2025 MIT Mystery Hunt
A year of radios, art deco details and side-quests
I don't think it will come as a surprise to anyone who knows me to learn that for this year's MIT Mystery Hunt I had my fingers in dozens of different pies - Deputy Ops, Ops liaison to Experience, Fabrication team, Radio team, Puzzle author, Test-solver. At one point this fall it felt like every time I opened Discord I had been added to yet another new channel.
I have a lot of thoughts about the experience of creating a Mystery Hunt but let's start with the basics. What did I do for the last year of my life? I made things.
There's a long running joke that my area of expertise is in the design and construction of things roughly the size of a breadbox but at one point as I was explaining the most recent thing I was working on to one of my teammates, they burst into hysterical laughter and inquired if I had any idea how big a breadbox actually is.
Puzzles
In the runup to hunt weekend I was a little bit surprised to discover that there was speculation amongst people who know me on other teams about my involvement with physical puzzles. People seemed to be assuming that I would have had my hand in a number of the physical puzzles and I remember being startled by the assumption. I mean, I didn't not have my hand in physical puzzles, I am after all a member of the fab(rication) team, but while I helped to manufacture several of them, I didn't write any of them.
So which puzzles did I write?
The original idea for this called for it to be a significantly harder late round puzzle, but in development we quickly determined that it would be far more fun if it was a simpler "fish" puzzle. This was actually one of the very first puzzles to pass test solving in the spring, and the 2nd puzzle to be officially declared "done".
Earlier this fall when Arcturus and I were going over the list of props and sets needed for the Gala, it occurred to us that since the Gala was ostensibly taking place IN an art gallery, we were probably going to need some art. Since the Art Team already had a lot on their plate we decided to simplify the problem by writing a puzzle and taking care of the art ourselves. (Arcturus created the art for Untitled 1, and Untitled 7, I created the art for the other 5). This puzzle was on display in the Gala starting on Friday night and required teams to submit artwork of their own in exchange for the solution. Alas, we realized far too late that our assigned solution probably could have been changed just slightly to still work with the Meta but to allow us to use the same puzzle mechanic to point teams to the final answer. (And by too late I mean that in late December our team was not going to change a Meta feeder just so we could give teams a postcard with one final painting on it. But we wanted to, and that's what matters.) Here is the bad photoshop version of our proposed final image.
I was working on "Untitled 5" one evening at the conclusion of a radio work weekend, while Evan and James sat across from me laughing hysterically as they plotted yet another ridiculous radio puzzle. As James was one of my editors on this puzzle, I held it up for the two of them to admire/critique. "It definitely looks like Elmo," Evan assured me, "but will you be offended if I tell you he probably shouldn't be that pink?". "We'll see what the test solvers think," said James as I tried desperately not to burst out laughing.
No Evan, I will not be offended.
It's All Cheep (and a Sheep) to Me
This puzzle was very much written with one of my friends in mind. More importantly, it had to happen - the referenced media is far too good/bad/amazing/awful not to share it with the greater hunt community.
This monstrosity has been the subject of a slew of ongoing jokes amongst my teammates. It even made the list of our trolliest puzzles (behind The Center is in Plain Sight, and Given Up) and that's quite an accomplishment on this team.
Ariel definitely did most of the heavy lifting on this one but the idea for what is essentially a "Dunk Konundrum" came about as a result of the EICs pointing us at each other and suggesting we find some way to merge our two puzzle ideas (she wanted a road rallye puzzle, I wanted a dunk-around). Getting two clean solves of this required some doing and our editors and fact checkers and test solvers spent hundreds of hours going through this puzzle with a fine toothed comb trying to catch all the problems - amazingly it was NOT the last puzzle to be declared "done" (and that's without even counting the scavenger hunts).
Of all the puzzles for which I am listed as an author, this is probably the one that I had the least involvement with. I helped come up with the initial idea and did some research (into a tangent that proved fruitless), and helped a bit with wordsmithing but Erin was really the one responsible for making this one materialize.
Scavenger Hunts
Early in the process James accused us of trying to create 5 scavenger hunts in a trench coat. In the end this ended up as 4 separate scavenger hunts (no trench coat), only 2 of which (the radio ones) we actually ended up launching.
Trainee's First Recital - a radio performance of the Star Spangled Banner (this one was Evan's idea)
The Comeback: It Takes Two - a radio duet (this one was my idea)
Infiltrating the Criminal World and RE-Infiltrating the Criminal World
One of the things that no doubt confused people at the Gala were the empty plinths arrayed to one side. These plinths were intended to display our favorite scavenger hunt submissions (and we hoped, encourage teams to battle it out to curry our favor) but since we never launched either of these hunts, the plinths remained confusingly empty all weekend. Our other brilliant scavenger hunt idea was to use it as a way to help fill our "vault" for the endgame. Some of the submissions called for the creation of physical items such as a replacement Shadow Diamond, a Stack of Fat (team branded) Cash, and a forgery of (what they envisioned might be) this year's coin. I actually think our scavenger hunt tasks were really good and I'm disappointed that we didn't launch them while simultaneously thankful as we already had a whole lot of things going on, we definitely didn't have the time and staffing for any more.
Fortunately we weren't reliant on them as at some point a week or two before it had occurred to me that we could also stock the vault by making money bags. Fiber arts are not my area of expertise, but Helene assured me that some basic bags would be easy enough to make from random fabric, old pillowcases, and a sage tablecloth or two (IYKYK). The plan was to sew some bags, paint dollar signs on them, stuff them with recycling, stick them in the vault, and call it a day. Simple and easy and a number of people contributed bags to the cause.
In addition to writing the puzzles listed above I also assisted with the manufacturing of several puzzles:
While simple to assemble, collating the cards for 120+ copies of this took rather a lot longer than I wanted. I also had some strong words for the creators about the difficulty of clipping all those tags onto the bags (my poor fingers).
