It’s an open secret that multiple top United States escape rooms are run by veteran puzzle hunters. These companies may be relatively few in number, but they are disproportionately renowned both on a regional and global stage. Many of these creators have decades of experience participating in, as well as helping to design, events like the MIT Mystery Hunt and The Game. They’ve spent thousands of hours honing their skills in puzzle design, often years before in-person escape rooms even existed.

These companies include:

• Trivium Games (Emeryville, CA)
• Palace Games (San Francisco, CA)
• Boxaroo (Boston, MA)
• Locurio (Seattle, WA)
• The Last Defender (Chicago, IL, and Denver, CO)
• Ravenchase Adventures (Richmond, VA)

Rich Bragg, the founder of TERPECA, is also a puzzle hunter. So is Dan Egnor, who created the very first Escape Room Directory. According to David Spira, “Looking at the TERPECA data, most of the 1,000+ game players in the US are at least casual puzzle hunters. Many are pretty hardcore.”

The 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt was a veritable escape room reunion, with most of the above escape room creators and 8 members of the REA team all in attendance. Death & Mayhem, the team that designed and ran this year’s Hunt, included designers from Boxaroo who contributed multiple impressive physical installations as well as a live escape room. My team, Cardinality, came in first place, meaning we are constructing the 2026 Mystery Hunt. If you’re interested in learning more about this fascinating event, take a listen to a REPOD episode with Death & Mayhem team captain James Douberley.

To an outsider, this might all sound like a niche affair, yet a staggering ~5,000 puzzlers, spread across 220 different teams, participated in this year’s MIT Mystery Hunt. Around half traveled to the MIT campus to puzzle in person, and the rest solved remotely. And many of these hardcore puzzlers also like escape rooms.

While puzzle hunts and escape rooms are very different mediums, it’s no accident that there’s so much overlap between the two communities.

In this article, I’ll dive into what puzzle hunts actually are, how they differ from escape rooms, and how we might pull from the expertise and innovations of the puzzle hunt world to design more elegant escape room puzzles. Almost every escape room includes puzzles, and regardless of whether the puzzles are the primary focus of the game, there’s often an opportunity to make those puzzles more varied and more satisfying.

Puzzle elegance is a difficult concept to distill, but for me, it comes down to discovering unexpected levels of intentionality as you find meaning in the unknown. It’s the feeling of peeling back one layer, and realizing that there’s so much more to discover. It’s when the pieces all click together, when every bit of data comes into play. It’s when a puzzle aha feels like pure magic and shifts how you see the world around you.

What Are Puzzle Hunts?

Puzzle hunts are tricky to define directly because, at their core, they’re characterized by a tendency to break their own rules and reinvent themselves.

Puzzle hunts vary wildly in difficulty, scope, and format. Broadly speaking, a puzzle hunt is an event where teams solve a series of puzzles. Some puzzle hunts take place in person, while many others are freely available online. They can last for a few hours or a few weeks, consist of 5 puzzles or 250 puzzles, and accommodate teams of 1 or 100. Like I said, tricky to define.

A more useful description centers around certain common puzzle hunt styles and conventions:

1. Anything can be a puzzle: Puzzles may take recognizable forms, like crosswords or logic puzzles, or they can look like literally anything else, from a playlist of cat videos to a tray of cupcakes to a million-line file of numbers.
2. No instructions: Puzzles may include some “flavor text” to help you get started, but they often don’t come with explicit instructions. It’s up to the solver to notice patterns, make connections, and determine how to engage with the puzzle content.
3. Extract an answer: Each puzzle leads to a word or phrase as a final answer. In contrast to something like a standard crossword, where you’re done once you’ve fully filled in a grid of letters, in a puzzle hunt, there’s always some final “extraction” step that leads to a more concise answer. Some common extractions include acrostics, tracing out letters, and indexing (EXAMPLE [4] = M). You typically confirm your answer on a website or app, and unlike in escape rooms, answers are very rarely just random numbers.
4. Lots of layers: Most puzzles have multiple steps, and at least one nontrivial aha moment. Sometimes, you’ll extract a “partial” (an intermediate answer phrase) which provides an instruction for the next step(s).
5. Metapuzzles: Puzzle hunts are usually grouped in rounds, each culminating in a “metapuzzle” that uses the answers (and sometimes other data or mechanics) from the preceding “feeder puzzles” in that round. Small puzzle hunts may have a single round with a single metapuzzle. Larger hunts may have many metapuzzles, and sometimes even a meta-metapuzzle which combines the answers to multiple metapuzzles!

