At the start of the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt, MITropolis’s hottest event, the gala celebrating the engagement of Gladys Finster (heir apparent to the legitimate businesses of crime boss Robert “Papa” Finster) and Ferdinand Carter (scion of the Carter Brothers jewelry conglomerate) is interrupted when Carter’s latest acquisition, the storied Shadow Diamond, is discovered to be missing.
Papa hires private eye Billie O’Ryan, of the Two P.I. Noir Detective Agency, who in turn recruits teams to join them and help find the diamond.
Prequel
In October, The Providence Crime Syndications and the MIT Puzzle Club ran a pre-hunt as an event for students. The MIT Mystery Heist is a prequel to the story of The Case of the Shadow Diamond, where Papa organizes a bank robbery to steal a valuable rare coin.
Invite
At the beginning of January, teams (with a US mailing address) received an invitation in the mail from Papa to the Gala:
Kickoff
Watch kickoff on YouTube.
The 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt was kicked off on Friday, January 17th at noon. It was presented in three different classrooms as a broadcast from the Finster-Carter engagement gala. When Carter goes to reveal the illustrious Shadow Diamond, it is discovered to be missing. Papa, father of the bride and MITropolis crime boss, hires Billie O’Ryan to find the diamond, starting by investigating those closest to it.
The Hunt
View the Hunt website as seen by teams.
In typical noir fashion, while searching for the missing diamond, teams learn that the situation is far more complicated than it seemed on the surface. While four characters are innocent of stealing the diamond, each has an unrelated dark secret of their own to uncover. The thief who stole the diamond turns up dead, and the diamond they had stolen turns out to be fake.
After finding the thief’s killer and learning everyone’s secrets, Billie and teams had to break into the Finster family vault, after which they learned that someone unexpected had been behind the whole thing…
Winning Team
At 8:56 AM on Sunday, January 19th, Cardinality became the first team to solve their final major investigation. At 12:17 PM they successfully broke into the Finster family vault and revealed the true mastermind behind the theft of the Shadow Diamond, making them the winners of the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to recover either the Shadow Diamond or the coin stolen by Papa, but instead they received a stash of surprisingly coin-like counterfeit jewelry manufactured by one of the characters.
A video showing footage of Cardinality breaking into the vault and learning the dramatic end of the story is available on the page for The Vault.
Between when Cardinality finished and wrap-up, an additional 10 teams (for 11 total) managed to finish the Hunt.
Wrap-Up
A wrap-up event for the Hunt was held at noon on Monday. Watch the video on YouTube.
Extras
The Hunt website allows you to re-play the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt with an in-browser re-implementation of the Hunt’s unlock structure. Experience the Hunt as teams did, or choose to unlock all puzzles to see all of the puzzles and content. We’ve also made at least minor — and occasionally significant — modifications to nearly 25% of the puzzles and interactions. We believe this should allow you to solve (or, in a few cases, at least experience) those puzzles which previously required physical components, in-person elements, or live staffing.
We’ve also collated video footage taken during Hunt into recaps of the events, the finale, and a few particularly dramatic puzzles such as Control Room and In Communicado Tonight.
Outside of the Hunt website, we also have a few pages of bonus content, analysis, and behind-the-scenes coverage:
- Credits: Over 165 people worked tirelessly for both a year and a weekend to bring the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt to life. In addition to credits on individual puzzle pages, you can roll the overall credits here.
- Coin: A detailed look at the design of our coin, highlighting some references and fun easter eggs.
- Gala: Learn more about the Gala, which served as both the central event framing the story of the Hunt and a real-world hub for a wide variety of in-person activities.
- Music: Original music composed and arranged by the team which was featured in Kickoff, the finale, and each of the in-person interactions following capstone super-metas.
- Radio: Design, schematics, and firmware for the radio that each on-campus team received. (And while we are unable to broadcast the original WDNM 2π PM radio station, we have included some archival audio clips on the virtual radio page.)
- Statistics: Overall statistics from the Hunt, including the full activity log. Each individual puzzle page also links to statistics for that particular puzzle, and for a handful of puzzles we have added some bonus statistics that we think are especially interesting. (Those puzzles are listed on the overall statistics page.)
- Minigames: The Interview at the Boardwalk featured three minigames that you had to play on Roger’s behalf. If you’d like to play the games without the full interview, you can do so here.