And Now a Puzzling Word from Our Sponsors
Most of the hard work on this one was done by other people, I just needed to assemble the martini glasses and package everything. I mention it mostly because having it packaged and done and on the shelves ready to be loaded into the uhaul was a very satisfying moment. (Also because it required so many boxes, it was also the puzzle that pushed us onto the second set of shelves so being done with it felt like real progress.)
abstract art and poems / concerning a pale blue dot / and many more friends
This one involved hours of chopping on a paper cutter - fortunately I have interns. It also involved a lot of time with the Cricuts and I was so so relieved when 5 of my teammates drove to my house for a day of mindless cutting and assembly the weekend before hunt. Molly and Aletta really saved me on this one.
Seeing the Big Picture (Event)
This was the other big puzzle that we tackled during that work day at my house. We had rather a lot of shapes that needed to be cut out of laminated cardstock. Fortunately I was able to trick the printer into thinking that the 9x12 paper I was feeding it was actually 8.5x11 (and as such did not have to sweet talk my interns into cutting the pages down to size). But once it was printed it required laminating and I spent two days idly laminating pieces of paper with one hand while I worked on other things with the other. But with 377 sheets of paper that needed to be laminated I didn't get it all done and the first order of business when my team of helpers arrived was to finish laminating the last hundred sheets. And then we cut, and cut, and cut.
Anything is Popsicle - Steve did most of these but I spent several days at Pappalardo and we took turns refilling the laser cutter every time we walked by it. Next time I think we should just cut and engrave the sticks as one process instead of sorting through several thousand slightly out of dimensionally/diverse pre-made ones. Getting to use the bag sealer was surprisingly satisfying.
In addition to manufacturing, I also provided some sort of an assist to several other puzzles:
I created the packaging to hold the 6 drinks that were eventually picked up from the bar in the final stage of this puzzle. The packaging came about because from a logistical point of view I wanted the bartenders to be able to just grab a single instance of this puzzle and not to have to deal with the six bottles individually. While we could have certainly just rubber banded them, or thrown them in a bag, turning them into a mini six pack felt classier. Since art had way more important things to deal with I ended up creating a variety of packaging options (and colors) that I presented to the puzzle authors at the fall retreat.
The final packaging was printed professionally on 19x13 silver paper and then laser-cut. It was supposed to have been printed on cardstock of the same color but there was a snafu and with less than 2 weeks left until hunt, I opted to back each sheet with adhesive cardstock that I had on hand rather than fighting the company to have it reprinted.
If you didn't have a chance to sample these monstrosities, you missed out? Certainly one of my favorite moments from hunt weekend was when approximately 12 of us gathered around the bar on Sunday night and did shots of these. Conveniently we had a number of empty martini glasses behind the bar and these came in very useful.
Somewhere along the line I became aware that the final step of this puzzle asked teams to show off their fashion at the Gala. Someone threw out the suggestion that we install a photo booth in one corner of the Gala and before I knew it I was researching photo booth options. I quickly discovered that photo booths are super expensive to rent (especially for the amount of time we would require it for) as it's almost impossible to just rent a photo booth, rather you instead need to rent a photographer to go with the photo booth. While you can buy basic photo booth setups they seemed both tacky and unnecessary when all you really need is an iPad, a tripod, and a light. But this is me, so of course this didn't end up as just an iPad, a tripod, and a light. Rather I ended up creating an old fashioned bellows camera, that attached to a premade tripod and housed an iPad and a light ring. And because you can't have a photo booth without an appropriate backdrop, I remixed the MIT skyline from one of the rounds with the scallop design we were using throughout the Gala. And then of course if you're going to have a backdrop, you will probably need chalkboards, and thematic signs for people to hold, and then if you have signs you're going to want some sort of a stand to keep them neat and orderly for the duration of the weekend. I've been joking that I basically spent my year doing side quests and the stand was basically a side quest, of a side quest, of a side quest.
This puzzle was Steve's baby (and he did ALL of the hard bits) but I'm pleased to have been able to provide an assist. We knew from the beginning that if we were going to build an installation puzzle we were going to need to build two instances. I ended up designing the physical game cabinets and then turning my sketches over to my intern to build. The exact instruction I gave him was "build me two pianos, don't worry about the piano part". Fortunately my intern is fabulous and well up to the challenge. We were able to deliver the two pianos to Steve just before Thanksgiving.
The other thing we knew we wanted for this puzzle was a phone we could hang on the bar. There are a lot of enablers on this team and it only took a couple of hours to go from, "we should buy an old fashioned looking phone prop to have on the bar with an out-of-order sign", to "we should make an old fashioned looking phone to deliver the answer - we should also be able to make it ring anytime we want just by pressing a button".
The phone construction itself was pretty straight forward. I built it from some of the scrap wood that was left over from making the game consoles, and then 3D printed a variety of accessories for it. My biggest concern was that I knew that anyone who looked at it would feel immediately compelled to turn the handle, so that had to be able to move. And I was right, Evan and James were the first people to lay eyes on it and the very first thing they did was turn the handle. (Steve did the exact same thing when he saw it the next day so I felt vindicated in my assessment of the situation.)
Test Solving
Did you know that in order to write a puzzle hunt you also have to test-solve puzzles? I will admit to being pretty remiss on the test solving until sometime in mid November I learned that there was a leaderboard. Fortunately nobody would ever accuse me of being competitive so I did not immediately start paying way more attention to test-solving and increase my score from a paltry 12 to a more respectable 28 over the course of the next month and a half.
Our rule for ourselves was that every puzzle required two clean solves in order to graduate from test-solving. And while some puzzles made it through without issue, others required quite a number of edits before they graduated. Before opening a puzzle, test-solvers were essentially given the same information as we later gave to teams deciding what to unlock on the hunt site. Needless to say, stakeout puzzles were often gobbled up in an instant, while others languished for several days before a test-solve group assembled to tackle them.
One of the things that was really interesting about test-solving is that unlike hunt, where I would typically pick and choose what I wanted to work on, once you opened the test-solve window you were committed and as a result I solved a number of puzzles that I never normally would have. (I will admit to taking an inadvertent nap in the middle of at least one of them, but I assure you that even if I had been awake for that one I wouldn't have managed to do anything useful.)
That said, I never think of myself as being a particularly strong solver. While I'm great at spatial logic, I fail utterly at word play and have no interest in chess boards and a few other puzzle genres. Unfortunately only once did I manage to test a puzzle with a spatial logic component (actually that was pretty funny as one of the editors was watching us solve it and he looked away for about 30 seconds, and when he looked back the spatial part was done. "Wait, how did that happen?" "Oh whoops, sorry, I'm really good at those.")
