About

In my free time, I like to write puzzles for these competitions called Puzzle Hunts. These are word or logic puzzles where the underlying premise is that you are not inherently given the instructions on how to solve a puzzle, and the first (often hardest) step is making the leap towards guessing a "mechanism".

To build a community of likeminded puzzlers on my campus, I founded Brown Puzzle Club, where we meet weekly to tackle beginner to intermediate puzzles and prepare a puzzle hunt of our own. We successfully ran Brown Puzzlehunt for 120+ teams in Spring 2023, and are currently working on our second iteration for 2024.

Before college, I directed my high school puzzle hunt, PEA Puzzle Hunt, for three iterations, (Spring 2020, Summer 2020, Spring 2021) leading the design, logistics, testing, and writing teams involved.

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Why I Love Puzzle Hunts

Like escape rooms, any topic under the sun can become a puzzle hunt puzzle. (Sudokus, Shakespeare encodings, alien communication attempts, etc.) In equal parts, though, it is critical, more than any other puzzle medium I know of, to define and make motivated puzzles, in which the solver feels comfortable teaching themselves the mechanics at play. Deeper questions of motivation, teach-ability, and context are what I find to be the most exciting aspect of puzzle writing. Harnessing these concepts has also excited me to one day become a teacher. :)

I first found an interest for puzzles competing in my high school's hunt in 2017. My team did not get far at all, but we were glued to the content. We participated year after year, until my senior year when I volunteered to start writing for the event. Nowadays, I team up with the local Providence team and my club to tackle the yearly flagship online puzzle events with general success.

(My recent favorite hunts: MIT Mystery Hunt 2021,UMD Puzzlehunt, CMU Oregon Trail Hunt)