Puzzles

Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2022: The Exam

I edited for this hunt and wrote a few puzzles, including:

✝️🔤🧩, an emoji crossword. Note that this puzzle was in a round where the puzzle came in chunks for each season. (Written with Jenna, Chris and Anderson)
Speedy Crosswording, an exercise in quick crossword-solving (written with Jenna and Jack; I constructed the crosswords themselves and wrote most of the clues)
Me, The Worm, a choose-your-own-adventure book about life as a worm. It's very cute, go read it. (Written with Chris and Jenna; I lost motivation during the actual-prose-writing part of the puzzle so I didn't write very much of its text)

I chaired the team for writing this hunt, edited, and wrote a few puzzles:

Breakfast Time!, an easier puzzle meant to be a good introduction to the hunt
Make Your Own Math Quiz, an interactive puzzle about writing math questions (written with Josh)
Charts (written with Lennart) — a part of the Microscope round, where the entire round was presented as one 1000x1000 pixel image and solvers had to figure out what parts were from what puzzle
Crosswerd, a meme crossword about misspelling

I co-led the ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈ with Josh as we wrote the 2021 MIT Mystery Hunt.

Some of the puzzles I'm proud of writing for that hunt follow.

Easier puzzles:

In a Park, a runaround you can do in many cities (created with Josh, and with clues written by twenty people)
Over 9,000: an Abbreviated Yet Awesome Tour Of Your First Equally Excellent Puzzle Mechanic, a puzzle made for the meme value (written with Herman, Joanna and Rob)
✏️✉️➡️3️⃣5️⃣1️⃣➖6️⃣6️⃣6️⃣➖6️⃣6️⃣5️⃣5️⃣, a puzzle whose title speaks for itself (written with Anderson, Ben and Lewis)
Hey, Can You Give Me A Hand With This Puzzle?, an introductory spreadsheet puzzle (written with Colin, Leon and Lillian)
Form, a small puzzle with one aha
Doing Some Gardening, my first Rows Garden

Less easy puzzles, most exciting first:

Runaround Training, a puzzle that appears to be a runaround on MIT campus
Enclosures, a puzzle consisting entirely of diagrams
Divided is Us, an interactive logic puzzle after Baba is You (written with Evan Chen)
Nutraumatic, an interactive puzzle riffing on the puzzling tool Nutrimatic (written with Rahul)
Fret Not!, a music/word puzzle (written with Cami and Lennart)
Water Bottle, one of our physical puzzles (written with Josh)
World Search, a geography puzzle written based on an idea I initially made in 2015
Analog Circuitry, an interactive puzzle that I spent an entire weekend constructing and coding up
Circular Reasoning, a difficult but very cool (IMO) word puzzle (written with Anderson, Jon, Lewis and Rob)
Bingo, a riff on Mystery Hunt Bingo (written with Joanna and Rahul)
Oh, the Places You'll Go!, a text adventure

And a few of the meta-puzzles I helped write:

I also helped create the Projection Device, which teams used to explore a virtual world during the hunt.

I organized the team for writing this hunt, edited, and wrote puzzles. Some of the puzzles I wrote include:

Road Trip, a US geography puzzle
Unsafe, a text adventure (written with Brian)
A Crossword, a definitely-perfectly-normal diagramless crossword (written with Yannick)
The Galactic Conference, the metameta (written with Rahul, Anderson and Patrick)

I also write crossword puzzles sometimes. I've been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Puzzle Society Crossword.

I co-wrote the October 2021 puzzle set for Puzzled Pint with Jon Schneider.