That said, I think this experience has led me to discover that I'm actually a stronger solver than I think I am. Since I solved these puzzles over several months instead of in one long sleepless weekend, they're less of a blur to me, and I can think of several occasions when I had a really useful insight or got the aha, so I'm going to try to hold onto that new found confidence. Also if nothing else, writing puzzles helps to make you better at solving puzzles…
We also definitely fell afoul of the same pitfalls as our solvers did. One night in particular we very specifically decided not to solve the chess puzzle, only to end up with a stealth chess puzzle. I still feel betrayed.
I am very appreciative of Erin who was always willing to assure us that she believed we could solve the puzzle whenever we needed to hear it. Once it even worked and we solved the puzzle as soon as she said it out loud.
Gala
I think that's where my involvement with puzzles ended, which is good, as I had bigger fish to fry - there was a Gala to plan (and more importantly to make look like an event, and not just a large empty room).
We knew that we were going to be planning an event within an event from the beginning as a Gala/cocktail party was a major feature of the theme we decided on so we understandably started the year by trying to figure out WHERE we could host such a party. We had a variety of ideas and options that ranged in availability, cost, and capacity. We pursued several of these options throughout the spring and summer and eventually determined that Stata's R&D Commons was our most/only viable option.
When I had filled out the initial interest survey I had basically indicated that I wanted to BUILD-ALLLLL-THE-THINGS!!!!!!!! And James had very kindly messaged me and said that while I would probably get to build some things, there were a lot of makers on the team who were also going to want to build a lot of things so while I would undoubtedly be able to do some of that, I probably wasn't going to get to do a lot of it. (lol)
Thus chastised, I realized that I was going to need to figure out a different way to get involved, I had already joined the ops team (since I'm good at that stuff), but it wasn't going to scratch all the itches, so it was at this point that I started poking at the Experience people to see if I could get involved with them as well, I crafted an email suggesting that what we were missing was some sort of Ops to Experience liaison and volunteered myself for the role. Miraculously it worked and all of a sudden I was a member of both teams!
I was flushed with the success of my plan up until the moment Grant introduced me on the main experience channel as the person in charge of dealing with the Gala.
Fuck.
The problem of course was that the early part of planning the Gala wasn't really a thing I could do. A lot of the choices we would make were going to be very dependent on the space that we would acquire and that was a task that required someone connected to MIT to investigate. Also as the Gala was so interconnected with everything else it was very much an all hands on deck kind of thing, the result was that I seem to remember spending a lot of time in the late spring feeling guilty that there wasn't really much I could actually do.
Fortunately as the year trundled on there started to be things that I could do. We secured the space in Stata and started planning out how we'd use it (and how we'd direct teams to it). At some point in late August or early September we held an ops meeting in the space so that we could spend some time in it and try to figure out what should go where. We knew that we were going to have to break the space down every night, and also that we needed a way to hand out physical puzzles, probably from behind a bar since that was thematic. The wooden wall in the center of the space was the logical place to put such a bar and as I sat staring at it over the course of that meeting the idea for the light up bottle wall, with puzzles stored behind them rushed into my head and I drew furiously. By the time the meeting was over I had the idea pretty well fleshed out, lacking only the ornamental details.
One of the neat things about acrylic is that thanks to SCIENCE™ if you put light into it, that light can only exit at the edges or where you've disturbed the surface. What this means is that by laser cutting/engraving acrylic we could very easily create a lighted bottle display without having to use actual bottles. Even better since the bottles would just be a flat façade, we could store things (puzzles!) behind them. I also really loved the idea of the glowing bottles as a callback to the memory orbs in the 2018 hunt.
In the end we laser-cut the bottles out of acrylic, we used two different vectors, the first was a full cut of the outline to free them from the acrylic sheet, and the second was a partial cut designed to just cut through the paper mask so that we could selectively peel it off and use it as a mask for sandblasting. In order to ensure that the edges of the bottles were really obvious I left a sandblasted outline around each one. I was really pleased by how well they glowed, even in daylight conditions.
Since we knew that we would not be able to leave anything in the space overnight, it made sense that the bottle walls should be created out of wheelie shelves. This would allow us to move both the set and the puzzles back and forth for setup and assembly. Here I should mention that woodworking is not a thing I'm good at, so my initial design lacked the sophistication of the eventual setup. For events like this I have a rule about not suggesting things that I'm not personally able and willing to make, and I already knew that we needed to have a bar and that was already going to stretch the limits of my woodworking skills. I certainly wasn't going to unnecessarily complicate other parts of the set until I knew I had a handle on that.
Fortunately Death and Mayhem is a very talented team, and not only do we have people who like woodworking, we also have Brie (and we are keeping her, IIF can't have her back). Brie is an amazing carpenter and the two of us together are basically the dream team with an array of complementary skills. She's good at all of the things I'm bad at and vice versa. Needless to say, what started as a fairly minimal set quickly grew more complicated and I had a grand old time looking at images of art deco furniture, bars, and elevators, and doodling accordingly.
We did toy with the idea of embedding a puzzle into the bar but decided that it was more important not to create a situation where we were blocking access to the bar because people were trying to find/record the information that they needed to solve it. Since the bartenders were the main/first point of contact for teams, we wanted to make sure that they were accessible at all times.
While we decided on the design for the bar pretty fast the cladding for the shelves themselves took rather a lot longer and in the end it wasn't until we were finalizing the coin design that I finally nailed them down.
The reason for this is that we had decided as a team that we wanted the coin to feature a diamond shaped hole to represent the missing shadow diamond. While this cutout made sense on the front of the coin it was a little bit more awkward on the back. During the initial idea process, I had submitted a sketch of the gala bar riddled with Easter eggs and I was really excited when my teammates liked the idea and started brainstorming items that should make an appearance. Because I felt strongly that the diamond cutout needed to make sense on both sides of the coin, I realized that the missing diamond needed to be incorporated into the shelving design. This of course led to playing with a variety of diamond motifs before alighting on the eventual design. The fact that the diamond on the coin and the diamond on the bar are an exact match for each other is probably my favorite detail of the entire event. Also see what I mean about not knowing how big a breadbox is?
