Table of contents
Introduction
MIT released their puzzles again for HackMIT this year. Similar to prior year, the top 50 get guaranteed admission to the hackathon.
Accessing Puzzles
Last year, people used a subdomain finder to locate the puzzle. I used one from C99.nl. After going through each subdomain, I found https://coolhackgames.hackmit.org/ which wasn’t part of last year and it led me to the CTF.
Triple Tile (750 points)
Triple Tile was similar to Mahjong Solitaire where you select matches to clear them from the board. The difference was that you need to select 3 matching tiles and you have a hand which can hold up to 7 tiles. Once you hit 7 tiles, the game is over.
On my second attempt, I was able to fully clear the board. But instead of getting a flag, all I saw was the “Play Again” button.
I decided to take a break from this one, and tackled it again after solving Papas Cipheria. Like last year, there was often stuff hidden in the network requests or source code. After examining the network requests on first load, I noticed a response for get_triple_flag.
The flag seemed to be foresttmpl, so I clicked the flag button next to Export Puzzle and submitted the flag.
With that, I was able to get my flag to submit.
Completed July 4, 2025.
Papas Cipheria (1000 points)
Papas Cipheria required you to answer ciphers from customers to unlock different freezers.
After inspecting the network, I noticed a response for answers. Using these answers and the blanks, I was able to answer the ciphers to finish phase 2.
After phase 2 was complete, I couldn’t find out how to get to the last freezer. 
After clicking around a bit, I the final cipher popped up after clicking the grey freezer boxes in the back. Luckily the final answer was part of the answer key. 
Completed July 4, 2025.
Conclusion
This year I didn’t have time to solve the puzzles, so I was happy with completing 2/6 despite my time constraints. I placed 48th on the leaderboard on July 4th and ended up dropping to 100th after the CTF closed. It was still a fun experience and I commend the HackMIT team for creating challenging puzzles every year.