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Puzzles

If you've never seen puzzlehunts before, the short explanation is that the goal of every puzzlehunt puzzle is to obtain an "answer", which is a short word or phrase. Beyond that, puzzles can come in many forms and usually contain no direct instructions; figuring out what to do is the puzzle. For a more in-depth tutorial and suggestions for first puzzles/puzzlehunts to try, you can read my blog post, Introduction to Puzzlehunts.

That is all to say, I've written quite a few puzzlehunt puzzles over the years. Some shortlists of puzzles I'm particularly proud of:

• If you're new to puzzlehunts:

  • Now I Know... (DPPH)
  • 15×15 (MH 2021)
  • Lime Sand Season (MH 2020, with Anderson Wang)
  • Unsafe (GPH 2019, with Azalea Weisblat)
  • Intersections (GPH 2020)

• If you're more experienced:

  • A Puzzle Consisting Entirely of Random Anagrams (MH 2015)
  • How to Run a Puzzlehunt (MH 2021)

The first puzzlehunt I participated in was the 2011 CiSRA puzzle hunt (archive.org link), with a bunch of people from Art of Problem Solving. In 2013 and 2014 (while I was in high school), I was invited to MIT's Random Hall team remotely to do the MIT Mystery Hunt; that team won in 2014 and thus wrote the 2015 hunt, which three of my puzzles made it into. Later that year, I got into MIT and started hunting primarily with ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈. With the same team, I've also helped run the annual Galactic Puzzlehunt as well as the 2021 MIT Mystery Hunt.

Full list of puzzles I've written

• My puzzles in the 2025 Galactic Puzzle Hunt (due to the nature of this hunt, linking to puzzles "doesn't really work", but I'll try anyway):

  • One-Time Use
  • Reduce
  • Symbolic Computation

• My puzzles in the 2024 Galactic Puzzle Hunt:

  • (unnamed)
  • (unnamed)
  • ANSWER
  • Clues
  • Colors
  • Exchange
  • FIRST LETTERS OF WORDS
  • Flags
  • Redundancy
  • THE LETTERS WITH ONE-TIME APPEARANCES MAKE THE ANSWER
  • USE ENUMERATIONS CONVERTED ALPHABETICALLY FOR SOLUTION
  • When You Know...
  • don't overthink it
  • oooooo

• My puzzles in the 2023 Galactic Puzzle Hunt:

  • Trigram Hell
  • Paint By Numbers
  • Two Worlds Collide
  • Jabberwock
  • Spirit of the Vines (with Violet Xiao)

• My puzzles in the 2022 Galactic Puzzle Hunt:

  • All Things Big and Small
  • Changes
  • Galactic History Exam (Celebratory Music and parts of the rest)
  • The Line (and associated puzzles, in a group)

• My puzzles in the 2021 Silph Puzzle Hunt:

  • Connections
  • Continuity
  • Δ
  • A Lot of Research into Things That Have Very Little Meaning

• My puzzles in the 2020 Galactic Puzzle Hunt:

  • Action Adventure
  • Symbols
  • Intersections
  • ✅ (in a group)

• My puzzles in the 2021 MIT Mystery Hunt (see also writeup):

  • Unchained (note: due to the round structure, it is not possible to "correctly" link to this puzzle)
  • How to Run a Puzzlehunt
  • 15×15
  • Recursion
  • Things
  • Countries
  • Illiterate Programming
  • Fish Hybridization
  • Lime Sand Season (with Anderson Wang)
  • Ignorance (with Jon Schneider, Mitchell Lee, and Xander Hughes)
    • TED-Ed adapted the subpuzzle I was most heavily involved in into a nifty animated video!
  • Look at What We Drew (with a large group)
  • Thank You to Our Sponsors (with a large group)
  • Green Building Meta (implementation; with Nathan Pinsker)

• My puzzles in the 2020 DP Puzzle Hunt:

  • Now I Know...
  • Top-Down Processing
  • Sleep Talk
  • The final meta, Finding Myself (with Level 51 and others)
  • (I wrote and edited small parts of many other puzzles to varying degrees; I won't catalogue all of them here.)

• My puzzles in the 2019 Galactic Puzzle Hunt:

  • Unsafe (with Azalea Weisblat)

• My puzzles in the 2018 Galactic Puzzle Hunt:

  • Everything and More
  • The Answer to This Puzzle Is... (I only contributed a form of the initial idea, though; the rest of Galactic polished and executed it)

• My puzzles in the 2017 Galactic Puzzle Hunt:

  • Puzzle of the Day
  • Identities
  • A Basic Puzzle
  • Also, Two-Button Idle Game, a puzzle written for the hunt that we ultimately scrapped

• My puzzles in the 2015 Mystery Hunt:

  • A Puzzle Consisting Entirely of Random Anagrams
  • Pipe
  • p1ctures

• 2015 blog puzzlehunt puzzles:

  • A Signature Puzzle
  • Anticron
  • When Is My Birthday Again?
  • Three for the Price of One (Meta)

• 2014 blog puzzle

• 2013 blog puzzle ("Puzzle 44 / ???")

• 2012 blog puzzle (Puzzle 32 / Slitherlink [Crosslink + Liar])

Some other selected logic puzzles:

• Puzzle 43 / Fillomino [Nonrectangular + Walls]
• Puzzle 45 / Fillomino [No-Path]
• Puzzle 31 / Fillomino [Sashigane]
• Puzzle 41 / Slitherlink [Clones]

My Katz number is at most 5:

• I collaborated with Josh Alman (and many others) on Look at What We Drew and In a Park (2021)...
• Josh Alman collaborated with Kevin Chen on Missed Connection (2013)...
• Kevin Chen collaborated with Iolanthe Chronis on Back on the Move (2015)...
• Iolanthe Chronis collaborated with Jennifer Berk on Bring Us Food, Yo (2006)...
• Jennifer Berk collaborated with Dan Katz on Protection Plan (2019).