Speaking of the coin, if you haven't had a chance to look at it, it is fabulous. It was designed by Gareth who did an amazing job and really went out of his way to make sure that the items on it were properly representative of the real life items. I love all the little Easter eggs on the back surface. In addition to the bottles, there is also the MITropolis skyline, a variety of books from Papa's study, a polaroid from the stakeout, a disguise and a newspaper from the Trailing a Lead event, a stack of receipts (because we love receipts!), a martini (a very dry one no doubt filled with scrabble tiles), a cash register, my old fashioned telephone, and an adorable little radio.
Speaking of the missing diamond, one of the requests from the experience team was that the empty diamond plinth be on display in the Gala all weekend with velvet ropes around it and I think this ended up being a lovely little detail that made a lot of sense in the space. (I had nothing to do with this one, Brie and Arcturus magicked this into existence with a few things that they had on hand at Boxaroo.)
With the main set underway I turned my attention to additional details. The decorative cash registers came about as a result of a conversation about how we were going to handle puzzle pickups. 1930s-40s-50s or not, we were going to need laptops to run the ticketing program.
One of the things that I have long known about myself is that my favorite part of the design process is getting to play with the tiny little details that nobody would miss if they weren't there but that elevate a design from good to great. I think the cash registers are an excellent example of this. Nobody would have thought twice about it if we had just had our laptops on the bar, but not only were the cash registers just that much better, they were also the logical solution. They were beautiful art objects, they served an important function, and they made so much sense in the space that nobody even thought to question them. Of course we had art deco cash register facades that would perfectly hold a computer or tablet. If they hadn't been there nobody would have questioned it, but they also made so much sense being there that nobody questioned that either.
From my days working retail in high school and college, no matter the business, I remember well how the cash registers and terminals were always covered with notes. Contact info for various employees, passwords or instructions for accessing various systems, stock information, or shut down procedures, these terminals are always overrun with post-it notes and important slips of paper. As such, one of the things I found really amusing was that despite the fact that we were a fake bar, by the end of the weekend our cash registers had all sprouted notes of their own.
As for the design itself, at this point I had already mostly finalized the design of the packaging for the drinks we would be handing out for the final part of Kindred Spirits and as I started trying to decide what the cash registers should look like Evan made an offhand comment about a design language. Nothing for it but to carry the fan shape forward into the Gala space.
And indeed I did, you probably noticed the same pattern on the photo booth backdrop, and on one of the photo booth signs, and even on the cake.
Speaking of cake, did you know that there was a cake? I did not until the first week of January when Brie and Arcturus and I were going through the prop list with someone from the writing team. Apparently as part of the split-around (like a final runaround, but in this case the winning team would be divided into parts and each sent off to help a different member of the family accomplish some task before eventually arriving at the vault for the end game) we needed a cake. Not only did we need a cake, it needed to be a fairly large cake as the idea was that the team needed to sneak it through the hall, so large and unwieldy was the name of the game.
No worries, not only did Steve have some leftover foam in Pappalardo, he also had a circular jig for the hot wire cutter. So off I went to visit the lab and in the course of 40 minutes we transformed a pile of scraps into a pile of cake. I took them home with me and had my intern sand and paint them. I glued the pieces together, laser-cut some embellishments, and asked a friend of mine to pipe frosting (in the form of spackle) onto it. Spackle shall henceforth be referred to as forbidden frosting, as it was apparently the nicest quality frosting she has ever had an opportunity to pipe. Light and fluffy, perfect for all your cake decorating needs! (Amusingly this is the same friend who once brought me a portal cake for my birthday, that one she has frosted with real frosting and I was very distraught to cut into it and learn that the cake really was a lie.)
The final cake was so good that the experience team decided that rather than saving it just for the end game they wanted to display it at the Gala for the duration of the weekend. I was fine with this but my brain couldn't leave well enough alone, and on my drive to work on the Tuesday morning before hunt it occurred to me that at some point the cake was going to disappear for the endgame and when that happened wouldn't it be great if we had a single half eaten slice that we could replace it with. Fortunately this is why we have interns and an hour later I had a vaguely cake shaped piece of foam and a pile of painted crumbs in hand. I glued it to a gold dollar store plate and my friend came over again that evening to pipe a little bit more frosting.
Other items that needed to be made for the Gala included oversized radios to hide the speakers in so that we could have music in the space. This is another example of a completely unnecessary item that nobody would have missed if it wasn't there. We could have just put modern speakers in the space and nobody would have noticed or cared, but that seemed inelegant. This particular detail was so unnecessary however that I really went back and forth on it. In the end it was Evan's suggestion that I use fabric for the sides of them that tipped the balance and made me actually make these - I had been stuck in a loop of indecision about what approach to take. The existing design was at the limits of what I could reasonably 3D print and I was struggling to think of a manufacturing method for a larger version that would be fast and easy to do. As a result I was waffling between doing nothing (which was disappointing) and designing some completely new wooden radio cabinet type housing (which I really didn't have time for), so the suggestion of fabric solved the problem by turning a scaled version of the radio into something that was easy to make. Better yet, it was easy to make multiples, which I ended up needing to do once the experienced team discovered that plans for the large radios were in the works. While I had originally intended to make two (for the Gala) in the end I made 5 (for the Gala, the speakeasy, the safehouse, and the vault).
I was pretty sure that people were going to try turning on the dials on these at some point over the course of the weekend, so they needed to actually turn. I was right - I lost count of the time I saw people try to adjust the station or the volume.
I found the “bigger but dumber” oversized radios inordinately amusing and couldn’t resist sending the radio team my version of a deep fake video once I finished making them.
I was up late Tuesday night, packing up puzzles, props, and my own supplies and materials (not to mention clothing and costumes). The U-Haul was set to arrive at my house around noon the next day so everything needed to be staged. In addition to all the things I'd made, we'd also been staging all of the completed puzzles in their boxes at my house. So the contents of my hallway had to go into the U-Haul to await load in on Friday morning. The contents of my dining room, to be packed into Fro's car to go to the hotel. And the pile of radios and other electronics, packed into 21 paper boxes in the middle of the kitchen which would travel down to MIT in my car with me. (At some point earlier this fall I had assigned my intern the task of determining how many paper boxes would fit in the back of my car - his answer was 22, but I think I could have managed 24.)
