There is a question every puzzle hunt has to answer before a single clue is written, and almost none of them answer it out loud: who is allowed to see the next puzzle, and what must they do to earn the sight of it? Most hunts answer it the obvious way — solve the puzzle in front of you, the next one appears. The 2026 MIT Mystery Hunt, written by Team Cardinality on a theme of Pokémon-like "Puzzmons," answered it differently, and the difference is worth more attention than it has gotten.
To open most puzzles, you did not solve your way forward. You spent a currency called Research Points. And the only way to earn Research Points was to step away from the puzzles entirely.
A currency you can't earn by solving
The mechanic is clean enough to state in a sentence, which is part of why it interests me. Per CJ Quines's solver recap, "Unlocking a puzzle costs a resource called Research Points, typically at a rate of 1 RP per puzzle... The way to gain Research Points does not involve solving puzzles; instead, you gained RP by doing Research Tasks. Each task awarded some number of RP, ranging from 1 to 8, depending on its difficulty." The tasks themselves were small and deliberately un-puzzle-like: play this minigame, go to this event, "submit a picture of a team member touching grass."
The student paper framed the intent generously: the non-puzzle tasks "were designed to be friendly to all ages and experiences, including children and first-time participants." And in the hunt's opening round, per Alex Irpan, "RP was the only way to unlock puzzles, with a hard cap on the number of open puzzles at once." So the structure was not decorative. For the first stretch of the largest puzzle hunt in the world, you could not get at the puzzles by being good at puzzles. You got at them by doing chores.
I want to take that seriously as a design decision, because it is one. A hunt that gates puzzle access behind solving is making a statement about what the experience is for — it is for solving, and the reward for solving is more solving. A hunt that gates access behind a separate, easier currency is making a different statement, and the interesting thing is that it ends up making two statements at once, pulling in opposite directions, depending on who is holding the controller.
The newcomer and the orientation phase
Start with the reading the designers seem to have intended. For a first-timer — a child, a friend dragged along, someone intimidated by a wall of puzzles each of which assumes fluency in conventions they have never seen — the Research Task is a gift. It is something to do that is not failing at a puzzle.
This lands on a thread I keep returning to. The cost of joining a puzzle is not paid at the moment you solve; it is paid earlier, at the moment of intake, when you are trying to build the mental scaffold the puzzle will later hang on. The experienced solver arrives with that scaffold already built and runs cheap recognition. The newcomer has to construct it from nothing, and construction is expensive, slow, and — crucially — invisible to everyone around them, including themselves. It looks, from outside and from inside, like just being bad at it.
A Research Task sidesteps the whole problem. Touching grass requires no scaffold. Playing a minigame requires no scaffold. And yet it produces the currency that opens the door, which means the newcomer is contributing materially to the team's progress during the exact window when the puzzles themselves would have offered them only the experience of being stuck. Read this way, the RP economy is an orientation phase made structural — a designed stretch of low-stakes participation that lets a solver acclimate to the room before the room demands pattern recognition of them. It is the hunt's way of letting people breathe before it asks them to bind.
That is a genuinely good idea, and if it were the whole story I would simply applaud it.
The competitor and the economy of attention
It is not the whole story, because the same mechanic hits a top-tier team in a completely different place.
For a team solving roughly two hundred and thirty puzzles in around fifty hours, every person is a unit of solving capacity, and the question stops being "how do I feel less stuck" and becomes "where is the marginal hour best spent." Against that question, the Research Task reads as a tax on attention rather than an invitation to play. Irpan is candid about it: "it was very hard to justify sending a marginal person off on a long Research Task," and over the weekend his team "gradually shifted to only doing the tasks that seemed super fast and ignored the rest."
Worse, the framing manufactured a phantom pressure. "The way it was phrased made it feel like we needed to be really aggressive on earning RP, and we didn't realize how generous the RP was until Friday evening." Sit with that for a second, because it is a precise cognitive failure and not just a complaint. The hunt presented a resource as scarce. The solvers' threat-detection — the same fast, liberal pattern instinct that makes puzzle people good at puzzles — read the scarcity signal and fired, and the team reorganized its behavior around a constraint that turned out not to bind. They spent real attention defending against an imagined shortage. The signal looked like the thing to attend to, so they attended to it, and the cost of attending was paid in the currency that actually mattered: focus.
This is the part I find genuinely sharp about the design, and I cannot tell whether it is a flaw or the point. The same wall does opposite work depending on which side you stand on. To the newcomer it lowers the floor — here is a way to matter without solving. To the competitor it raises a toll — here is a thing you must do that is not solving, priced in the one resource you cannot make more of. The mechanic is not accessible or punitive. It is both, simultaneously, and which face it shows you is a function entirely of how much puzzle-scaffold you walked in with.
What the redaction round knew that the task economy didn't
The hunt contained, elsewhere, a quieter answer to its own problem. One round, "Land of No Name," opened with every letter of every puzzle redacted; per Irpan, "solving a puzzle would un-redact a specific letter across the entire round." There the currency was solving. Each answer bought visibility — not of a new puzzle, but of the very letters you needed to read the ones already in front of you. The reward for progress was legibility, paid in the same coin you were already spending.
I keep setting the two mechanics side by side because they are answering the identical question — what must you do to earn the next layer of access — with opposite philosophies. The redaction round says: the thing you do to advance is the thing the hunt is about. The RP economy says: the thing you do to advance is deliberately not the thing the hunt is about, so that people who can't yet do the thing still have a thing. One keeps the solver inside the register the work requires. The other builds a second, easier register beside it and lets people stand there until they're ready — or, if they're already fluent, taxes them for the privilege of walking through.
Neither is wrong. They are bets about who is at the table. A hunt that can assume an experienced field can afford to make every gate a puzzle. A hunt trying to widen the door — to seat the child and the first-timer next to the fifty-hour team — has to build something the child can do, and the moment it does, it has built something the fifty-hour team will experience as friction. You cannot lower the floor and leave the ceiling untouched in the same structure; the floor and the ceiling are the same beam, seen from below and from above.
The open question I am left holding: is there a gate that reads as invitation to the unscaffolded solver and as solving to the fluent one — a single mechanic whose cognitive function changes with the solver's prior state, the way the best sequel rooms make one clue do recognition for the veteran and construction for the newcomer? Or is the tension between welcoming and challenging not a problem to be designed away at all, but a genuine conservation law of puzzle hunts — a fixed quantity of friction that you can only ever move, from the newcomer's shoulders onto the expert's, or back again, but never spend down to zero?