Puzzle Hunts Vs. Escape Rooms

As David noted in his 2020 Puzzle Hunt 101 article, “Escape rooms aren’t really about solving hard puzzles.” In contrast, “puzzle hunts really are about information organization and puzzling skill.” I’d like to add on a few other key distinctions.

Player Experience

Much of the audience for puzzle hunts are people who are already familiar with puzzle hunts, whereas the majority of escape rooms players haven’t played many or any escape rooms before. As such, puzzle hunts can be far more self-referential than escape rooms; they can assume that players already know the common rules and patterns, and then subvert players’ expectations in fun ways. This leads to endless innovation, both in individual puzzle mechanics and meta structures. Escape rooms, on the other hand, more commonly are forced to cater to a general audience, other than in particularly mature markets or experimental settings.

Length

Puzzle hunts also have time on their side. In a weekend-long puzzle hunt, an individual puzzle can take hours to solve, enabling incredibly intricate designs. Escape rooms don’t have this luxury. Most escape room puzzles are designed to be solved within 5 minutes.

Physicality

In puzzle hunts, puzzles usually center more around the manipulation of information than the manipulation of objects, although some puzzle hunts also involve tactile components or site-specific elements (often in the form of “runarounds”). In contrast to an escape room, which is physically active and object-centric, the vast majority of many puzzle hunts is spent moving data around in a spreadsheet.

Outside Knowledge

Whereas most escape rooms are fully self-contained and don’t require any outside knowledge, many puzzle hunts are designed around unexpected ways of engaging with real-world data sources. Solvers might have to scour wiki pages for obscure video game level maps or solve a cryptic crossword in a foreign language. Sometimes this knowledge is reasonably searchable; other times (especially at the MIT Mystery Hunt) puzzles may require specialized skills, like coding or organic chemistry, that aren’t as easily acquired on the fly.

While all these factors inherently limit how difficult or complex an escape room puzzle can be, this does not mean that escape room puzzles can’t also also be interesting, memorable, and elegant.

Striving For Elegance

In escape rooms, the “one time use” rule usually gets applied to everything in the environment. While this guideline makes sense for certain elements, like keys or 4-digit combinations, it can sometimes lead to relatively simplistic puzzles that lack the layered, progressive discovery that I believe is one of the core features of puzzle design.

Pulling from the strengths of puzzle hunts, here are some tips for designing elegant, interesting, and satisfying escape room puzzles.

Design More Metapuzzles

A metapuzzle can serve as a capstone, providing a meaningful sense of progression and tying the experience together on a structural level. An individual puzzle answer means one thing in its original context, and you later discover that it has an additional property in the context of the metapuzzle.

Typical escape room puzzle flow comes more from physical gating than information gating: you unlock a box and get a new, unrelated puzzle. “Object collection” metas are common, but how can we combine the outputs of the preceding puzzles in a more meaningful way, instead of just totems with RFID tags that you place in the obvious spots on a shelf?

One approach involves combining the physical outputs of multiple puzzles into a new aha-based puzzle that uses those objects in some new way. Maybe you realize that the objects all look like letters, or that they can be assembled into a useful contraption. Or you provide new information or a new tool that enables players to renavigate previous spaces differently, or perhaps even re-solve certain previous puzzles to produce different answers.

Make Each Puzzle Memorable

Many escape room puzzles are fun in context, though not necessarily as interesting as puzzles. If the majority of the time spent in an escape room is spent solving puzzles, then shouldn’t we strive to make those puzzles individually memorable?

Strive to keep each puzzle unique, not just in presentation but also in underlying mechanics. This also applies when looking across multiple rooms at the same company. If each of your experiences includes the exact same set of puzzle mechanics, the gameplay may start to feel repetitive for those playing multiple rooms there.