By the time I got home on Wednesday afternoon my hallway was empty, the U-Haul was gone, and I had only to wait for the 3D printer to finish one last thing before I could head to Pappalardo with a carload of radios.
Radio
Probably I should talk about the radio huh?
We started talking about a radio fairly early on, certainly people were already poking at electronics at our first work session in March. Evan claims that it was Michele's idea, but Michele is unwilling to take the blame for this. However it came about, work was underway by mid-March and it was going to need some sort of housing. I don't know if you've noticed this, but a radio is definitely breadboxed sized, this project was practically calling my name.
Unfortunately Evan was leading the charge, and as my only interaction with him up to that point had been when he yelled at me and a few of my friends during Mystery Hunt, I was pretty sure that he was a huge jerk. But the idea of a radio, and more importantly the idea of getting to design a custom housing for it and then spinning up small scale manufacturing to actually produce it, was basically a siren song. I wanted in on this project so badly.
So I started researching. It turns out that radios of this era are gorgeous art objects. Since radios were actually fairly new, the first radios were invented in the 1890s and the first radio broadcasts didn't begin until the early 1910s with consumer radios not commercially available until 1920, there wasn't yet a design language governing what radios should look like. As a result, radios from this era are amazingly diverse, they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and are made from a wide range of materials. Some of them were stunningly beautiful and as I researched, I doodled.
Since I knew that whatever design we picked was going to have to be something that we could fairly easily mass produce I spent quite a bit of time thinking about our manufacturing options and with our first retreat just a week or two away I decided to pick a couple of the designs I was most interested in and mock them up.
While I liked the look of some of the radio cabinets, I felt that they would all be too big for our purposes. A lot of the smaller wood radios of the era were curved but since kerfing wood seemed like asking for trouble I decided to focus my attention on things that we could more easily achieve with a laser cutter and/or 3D printer. In my research I had been really drawn to some of the Bakelite radios of the era so I decided to experiment with that kind of a look. In the end I showed up to the Spring retreat with two options, one that was more boxy that relied heavily on laser-cut wood, and another that relied on a 3d printed shell design. Since one of the things I knew we would want to do would be to disguise the speaker and avoid visible fasteners, I took the opportunity to experiment with a couple of different options for doing so.
You have to remember that while this team has solved together for years, I was brand new to the group and hardly knew anyone. I had emailed James a week before hunt asking if he would take a handful of us in and we had mostly kept to ourselves during hunt as we didn't want to step on anyone's toes. By the start of the Spring retreat I had only met a handful of my teammates and almost none of them had any idea of who I was, let alone that I have a penchant for designing and mass producing things roughly the size of a breadbox.
As such I was torn between glee at how good the prototypes looked, and horror that I was essentially butting my way into a project that I hadn't exactly been invited to. Fortunately the group that was poking at electronics were suitably enthused by my sample enclosures that they didn't notice my impertinence and before I knew it I had a seat at the table.
Here I should note that Death and Mayhem is actually a super welcoming group of people (and Evan is actually very nice when you're not breaking the rules like we were), but the radio felt like such an important project that I felt guilty pushing my way into it as a new/unknown person. Don't worry, that didn't last but it's interesting to reflect on where I was a year ago vs where I am today. Definitely some imposter syndrome going on.
Regardless, the mockups were a big hit, with the mint green shell the more popular of the two. Alas it was deemed too 1950s looking for our purposes. "Who told you that?" asked James as he cuddled the radio to his chest. "Simone, the art lead." "Oh."
Fortunately I had ideas about how the design could be modified for a slightly older/grittier look. What mattered here was that the people felt that the shell design was reasonable from a manufacturing perspective, and that they liked the look of the fabric to cover and disguise the speaker and fasteners. I could work with that.
Over the course of the summer, I refined the design. Looking through my sketchbook, I am reminded that at one point we discussed a physical puzzle that involved partially disassembling the radio so that parts of it could be used to interact with another larger physical radio. So I have a number of notes and sketches about how to protect the electronics we cared about while letting teams go haywire on the rest of it. You can imagine my relief when that idea eventually fell to the wayside. And indeed we eventually sat down to author a document entitled "Inviolable Radio Rules (Do Not Violate)".
There are only two rules:
Uses of the radio that require the radio to be in motion must not rely on an active, ongoing, reliable internet connection.
No disassembly. At all. None. No open shell.
By the time the end of summer rolled around I had refined my design pretty significantly. I'd ditched the mint green for black, found a coarse fabric, slightly yellowed from decades spent sitting in what I could only imagine was Billy's smoke filled detective office, and discovered that for puzzle reasons it was going to need legs.
Meanwhile Steve and Evan had spent the spring and the summer designing the board and I had watched in fascination as they passed design ideas and board iterations back and forth in a discord channel. I only understood about one word in 100 but the conversation was fascinating, apparently even in 2025 designing a radio is a lot harder than you'd expect it to be. But what mattered was that we had some prototype boards to play with and it was time to start locking things down.
Evan arranged to fly into town for the first of many "radio weekends" and the four of us (myself, Evan, Steve, and Arcturus) gathered in Pappalardo to take stock of where we were and to make some choices. Arcturus and I had gotten together towards the end of August and we were feeling good about the shape and size of the black shell and the little legs. So it was time to turn my attention to the design of the radio face. Dials! Buttons! Random decorative elements! What did I want this thing to look like? In the week or two leading up to this meeting I spent quite a bit of time doodling options and I set myself the goal of showing up to radio weekend with an array of options for my teammates to choose from.
Radio weekend #1 was a success. We were joined in the lab for a few hours at a time by a handful of our other teammates who were planning to write various radio puzzles. By the end of Saturday not only did we have a plan for what we wanted our radios to look like (and Arcturus was starting to finetune the design for manufacturing), but James, Evan, and Eric had significantly refined the plan for the puzzle that would eventually become Songs on the Radio (what do you mean you want to play Bop-It with our precious radios??!?!?). There was also a significant amount of laughing over the song "Never Gonna Give You Up", but who can truly say which puzzle that was in reference to.
