Hide and Seek Puzzle

A Hide and Seek Puzzle is a type of puzzle commonly found in physical or digital puzzle hunt in which puzzles are placed in particular locations, requiring solvers to find them in order to begin working on them. The puzzles themselves may be any genre; the only key aspect of a Hide and Seek Puzzle is that it is initially hidden from solvers and must be searched for.

Hunt Application[edit | edit source]

The one requirement for a hunt to be able to utilize Hide and Seek Puzzles is for them to have access to a physical or digital space in which physical puzzles, ways to unlock puzzles, or links to digital puzzles can be hidden (and eventually found).

Depending on the space being used, puzzles can be actively hidden (with or without hints to their locations) or simply scattered around an area (with the task being more collecting all of them). The result of 'finding' a puzzle may also vary, as solvers may find them puzzles themselves (in the case of physical puzzles in an on-site hunt or links to puzzles in digital ones), or find things that can be traded in for puzzles (like tokens or codes).

Notable Examples[edit | edit source]

  • Harvoid Constellation (MITMH 2009) (web) - In this round, solvers were told to go 'Galaxocaching', requiring them to actually go to geocaches in order to find puzzles.
  • Students (MITMH 2021) (web) - Since this hunt was entirely online, taking place in a fully-navigable parallel version of MIT campus, the organizers were able to scatter many puzzles across the world for solvers to find them. These puzzles could also be sought out individually, as each student had a picture of them in their location that could be used for locating them. This applies to both the Students and the Athletes.

See Also[edit | edit source]