On January 16 2026, I played in the MIT Mystery Hunt with team Left Out.
In Minneapolis, federal law enforcement agents were so bad at their jobs that they drove the crime rate up. In Cambridge, nerds gathered to solve puzzles, including about ½ of Left Out. A ways down the San Francisco peninsula, about another ⅓ of Left Out gathered at a big house. I instead was home in my San Francisco apartment. I'd stocked my fridge with pizza and was getting ready to solve "remote," i.e. not with one of the big Left Out gatherings, for the first time.
I hadn't participated in Mystery Hunt since COVID-19 hit the USA. (I was on the running team in 2020 when COVID-19 was news of a new bad SARS variant in China.) I enjoyed getting together with my teammates, but a fresh wave of COVID seemed to hit the SF Bay Area annually around mid-January. Each year, I'd sign up on the team as a "maybe" participant; but then would back off to a "no" when I saw high COVID numbers. Instead of solving with the team, I stayed home kibbitzing on the team chat.
Then for a couple of years COVID seemed to calm down—but then the local COVID reporting statistics paused each January (perhaps when some health-data-scientist academic went on vacation?). For a couple of years I again stayed home and kibbitzed… and then grumbled when the stats refreshed some days later and I saw that gathering around SF would have been pretty safe after all.
As of 2026, California had changed its health stats reporting to auto-update. And, as of early January, the COVID numbers were low! I once again signed up as a "maybe," but in my head it was "this time for sure." A few days later, my laptop broke. By the time a replacement showed up, I knew I wouldn't have time to set it up for hunt. So, new plan: I would solve "remote" at home instead of gathering with my teammates.
I wasn't super-pleased to solve at home. I probably enjoy gathering with teammates more than I enjoy solving puzzles. But after sitting on the "sidelines" for a few years and thinking this year I'd get to play again, I was bound and determined.
And thus at 09:00 Friday morning (12:00 Cambridge time), I sat at home, watching a video in which Cardinality, the running team, presented the start of the game's story. An hour after that, I sat down and started to solve puzzles. I gave a quick look at the web site that Cardinality had set up to present their hunt. There was a web app, a Pokémon-like game in which you could walk a character around a sprawling world and talk to NPCs. That was probably plenty nostalgic for Left Out's 40-something-year-olds, but not so much for this 50-something-year-old. I left main hunt web site to the young sprats and went to Left Out's Jolly Roger server, where we kept track of puzzles that folks on the web site had discovered. I picked a puzzle and went to work.
Here, "went to work" means reading over a puzzle, then switching to look at a shared spreadsheet where other Left Out members and I would enter bits of research, chat about next steps, carry out those next steps. If a couple of people were on a streak, it could be tough to try to follow what they were doing, let alone contribute. It was like watching a school of cartoon pirahna devour a chicken. Often, a couple of people were on a streak. Remember, several members of Left Out are US National Team this or World Record that. I'm not exaggerating. Before this year's Mystery Hunt when lots of Left Out people were idling in a room in Cambridge, Tammy McLeod pressed a few into service as witnesses as she attempted to break some world record or other.
There were a few minutes when I was looking at a puzzle that wasn't being cartoon-pirahna-devoured quite yet. I arrived at one puzzle with just one other person working on it: Eric Prestemon was busy identifying audio tracks of birdsong. That left me to answer some crossword-y clues. Looking for a gimmick, I joked in chat, "Hey wouldn't it be funny if the answer to this one was [SPOILER REDACTED]" and then realized: yes, that joke-y idea was the gimmick. I started filling in answers. The pirahna swarm arrived and the puzzle fell soon after.
I remember I was the first on the team to look at a puzzle titled "Jumping to Conclusions." I got partway through looking up a bunch of [SPOILER REDACTED]s on Wikipedia when the pirahna swarm arrived; by the time I was done looking those things up, folks working in other parts of the puzzle had solved them.
The folks running Hunt restricted us to having eight puzzles open at a time. In hunts with a wider "beam," I might spend more time with a puzzle before a pirahna swarm arrived. But in this hunt, effort stayed intensely focused for those first few hours.
I over-focused.
At 14:00 (17:00 Cambridge time), I looked up from my laptop. I was hunched over. How long had I been sitting hunched over? Not all the time since 10:00; but too much of the time. My neck was sore, and I was stiff. In past years, I'd remembered to stop and stretch occasionally. Apparently in the intervening years I'd lost that useful habit. I'd concentrated too hard on spreadsheets for too long.
I went out for a walk. That helped me unwind, but my muscles were still pretty mad at me. I came back home, looked at my laptop sitting on a chair…and left it there. Maybe four hours was enough.
I stopped trying to solve puzzles; instead, I just kibbitzed on the team chat.
Saturday 03:00, I was back on the laptop. Left Out has a rule: if you play, you have to do "chores." The usual way you do chores is by working a shift at some team job. Since I was playing "remote," not in one of the team's big gathering spots, there was just one job open to me: "Comm Czar," the job formerly known as "Remote Czar." A remote player who has just woken up from a refreshing nap, wanting to re-join the team effort but unsure of a good puzzle to work on, can ask the Remote Czar. The Remote Czar, to provide useful advice, can keep a weather eye on the currently-opened puzzles; or consult with other "Czars" keeping track of the currently-open puzzles. Since there aren't that many remote players re-joining at any given time, the Comm Czar duties are pretty light. While on duty, you can spend most of your time solving puzzles, just taking an occasional break to answer a question.
At 03:00 (06:00 Cambridge time), I was pretty sleepy. I wasn't in a state to solve puzzles. On the other hand, I didn't just want to wander away from my laptop to drowse: if I fell asleep, I might miss a question from a remote solver, sending their morale into a spiral. So I kept myself awake by going over the list of open puzzles and doing some gruntwork. Copy-pasting puzzle content into shared spreadsheets; doing a first pass of internet research on some citrus fruit; fixing some broken permissions. Nobody asked me any questions; if I'd fallen asleep, I would have gotten away with it.
My shift ended. I drowsed. I got up; kibbitzed on the team chat,
went out, came back, took a nap, kibbitzed some more.
I was hanging out in the team chat when the puzzle
"Financial Literacy" came up, with a surprising
reference to Curtis Chen, kind of a
big deal in the SF Bay Area
puzzlehunt scene back in the 'aughts; that was before he moved up
to Portland, Oregon and co-founded
Puzzled Pint.
Probably just a coincidence
that he got a mention in Hunt, but it was delightful. Chat lit up
for a bit with folks getting caught up on Curtis' recent doings.
Saturday and Sunday I did errands, visited, read my socials; in between I kept up with the team chat. The running team started handing out hints; but not to us, we were still in the running to win. A long time later, we were no longer in the running to win, thus we could have hints. Later still, we heard that Team Providence, from Brown University, had won, had found the coin. Some Left Out team members kept plugging away until early Monday; but even then, they didn't finish.
Things I want to remember:
- Playing "remote" was OK, actually. Yes, face-to-face is nice. OtOH,
- But I gotta remember to look up occasionally.