Arcturus in their role as Fabrication Coordinator (for everything in the hunt, not just the radio), leapt into action and while I turned my attention to some of the other things that needed designing, Arcturus started spec’ing parts, tweaking tolerances, and just generally figuring out how we were going to mass produce this thing. They also took my initial CAD files and turned them into an insane assembly that they then went on to produce all sorts of exploded views and diagrams from.
One of the things we needed in order to put the radio into production was the fabric for the front face. At the start of the summer I had bought a couple yards of a perfect fabric at Joann's Fabric and I was having a lot of trouble finding more of it. Clearly my intern should have run for the hills as the very first task I gave him involved calling every Joann's in New England in an attempt to find more. Alas while I had the SKU number, it was useless as Joann's apparently sells hundreds of different types and styles of fabric as remnants under that number.
Undeterred I set out on an epic misadventure one evening, but alas I struck out. I tried a few other places, but nothing I was finding was anywhere as good. Burlap didn't have a tight enough weave to disguise the things we wanted the fabric to disguise and everything else we found was either too gray or too beige. We really liked the two toned nature of the fabric we had found and the yellow spoke to us of a disreputable smoke filled PI office.
Neither of us were content with any of the options we were finding and we discussed (and abandoned - look how much restraint we showed!) everything from weaving our own, to dyeing one of the inferior fabric options.
By the time the Fall retreat came around we were growing increasingly saddened by our failure to find anything comparable and we were also running out of time. I brought fabric samples to the retreat and sent them home with a number of different people in hopes that they might have more luck and Sue came through with shining colors. She visited a local fabric store and the people there helped her figure out what it might be and where she might find something similar. A couple of days later she sent us links to a handful of options and we sent away for samples.
Success! One of the fabrics was perfect for our needs, and months later as I compare the two I have to admit that I much prefer the one we ultimately went with to the one we couldn't find.
Somewhere along the line we decided that the radio was going to need an instruction book to go with it and as a joke one evening I mocked one up in the style of a 1930s instruction manual, complete with an era-appropriate little D&M logo (for Diodes & Microcircuits).
While the logo may have started as a joke, soon enough it was popping up everywhere. Its first appearance was on the radio dial, and then I realized it would look good on the cash registers, and then Grant needed a logo for the event invitation, and then all of a sudden every time I turned around someone had plopped it on something. And then my teammates started remixing it. Steve made a logo for the switchboard puzzle that resembled the old AT&T and IBM logos with white space cutting through the logo, and then the art team made a purple and gold one for our YouTube channel. Radios, TV stations, cash registers, printed invitations, pie servers, chalkboards, telephones, cameras, switchboards - clearly D&M is some sort of giant multinational corporation with their hands in dozens of different pies. (A few days before hunt Steve gave me a bag of D&M logos that he has laser-cut out of gold acrylic that turns black where engraved. These logos were backed with stickers, just in case I encountered anything that we had somehow forgotten to label.)
I spent the rest of October 3D printing shells, laser-cutting front plates and running back and forth to the city to pick up piles of miscellaneous parts. I had finished my attic in the spring, turning it from an unfinished space into a large workroom, so the plan was to do radio assembly at my house. As such on the last Saturday in October a whole slew of people showed up on my doorstep for the first of many radio assembly work parties.
I'd picked up Evan, Crispy, and several large boxes of parts from the city the night before. Steve had lent us a handful of nice soldering irons from Pappalardo, and Arcturus had put together step by step instructions, illustrated with drawings from the CAD model. We were ready to go!
Our eventual goal was 125 radios and at this first session we soldered daughter boards, assembled connectors, attached the speakers, stand offs, and dials to the front face, glued fabric, tested (the world's sketchiest) batteries, cut and assembled wire for wiring harnesses, and soldered buttons (this was one of the most skilled tasks as in order to keep the costs low we had not been able to buy from reputable sellers like digikey and a week or two prior we had discovered that the heat of the soldering iron on the lugs was enough to melt the plastic such that the buttons failed).
Three weeks later we were back at it again, this time with a slightly smaller group. I’d picked up Evan from the airport the night before and (since his plane was late), much to his horror, greeted him with a sign.
This time we installed front plates, attached legs (with the wiring harnesses), superglued the front rings, and installed the main boards. It was during this assembly weekend that James and I were handed a radio and asked to test-solve the musical portion of Songs on the Radio. At the time we were told it was because they wanted to get an idea of how challenging musically inept people would find the challenge, but in retrospect I suspect that our team members just wanted a good show. We did not disappoint. Here is the extended cut of the video that we showed at wrap-up.
As we made really good progress on the radios, we also had time for some test solving. We managed to get through It's Not Clear fairly quickly and then failed utterly at Engagements and Other Crimes, that particular puzzle is not at all my area of expertise and while I knew exactly what I needed to do I found myself completely incapable of actually doing it. Fortunately my annual dessert auction was approaching quickly and I was able to hand it off to Ross who had no trouble finishing it.
Fast forward another three weeks and it was time for another radio weekend. I had laser-cut all of the back plates in the intervening time but the wood I used was warping spectacularly. I've honestly never seen anything like it, the plates were pretty much jumping off the bed as soon as the laser cut them free. I had concerns and I ended up dragging Evan back to my lab one night so I could cut an extra 60 plates out of some wood that Steve had laying around. Later that evening found the two of us kneeling at the top of the stairs testing each backplate one by one for warping by evaluating them against the flat tread. It was one of those moments that made me question my hobbies.
The next day we glued the magnet sensors to the backplate, cleaned up any white marks from the superglue, installed the batteries (I might just possibly have let the magic smoke out of one of them, apparently our board did not include any protections against people installing batteries the wrong way round), affixed warning labels (the creation of which had pushed me to the very limits of my graphic design skills), and serial numbers to the back plate, and started provisioning them.
I had had to go to work (albeit only for a couple of hours) while some of this activity was taking place and things were not going well. Boards seemed to be failing to turn on left and right and Evan was growing increasingly worried. He and Steve were in frantic discussion on discord and in between my classes I ran around like a crazy person trying to throw together the supplies that would be needed for Evan to diagnose the problem.
