An advertisement for what puzzle hunts are about and why they’re cooler than everyday puzzles

I remember when I got the central aha, I justified it to my teammates as “it’d be so cool, so it has to be right”. — Nathan Pinsker

This is a post meant to explain what makes puzzle hunts appealing to people who haven’t done them before.

If you do care about the actual mechanical details, Brian’s introduction is great. The one-sentence summary is: you’re (usually) trying to get an English word/phrase as the final answer, there are (usually) no directions or instructions, and I write “usually” everywhere because puzzle hunts love breaking rules.

When I first tell people about puzzle hunts, their initial reaction is usually that the fun must be in the challenge. And it is not untrue that there is a notion of skill, and it’s satisfying to become a stronger solver. However, I think this misses the point: it ignores the elegance of puzzle construction.

If I tried to make an analogy of what a puzzle hunt puzzle is like, I’d say it’s like a mystery movie. But I want to emphasize that the word “movie” is much more important than “mystery” here.

Because the experience of solving a good hunt puzzle is usually choreographed carefully by the designer. Mechanically, this means for example that:

• Any red herrings or extra information is eliminated.
• Some form of error correction is often present, so that if a solver makes a mistake, they find out quickly. (As opposed to, say, sudoku, where if you write a wrong number you often don’t find out until much later.)
• As much as possible, there are “guard rails” that prevent a solver from going too far off the correct path. (As opposed to, say, math contest problems, where it’s not uncommon to spend a lot of time chasing fruitless paths.)
• Conversely, the solver usually knows pretty quickly if they are going down the correct path. For example, often the title of the puzzle will be a subtle allusion to the main idea; thus when solvers do find the main idea, they can look at the title and say “ah, that’s why this title was chosen”.

But perhaps more important is the aesthetic implications. In the same way that good movies (mystery or not) have coherent plots, fresh characters, and elegant sets, a good puzzles have coherent themes, fresh ideas, and an elegant presentation. It’s not like a sudoku or NYT crossword, which all look the same and for which the solver already knows what to expect.

Having a cohesive theme means all the parts relate to each other. This makes more sense with examples (spoilers follow for the mentioned puzzles):

• The MOP 2021 metapuzzle “Sticks and Stones” was centered around the letter S, an ongoing gag in the MOP community (MOP vs MOSP).Solvers needed to realize the number corresponded to the “Steve’s stones” problem from JMO 2015/6 (solved with sticks and stones), and arrange words crossword-style in a grid so that S’s were placed where stones go. When done correctly, the words themselves formed a giant letter S in the grid which spelled the answer when traced.
• The puzzle Le chiffre indéchiffrable from Mystery Hunt 2021 was themed around mangled Google Translate and Unicode.The puzzle opens with a Unicode Vigenere cipher (the title is the French name for this cipher) and produces lyrics from Google Translate Sings that have been translated yet again into another language as the plaintext (using Google Translate). At the same time, the keys are themselves names of Unicode characters which have been translated into different languages (again using Google Translate). So doing a Unicode Vigenere cipher yet again with the episode numbers from Google Translate Sings gives the answer.

More examples in Section 4 “Elegance” of David Wilson’s puzzle writing guide. I also really like this sentence from Nathan Pinsker:

The most elegant puzzles are those where every single piece of information is used somewhere, like a dozen mini-Chekhov’s Guns wrapping up the experience into a perfect, tightly woven package.

Or with more profanity (from me working on Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2022 — speaking of which, the next GPH is happening this weekend):

I guess what I’m trying to say with all this is that a puzzle hunt puzzle is almost like a story, designed intentionally by the puzzle author. And just as people will say they loved a novel, puzzle hunt enthusiasts have tastes in puzzles as well.

Except there is one big difference between a mystery movie and a puzzle hunt. In the movie, you are the audience; all you have to do is sit back and watch as the protagonist progresses through the story, slowly figuring things out. But in a puzzle hunt, you are the protagonist.