It can also be helpful to consider how each puzzle’s framing contributes to its perceived significance. If you asked players to talk you through the puzzles they solved, what would they say? Small tweaks in presentation may be the difference between “we counted how many birds there were of each color, but one was too well hidden so we just spun the lock” versus “we went birdwatching in various habitats and added lots of new birds to our life list, including a super rare one!”

Minimize Unconstrained Noise

In an elegant puzzle, every element is used, and nothing is random. While this aesthetic needn’t apply to all aspects of an escape room in the same way it might in a puzzle hunt, it’s still true that tighter design constraints can make for more satisfying solves. When the player experiences a high level of intentionality through every stage of the puzzle, they also develop a high level of trust in the puzzle’s designer.

This style actually parallels the “inventory approach” that most escape rooms already take. Whenever you encounter a useful object, interactive interface, or perceivable pattern, you add it to your mental inventory of things yet to be used. Some puzzles are self contained, while others will need to be combined with additional objects or information.

Building on this, it’s equally important to consider the presentation (and mere inclusion) of any items, data, or patterns that are not useful in puzzles, and the precise sequencing of when they become available. When we place players in an environment where most elements are part of a puzzle, they will approach everything they have access to as a potential puzzle. Clear signposting is key, and ensure that any noise (e.g. extra books, colorful tiles, objects of different heights) can’t be solved as a puzzle even if they weren’t designed as a puzzle.

For a deeper dive into puzzle design principles, check out the following REPOD episodes:

• Elegance in Puzzles with Sandy Weisz of the Mystery League
• The Art of Game Flow with Summer Herrick of Locurio
• The User-Centric Design of Boxaroo with Fro Myers
• Hard With Pain: Rich Bragg, Creator of TERPECA
• The Puzzling Adventures of Master Word Nerd Eric Berlin

Where To Learn More

Puzzle hunts can have a pretty steep learning curve, and I’ll admit that they’re not for everyone. That said, puzzle hunts vary wildly in style, scope, and difficulty, so even if one particular hunt isn’t quite your speed, there might be others out there that are.

Here are some recommendations for where to get started:

• Boxaroo’s Colby’s Curious Cookoff includes a range of approachable puzzle types, all wrapped in a super sleek, fully self-contained web interface. No spreadsheets or internet research required. If you’re brand new to puzzle hunts, I recommend starting here.
• Puzzled Pint is a newbie-friendly event that takes place in dozens of bars around the world on the second Tuesday of every month. All past Puzzled Pint sets are conveniently archived on their website.
• DASH (Different Area, Same Hunt) is a step up in difficulty from Puzzled Pint, though they typically offer Standard and Expert versions. After a multi-year hiatus, the next DASH will take place in September 2025.
• EnigMarch offers a low-stakes opportunity to try your hand at designing puzzles, as well as solve new puzzles by dozens of other participants.
• For an in-depth look at how puzzle hunts work, check out this guide by betaveros.
• For a comprehensive listing of upcoming puzzle hunts, check out the Puzzle Hunt Calendar (also created by Dan Egnor!)
• Join the #puzzle-hunts channel on the Escape Rooms Discord, and the puzzle hunt-specific Puzzle World Discord.

Puzzle hunts are their own language, and like any new language, it might not make complete sense at first, but you get better by diving in and practicing. Solve lots of puzzles, read through solutions of archived puzzle hunts, and explore all the rabbit holes.

Glossary

Flavor Text: Text that accompanies a puzzle, usually presented between the puzzle title and the puzzle body. The flavor text may simply set up the theme or story, or it may provide subtle hints for how the puzzle works. Not every puzzle includes flavor text.

Extraction: A step that produces letters that form the answer or a clue phrase. For most puzzles, the extraction is the final step of the puzzle.

Partial: An intermediate answer phrase that clues the next step. Partials sometimes can be confirmed with the answer checker, which will indicate that you’re on the right track and should keep going.

Feeder Puzzle: An individual puzzle whose answer is used in a metapuzzle.

Metapuzzle: A capstone puzzle that combines the answers to multiple feeder puzzles.

Runaround: A puzzle that involves following some sort of instructions to navigate a physical space, typically gathering information along the way. Some runarounds add new physical components to the environment; others just reference whatever is already there.

For a more comprehensive list of puzzle hunt terminology, check out the glossary on the Puzzle Wiki.