By the time I got home (with two multimeters, a portable power supply, and a whole box of miscellaneous electronic bits) there were 40 radios set aside - my heart sank. While we were expecting some manufacturing defects we were not expecting to lose 30% of the boards.
Nothing for it but to get back to work, so I joined Erin who was continuing to work on physical assembly while Evan tried to figure out what was going on. Very relieved to discover that the problem seemed to be an inrush issue and one that could be circumvented by turning on the radio before plugging it in, made a note to add that to the instruction booklet.
Evan took a second pass through the radios and when he was done we had 7 boards that wouldn't work. 4 of them had bad flash, 2 of them had mystery issues, and 1 was the one I let the magic smoke out of. When we were calibrating them the next day we would identify a magnet board that didn't have a sensor on it, and one additional radio that we deemed "working but sus", we made a note to hand it out last. All told we had 117 radios we trusted. Now it was time to sit back and try not to fret as we watched team registrations come in. We felt fairly confident that we'd have less than 117 teams on campus, but we were worried about backups, what if something went wrong?
Over the next few weeks I packed up the radios and shifted them downstairs to the kitchen to await transport to MIT. Since we were worried about freezing conditions I drove them straight to campus with me, and on the Wednesday night before hunt the radio team assembled one last time in Pappalardo to assign the radios to teams and connect them to the MIT network (so they could download all of the assets they would need).
We had some fun with radio assignments, giving 0110 to Palindrome, 69 to Singles Ready to Stay Inside, and 17 to Random.
I had brought all of the spare parts down to Steve the week before in a box that I had labeled as the "Anti-Hubris Box", designed to appease the gods of consumer electronics. Weirdly as we were charging the radios we discovered that a handful of the shells were pretty significantly out of spec, with one side much higher than the other in a way that I wouldn't have expected to be possible the way they were 3D printed. The result of this was that on a handful of the radios, inserting a USB charger was causing the board to pop out of alignment. Fortunately the hubris box contained a number of radio shells that were complete except for the main board so it was fairly easy (albeit annoying) to just swap the boards into different shells.
A handful of our teammates came over to help so we set them the task of screwing in the 4 tiny screws that held the back cover closed and affixing the tamper proof stickers. Before I knew it we were done. We loaded the radios back into their boxes, into the car, and took them to the hotel where I unloaded them all onto a table and plugged the first set of 15 in to charge and went to bed.
The next day was spent charging radios and packing team boxes. Because the radios were individually assigned to teams, as each radio turned green and came off the charger, it was necessary to check their assignment before packing them lovingly into a nest of lanyards and sealing the box closed. Amusingly Left Out's Radio was the very last one to finish charging and be packed away.
All told there were six puzzles that involved the use of the radios:
While I didn't actually write any of these, I was obviously spoiled on all of them and enjoyed watching the development. I helped Quentin assemble and deploy the transmitters for "Given Up" and as a result have come to more fully appreciate the song "Never Gonna Give You Up". I'm pretty sure I horrified him by dancing to it as I was testing the range on some of the transmitters, but how else was he going to know that I could hear it when I was on the other side of a glass wall?
One of the problems we ran into with early tests of Songs on the Radio was testers missing that the knock was a note and not just for the activation. We had a long discussion about this one afternoon and I ended up suggesting that we not only inform teams that there were 6 actions, but that we also unlock them a few at a time as they progressed through the songs and basically treat it more like a game tutorial than a straight puzzle.
I also suggested a couple of the clue phrases for Can-Do Transmissions. Look at me writing word clues - next stop crossword!
Hunt Weekend
The leadup to hunt was crazy, there was a lot to do and not a lot of time left to do it in.
But (in my opinion at least) the late nights and the stress were worth it.
All told I had a fantastic weekend on campus. In partnership with Arcturus (who had the late shift), my role for the weekend was that of Gala Boss, in charge of making sure the public face of the event was running smoothly and putting out fires when it wasn't.
I'm pleased to say that for the most part it went fairly smoothly, there were a few minor things on Friday as teams learned how to interact with the space, and as we rushed around trying to get all the things unpacked and the other rooms set up. We (by which I mean I) also made a few mistakes like locking the dartboard setup into a room that we didn't have card access to. We also were right down to the wire getting everything set up by the 1pm deadline. I was very relieved when a CAC representative came through the space on Friday night and decided that our setup was so well done that we could leave the bar and shelves set up overnight. Not having to break the bar and shelving down each day was a huge quality of life improvement. As it was, getting it setup again every morning took some time. While we obviously prioritized getting the puzzles on the shelves and the terminals set up, there was a crowd ready and waiting at 6:15am on both Saturday and Sunday morning ravenous to get their hands on some Mystery O's (part of a complete breakfast!)
Somehow despite never leaving the Gala, I managed to walk 10.5 miles on Friday night. Unfortunately I did not do this in good shoes and as a result walking was extremely painful for the rest of the weekend. I solved the problem Saturday and Sunday by just parking myself behind the bar and letting the problems come to me. The bartenders would just escalate any unusual requests to me and in the meantime I ended up bartending which I hadn't expected to do (and which turned out to be a lot of fun).
Pressing the PRINT-ALLLLLLLLLL-THE-RECEIPTS button on the receipt printer never got old, and by the end of the weekend we were purposefully distracting people with random chatter so that they would not be prepared and ready to go with their bags.
My familiarity with the radios was also useful as I quickly turned into a radio whisperer. I was able to sweet talk a number of radios into working, or diagnose quite a number of simple user issues without having to escalate them to the people who were dealing with the more serious problems.
Interestingly, while we opened the hubris box 3 times on Wednesday night as we were deploying them, we never had to open it again since pretty much all the radio issues involved teams releasing the magic smoke from the charging chip. The prevalence of this problem was extremely disturbing on Friday afternoon and evening and I was very relieved when the tech team figured out a way to fix the boards. I was also really glad that we had a number of spares but for awhile there I know we were all wishing that we had significantly more spares than we actually did. I don't know what the final magic smoke count was but I do know that now that I'm home I'm a little scared to charge my own radio.
