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Someone out there is going to take a timed break from running a content farm, read this, and get a faraway look for a second.

My team, Death and Mayhem, organized the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt. The hunt was a great success. Many people commented that it was the best mystery hunt ever.

This year, we added a new and interesting feature. Not only were teams allowed to choose which puzzles to unlock, but they were also given a short description of each puzzle in addition to its title. So, small teams who liked crosswords could choose to work only on crosswords.

As usual, I will list the mathy puzzles, including our official puzzle descriptions. All the puzzles can be found at the hunt’s All puzzles page.

We had a special round called Stakeout, with easy puzzles. My team isn’t too nerdy, so we didn’t have too many mathematical puzzles overall, and just two puzzles with a math flavor in the Stakeout round, incidentally coauthored by me. Somehow, I like designing easy puzzles. There were two additional puzzles in this round that I enjoyed during testing. I loved the popsicle puzzle so much that I brought it to my grandchildren to solve.

• A Math Quiz: A list of math questions.
• A Sudoku?: Grids with numbers.
• Anything Is Popsicle: Physical Puzzle — popsicle sticks.
• Some Assembly Required: A list of phrases and a word bank.

The first round wasn’t too difficult either. Several people praised the ChatGPT puzzle, though it’s not mathy.

• ChatGPT: A blank textbox with a text entry field below it.

Now, moving to more difficult puzzles, Denis Auroux is famous for designing fantastic logic puzzles. His puzzles below aren’t easy, but many people loved them. I even heard magnificent as praise.

• Maze of Lies: A text adventure exploring a maze.
• Bermuda Triangle: Triangular battleship puzzles.
• This is Just a Test: A bunch of grid logic puzzles.
• Good Fences Make Otherwise Incompatible Neighbors: A hexagonal logic puzzle.

Here are two puzzles I test-solved and enjoyed. The first one is a logic puzzle, while the second one isn’t math-related.

• Unreal Islands: A grid filled with letters and numbers.
• To Do: Tile That Rectangle: Rectangles of different lengths with words on the center and edges.

Here are two puzzles that I edited and highly recommend. The first puzzle was initially called Gin and Tonic; I wonder if anyone can guess why.

• Follow The Rules: An interactive interface with a grid of toggle switches and a grid of lights.
• Incognito: Cryptic crossword.

These are math-related puzzles that people liked.

• The Inspectre: Physical Puzzle — A bag of acrylic pieces and a sheet of paper.
• Knights of the Square Table: A 9×9 grid logic puzzle.
• Do The Manual Calculations (Don’t Try Monte Carlo): Some unusual chessboards and graphs with rules.

I asked only a few people for recommendations. These are math-related puzzles that weren’t mentioned but seem cool. The fourth puzzle was an invitation to the Mystery Hunt, which, not surprisingly, was a puzzle.

• The 10000-Sheet Excel File: An Excel file with 10000 sheets.
• Eponymous Forensic Accountant: Physical Puzzle — Bring your own bag (The PDF with receipts is available).
• _land: A thin, multicolored horizontal line.
• Engagements and Other Crimes: A printed invitation.
• A Map and a Shade (or Four): A chart with letters, colors, ticks, crosses, and a series of pie charts below.
• Garden Anecdotes: Post-it notes and some gibberish text.

I also got a recommendation for a non-math puzzle, which I would definitely have enjoyed watching solved. I’m not sure I’d enjoy solving it alone.

• Men’s at My Nose: A series of quotes.

Finally, here is the list of non-math puzzles that seem cool. A warning about the first puzzle: It’s rated R. The first three puzzles are relatively easy; they are from the Stakeout round.

• A Recipe For Success: Several completely normal and reasonable pickup lines.
• Charged: Interactive interface with text entry boxes and lines between them.
• Magic i: Two columns of text.
• Star Crossed: A large isometric grid of letters in the shape of a circle.
• Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt: A series of colorful dropquote puzzles.

