Blog: Expanded Universe

Some puzzlehunt puzzles I enjoyed in 2025

The only puzzlehunt I ever write about publicly is Mystery Hunt, basically as a force of habit and for no other reason, which I've realized is silly. Here's trying to fix that.

Caveats for this list:

I'll try to describe the puzzles without spoiling any major parts, but if you are a purist about that kind of thing, you may wish to just not read anything other than the puzzle links.

Plaintext Adventure (Silph)

Every so often a puzzle comes along that has me kicking myself, why haven't I written this puzzle? This is one of those. Maybe because it kind of fits into one of my "low-inspiration" perspectives, pretending something is something else entirely? All the same, I've known everything I've needed to know to write this puzzle for as long as I've been writing puzzlehunt puzzles, but I haven't written it. On the other hand, that means I get to solve it, so that's a blessing.

The other nice part of this puzzle is that it gives you a great arena to feel smart by cheesing it. I'm reminded of the Bennett Foddy quote (via Alex Irpan) comparing a well-designed game to a painstakingly carved sculpture, and a speedrunner to somebody who carefully appreciates the sculpture and then breaks it over their knee. This is a puzzle built to be broken in this way; every part of the puzzle is there for a reason, even while most reasonable solve paths will discard most of the puzzle.

Difference Maker v3.0 (Silph)

This is a Something Different crossword, which is already a good start. It's a fun genre with plenty of opportunities for creative and funny clues, which this puzzle takes. I actually can't describe the clue in this puzzle that's funniest to me without spoiling it; let's just say that it extracts the first letter of the answer.

The main highlight of this puzzle for me, though, is the experience of discovering a secret in something that's been staring you in the face the whole time. And then doing it again, and again, and again. This puzzle is a remarkable feat of construction where the remarkableness translates successfully into having something fun to discover.

Spooflantu Cultural Exchange (Galactic)

(Linking to puzzles from Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2025 sort of doesn't work so the link is just for the general direction)

The puzzle is built on a solid xenolinguistics base that's already great by itself, but the final extraction takes it to a new level. It would have been so easy to write this puzzle such that you identify a bunch of things just to use as extraction chaff by taking first letters or indexing. Instead, you get a novel mechanic that forces you to engage with source material similar to the things you previously encountered in this puzzle, but more deeply than before. There's also some scrappy math on the way.

square (Galactic)

(As above, linking to the puzzles from Galactic Puzzle Hunt sort of doesn't work)

It's "just a logic puzzle". But it's fresh, the logical solve path is nice and tidy, and then the final extraction hits you with a wow moment, because usually you get a tidy solve path by giving yourself free rein to plonk down clues as the logic demands it, but turns out the answer was a tight constraint on that. How did they pull that off?

A Fistful of Cards {I, II, III, IV} (Brown Puzzle Hunt)

Where do I start? I'm a simple dragon, I like big numbers, especially when you make them from little numbers in surprising ways; I play a lot of deckbuilders and TCGs and love looking for combos. The puzzle sequence sets up the punchline well; what number would you expect to come after 14, 21, and 36? I suppose how the last puzzle works was somewhat predictable, but I was still surprised by how big its goal number was, and anyway, there is still something deeply satisfying about watching Chekhov's gun go off in the final act.

I also got to solve this puzzle with physical cards because from the physical box of puzzles that Brown Puzzle Hunt sold this year for solvers to use. Although the objective experience of solving the puzzle isn't much improved (if at all) by having physical cards rather than online ones, it definitely enhanced the feeling by way of "flavor".

Eagle (DASH 12)

Speaking of physical cards! This one leans more into that; one of the steps is much easier with physical cards than an online copy. It might not actually be that special since I saw the same trick in another physical deck of cards this year. But it's still exciting for reasons sort of similar to some other puzzles on this list, where you find that something has been hiding from you in plain sight all along.

There's also something to be said about the experience of having to solve the messy first half of this puzzle collaboratively in the physical world, without getting to organize your work in a spreadsheet. I wouldn't like to do it a lot, but it's cool to be forced to be resourceful once in a while. (We used a bunch of post-its.)

I think I gave my deck to Patrick Traynor (of Parabox fame) but that's a story for another time.

Language Arts (BayPHL 1 via BAPHL 24)

(You probably can't post-solve this. You could perhaps ask somebody who's spoiled to dungeon-master it for you but I don't think it will hit the same way. I'll be vague anyway.)

And speaking of physical puzzles! This is another simple idea that leans yet a bit further into what you can do with physical artifacts at an in-person puzzlehunt event. It's small but hard to share or replicate online. I guess I would vaguely describe it as the thrill of doing something irreversible, something that destroys information, which many online puzzlehunts bend over backwards to prevent you from doing so you don't have to be paranoid about recording everything you see.

Workout Routine (LN Hunt)

Sometimes you don't need deeply novel mechanics or elaborate construction, you can get a good puzzle just by using a funny dataset. This puzzle is a pretty standard ISIS puzzle, but it themes and executes its standard mechanics well. Furthermore — and this is important for pulling the funny dataset card — the puzzle is constructed to force you to engage with the dataset "normally" so you can appreciate how funny it is, rather than just find the lifeless data on some wiki and call it a day. No wonder my friends and I are still quoting the dataset to this day.