I really enjoyed all the art submissions, and was really glad that Arcturus and I wrote that puzzle. Dinosaurs and aliens turned out to be the most popular theory as to what had happened to the shadow diamond but I really liked the image of Gladys that someone on team emoji painted, although the untitled goose game theory was my very favorite.
I also really appreciated the range of finger paints that teams had used. While some teams had used actual paint, others had gotten creative with various food substances. One team gave me a very detailed description of how they had grown down blue sour patch kids to make the color that they had used for their sky, and used the run off of M&Ms for the other colors. Children died for this painting!
I had a number of really fun interactions with teams at the bar. I enjoyed getting to judge their recitals (admittedly some I enjoyed more than others), and I think we just generally had a lot of interesting physical puzzles that teams enjoyed receiving. It was also nice to have fairly frequent contact with team representatives as it gave us a way to keep an eye on team morale and direct teams to help if it looked like they were unhappy.
When teams showed up asking to pay their tab for Drunkens and Flagons, we all had a great time lambasting them for the "destruction they had caused to the bar the night before". At one point I went on at great length to representatives from team "Chips for Now" about the missing diamond cutouts on the bar and how they had been there the night before and about 20 minutes later they came back and gave me an origami diamond as an apology. I promptly hung it up in one of the cutouts.
One of the interesting things about the CYOA format was that very quickly we were getting requests for pretty much all of our puzzles. As a result we had to be ready to react to pretty much anything at any time. This got us into trouble on Friday when Ben from Palindrome swung by to give us cookies. The bartender who accepted them basically lambasted him for them before discovering that it wasn't in the ticket system and that he had just brought us cookies to be nice, and not because his team had solved the puzzle that directed them to bring us a baked good. The bartender in question felt awful for how mean she had been about it, whoops, "he'll figure it out in a day or two once they solve that puzzle"!
Speaking of baked goods, we received some horrors. One team brought us a selection of foods that people would eat while baked. This assortment included a gravy flavored candy cane which we of course broke into tiny pieces and handed around to anyone foolish enough to try it. Let me assure you that it was not a good flavor. Jason described it being "like Bisto suspended in treacle".
Another team brought us a horror on Saturday night and then came back on Sunday with an apology note and some very delicious homemade cookies.
One of the most amusing interactions I had occurred at 6:15am on Saturday morning when a member of Literally Animal Farm stormed into the room and announced very aggressively from about 20 feet away that he was there to flirt with a bartender.
Oh are you now? What followed was a shouting fight about how inappropriate it was to flirt with my staff who were just trying to do their jobs. When I finally let him deliver his pickup line (to one of my coworkers) he went with "Were you made by the Coronel, because you're finger licking good".
Seriously? Millions of pickup lines on the internet and you went with that one? I proceeded to lambast him for his awful taste in pickup lines before eventually giving him the puzzle answer that he was looking for with an admonishment to never visit my bar again.
Later that day I had someone from another team politely inquire as to whether he could flirt with me, when he informed me that he wanted to get consent first I just handed over the receipt. A++
As expected I ended up getting twitchy if I had to leave the Gala for any length of time, and this worked out as there were a number of problems and places where Arcturus' expertise was useful, so I ended up extending my Gala Boss shift pretty significantly most days. I did sneak out a few times and managed to see some friends on other teams which was really nice.
One of my favorite things about the Gala was that on Sunday afternoon/evening when people might instead start leaving (particularly on a night like this when it was snowing), many of them instead made their way to the Gala and started solving from there. Having spent a lot of time on a small team, and knowing how demoralizing those last few hours can feel once people start leaving, the energy and continued drive that permeated the Gala made me so happy. We had teams solving right to the end and I really enjoyed the feeling of comradery and shared purpose.
At one point this fall I made an offhand comment about how it would be cool to have a jazzy version of the song “Closing Time” with which to close down the Gala each evening and like magic, an hour later Kat sent me one that she had created. At 10pm on Sunday night I turned the speakers up full blast and played that song, it felt like a fitting way to say goodbye to the magic that we had created. When it was over we started breaking down the set and took all the pieces to Pappalardo to sort in the morning.
I had fun dressing up and I enjoyed getting to wear my grandmother's hats. I did not however enjoy it when my mother draped my grandmother's fox stole around my shoulders at one point this summer. While I'm keeping the hats, the stole, which was made out of pairs of foxes sewn shoulder to shoulder and then head to tail, is an item that I hope to never lay eyes on, let alone touch, ever again. I can't decide which was more horrifying, the fact that the foxes still had their little faces, or their little feet.
All told I had a really good weekend, which capped off a phenomenal year. I was really fortunate that my teammates just set me loose and let me get up to all sorts of shenanigans. I had not realized what a puzzle shaped hole I have had in my life since the end of the Miskatonic University Game, but it turns out that I thrive on this type of an all consuming challenge. Having a ton of different things to design and build, and organize scratches all my creative itches and I have adored having the opportunity to collaborate with this group of people.
And what a collaboration it has been, while I was busy doing crazy things on the design side, other people were busy being just as insane on other aspects of this project. Did you know that people composed music and we had a custom soundtrack? Also there was a plot, and art, and acting, and a slew of really good puzzles, and a website, and some escape rooms, and all sorts of insane little details of which I can tell you very little but that some other people dedicated their entire years to. This is an entire team of overachievers and I am here for it!
Thank you to Arcturus, Steve, and Brie for being the most fabulous fabrication team in existence. #fab-team-is-fabuous. To Evan, Steve, and Arcturus for the opportunity to create something truly delightful in the form of the radio. And to Michele, Molly, and Laura for being so competent at the actual logistical stuff that I didn't feel the need to worry about it, and as such making it ok for me to run off and do crazy design shit all year. Thank you to James for adopting me and a handful of my teammates.
From the radio, to individual puzzles, to 377 sheets of laminated paper, thank you also to the many many people who helped us manufacture things, this was truly a team effort. I also really enjoyed the opportunity to test-solve puzzles that I might otherwise never have looked at, and it was really great to be able to put together a test-solve group on the spur of a moment anytime I found myself with a free evening, or in need of some entertainment or company. I am really going to miss having this project in my life, let's do it again in another 7 years.
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Wow that is a lot of stuff you did! I am very sorry I ended up never making it in to campus. I had intended to but things got in the way.
You're an absolute treasure!