Here is a video from Cracking the Cryptic, joined in this episode by Matt Parker, titled Matt Parker Sets Us A Challenge!. The video is devoted to the second part of the puzzle Maze of Lies, mentioned above, by Denis Auroux and Becca Chang.

ssh tiny.christmas

ssh tiny.christmas leads you to a little christmas tree with a global singalong.

Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/tiny-christmas

I am a proud member of the Death and Mayhem team, which participates in the MIT Mystery Hunt every year. This year, our team had the honor of running the hunt.

Here is a puzzle I contributed, titled A Math Quiz. It consists of a list of math problems. I am especially happy that I was able to turn a collection of cute math puzzles into a puzzle-hunt challenge with a word or phrase as its final answer.

New Yorkers love preserved fish – particularly on top of a bagel with a nice hearty schmear of cream cheese. My favorite preserved fish in New York City comes from Russ & Daughters, an icon of New York cuisine that’s been around since 1914.

But this article isn’t about preserved fish of New York. It’s about Preserved Fish of New York, a human man with a very bizarre name.

Top: Preserved Fish
Bottom: preserved fish

Preserved Fish, born in 1766, was a member of the prominent Fish family, which produced centuries of New York politicians.¹ Preserved’s distant cousin Hamilton Fish, for example, was Secretary of State under president Ulysses S. Grant.

A Fish family genealogy indicates that Preserved Fish of New York City was far from the only member of his family named Preserved (pronounced with three syllables as preh-ZUR-ved). The same source helpfully points out “There is no foundation for the oft-repeated story that he was picked up from a floating wreck by a New Bedford fisherman, and therefore named Preserved Fish.” Good to clear that up. The name “Preserved” is actually a Quaker one, coming from a desire that the child be preserved from sin.

Preserved Fish appropriately began his career as a whaler, and soon shifted to selling whale oil. He later became wealthy from the shipping industry more generally. Even during his day, people made fun of his name. The genealogy recounts this story:

“When a vessel near New York Harbor passed another, one called to the other, ‘Ship Ahoy!’, getting the answer, ‘The Flying Fish.’

‘Who’s your Captain?’ ‘Preserved Fish.’

‘What’s your Cargo?’ ‘Pickled fish.’

‘Where bound?’ ‘Fishkill.’ ”

Fish was a key player in New York society, though a quirky one. He got in early as a trader on the New York Stock and Exchange Board, a precursor to today’s New York Stock Exchange. He abruptly abandoned the shipping company he helped run, Fish and Grinnell (leaving it to become Grinnell, Minturn & Co.), and hopped around starting other companies before eventually becoming president of a bank.

For a time, Preserved Fish even controlled Tammany Hall, the political organization that essentially ran the New York City Democratic party, and by extension the city itself. While in charge, he fended off a challenge by the similarly absurdly named “Locofocos”, a group of reformers opposed to government banking, paper money, and entrenched interests in politics. The Locofocos got their name from an incident early in their movement’s history, while they were fighting Preserved Fish for control of the city’s Democratic party machine. When the reformers stormed Tammany Hall,² the party’s leaders shut off the building’s lighting gas. The reformers responded by lighting candles with a new brand of self-igniting matches, the eponymous “Locofocos”.³

The matchsticks, in turn, were named by someone who misunderstood root words. The brand name combined “foco”, a late Latin word for “fire” (think Spanish “fuego”) with the “loco-” in “locomotive”, which many people at the time incorrectly thought meant “self” (it actually means “from a place”). So “self-fire” was the intended meaning.⁴

To editorialize a bit, Preserved Fish has a pretty typical story for a New York Merchant in the early 19^th century. He’s definitely work mentioning in a history book, but probably wouldn’t take up a full chapter. Still, he did quite well for himself as a person with a strange name – I’d say he’s definitely loxed and loaded.

Coming soon: There are too many kinds of barcode