fun to solve instead of just difficult. Every step in a puzzle's solution should not just be appropriately clued, but also feel natural. Red herring rabbit holes are frowned upon, and reliance on uncommon codes or trivia knowledge is generally avoided.

This philosophy also bleeds out to the design of puzzle hunts themselves, making them feel much less competitive than they first appear. Most hunts are free to join, award no monetary prizes, and generously provide personalized hints to less experienced teams. While the first team to finish a hunt is generally acknowledged to be the winner, most teams consider simply finishing to be the more important milestone.

How to puzzle? Getting into puzzles can be intimidating. Initially, it might help to take a look at a bunch of old puzzle solutions to get a feel for the kinds of insights solving a puzzle might involve. Besides that, there's not much to do besides solve lots of puzzles, ideally together with an experienced solver or two.

Unfortunately, there isn't really a difficulty curve to puzzle hunts. Most hunts tend to be targeted towards experienced solvers and can be prohibitively difficult for beginners to solve. This is likely because hunt writers tend to be experienced solvers themselves. The one hunt I know that is explicitly targeted towards beginners is DP Hunt, but it's still pretty hard. There's also the Students round of the 2021 Mystery Hunt, the School of Fish round from the 2015 Mystery Hunt, and the Void of Conclusions round of the 2018 Caltech Puzzle Hunt, all of which contain intentionally easy puzzles.

What most significantly contributed to my puzzle solving ability is, I think, testsolving for a hunt writing team. When testsolving, I would often be paired with more experienced solvers to persist on solving a single puzzle through to the very end. In the process, I got better at spotting patterns, googling for information, and approaching puzzle genres that I might never have dared touch otherwise.

Where are puzzles? Most puzzle hunts are announced on the Puzzle Hunt Calendar, though the calendar also includes many events that aren't really considered Mystery Hunt-style hunts. Past hunt puzzles and solutions are also often archived on their respective hunt websites. Recent Mystery Hunt-style hunts I've enjoyed include Galactic Puzzle Hunt, Teammate Hunt, Huntinality, Silph Puzzle Hunt, EC Puzzle Hunt, Puzzle Potluck, P.I. Hunt, CMU Hunt, and, of course, Mystery Hunt itself.

Puzzles and me. I hunt with ✈️✈️✈️ Galactic Trendsetters ✈️✈️✈️ for Mystery Hunt, and have joined them in writing the 2021 Mystery Hunt, the "2020" Galactic Puzzle Hunt, and the 2022 Galactic Puzzle Hunt. For smaller hunts, I usually join either a subteam of Galactic, or the Floor Pi team.

I'm generally a fan of word and logic puzzles, and not so much a fan of sports, popular culture or board game puzzles. Though, really, I'd enjoy any puzzle that's generally well-designed, has a non-tedious solve path and ends with a creative extraction. This means that I'm usually happy to give puzzles of any genre a shot, especially if the author or writing team has a track record of writing good puzzles.

Puzzles I've written or helped write include Broken Jukebox, Oversimplified, Eclairs and More @ Ovsljs* Opsvut , Patterns, Radical Rebuses, Unmasked, Treasure Maps, Back School To and You Will Explode If You Stop Talking. This maybe reveals a bit about my areas of knowledge or interest.

As you might notice, I've not really gained the courage to write word or logic puzzles yet, though I've at least tried to give my later puzzles interesting extraction steps. Honestly, I still see word and logic puzzles as difficult and time-consuming to construct, and am very grateful to those who do write them.