Solution to New House — MIT Mystery Hunt 2021

Back to Puzzle

Answer: RAINBOW

by Josh Alman

Each of the five answers corresponds to one of the five cultural houses in New House. From the 2016 dorm website we find that each of the cultural houses takes up some floors of one or more of the six physical Houses that make up New House. If we order the cultural houses by the order we would get to them from the entrance of the dorm (i.e., from smallest to largest House number, with ties broken by smallest to largest Floor number), and then index the floor numbers into the corresponding answers, we get the cluephrase COLORFUL ARC, which clues the final answer RAINBOW.

Cultural House	Location in New House	Corresponding Answer	Index Floor Numbers into Answer
iHouse	Floors 1–2 of physical House 1	COSMOPOLITAN	CO
Chocolate City	Floors 3–5 of physical House 1	MILO READY-TO-DRINK	LOR
Spanish House	Floors 1–2 of physical Houses 3 and 4	FUEGO	FU
French House	Floor 5 of physical Houses 5 and 6	NAPOLEON	L
German House	Floors 2–4 of physical House 6	MARCO REUS	ARC

Author’s Notes

With the answer RAINBOW available for this meta, it seemed natural to make a puzzle about the New House cultural houses. I aimed for a relatively simple mechanic of matching answers to cultural houses, and then indexing using the strange but convenient floor layout of New House.

After putting this puzzle together, we realized that New House has been recently renovated. Confusingly, the new building layout isn't finalized yet and can't be found online. This is a bit of a strange issue to have in a puzzle, since only current MIT students might realize that the layouts of New House one can find online are not up-to-date. We hope the disclaimer to address this wasn't too confusing!