The winner of MIT Mystery Hunt 2018, Setec Astronomy, pours in a lot of puzzles and celebrations!
In this MIT Mystery Hunt, the kick-off involved Setec Astronomy creating Molasses Awareness Day in remembrance of the Great Molasses Flood of 1919, which happened 100 years ago. However, a flood swept through many of the holidays in the Holiday Forest. In response, Santa Claus and Jack Skellington got the teams to help solve the problems based on two of the holidays. The teams eventually found that the April Fool was responsible and was able to stop the flood.
The first team to do so, Left Out, got a coin (and a drip of molasses) and went on to host MIT Mystery Hunt 2020.
- A Birthday, Not a Break: The mayor of Your Birthday Town came to celebrate ... but turned out to be the April Fool, pranking the teams by giving them an empty box.
- A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma: Taken literally with "DK8: The Turducken Konundrum (Turkey)
", as the overview of the solution to the puzzle describes itself as "konundrum inside a konundrum inside a konundrum", fitting for the title. - Cartography Sidequest: The puzzle "First You Visit Burkina Faso" is one of the more infamously difficult geography puzzles, in which incredible mapping and cartography skills are needed to get to the right locations, which are then filled into a map to extract letters for a final clue phrase.
- Continuity Nod: The puzzle "...FISH Puzzles" explicitly makes a call back to the fish puzzles from MIT Mystery Hunt 2015.
- Crappy Holidays: The holidays that are affected by the flood become filled with problems that teams need to solve throughout the hunt.
- Failure Montage: The puzzle "Safety Montage" depicts a list of horrible injuries or deaths ... which all came from Dumb Ways to Die.
- Food as Bribe: The metapuzzle connecting Valentine's Day Town with President's Day Town involved some couples attempting to bribe voters with candy hearts, and teams need to find out how to decide the winner in light of that.
- Halloween Town: As with the original film, one of the towns visited is Halloween Town. It connects with Christmas Town (like in the film) but also Valentine's Day Town and Thanksgiving Town.
- Holiday Episode: As with all other MIT Mystery Hunts, this one takes place over Martin Luther King Jr. weekend but incorporates many other holidays. Martin Luther King Jr. is also represented as a town.
- Holiday Motif: As with the original film, each holiday gets a town. Halloween Town and Christmas Town make a reprise from the original film, Valentine's Day Town and Thanksgiving Town become more prominent compared to the film, and Holi Town and Pi Day Town are entirely new towns for the hunt. Even the newly created Molasses Awareness Day becomes its own town.
- Howthe Character Stole Christmas: Slightly subverted, as while Jack Skellington did so in the original film, he is not the culprit as Santa and Jack work to fix the problems and the real culprit is caught before anything bad happened. In particular, based on the solution to the metapuzzle "April Fool's Day Town", the April Fool is responsible for the pranks and is planning on going for Christmas next.
- Meaningful Background Event: Part of the solution to the metapuzzle "April Fool's Day Town" involves observing that all the main round towns except Christmas Town have a clock, which is used for extraction.
- Merit Badges for Everything: The puzzle "Badges, Badges, Badges" involves working with 72 badges from various organizations.
- Pun With Pi: Two of the metapuzzles connecting Pi Day Town are more mathematical, but the one connecting with Holi Town is more on the food pie.
- Santa Claus: One of the allies who delivers puzzles at a fixed time. This time, he and Jack Skellington are now on good terms, as the storyline of the film happened before the hunt and they both have a common problem to solve.
- Saving Christmas: Thanks to the combined efforts of Jack, Santa, and the teams, the real culprit who planned on pranking Christmas Town got stopped in the endgame.
- Shout-Out: Obviously, this puzzlehunt is a shout-out to The Nightmare Before Christmas and expands on the holiday theming by incorporating more holidays.
- Twisted Christmas: As with the original film, the first metapuzzle combines Christmas with Halloween via using all feeders from Christmas Town and only some feeders from Halloween Town, and the premise involved making peace with the Christmas people, who "just couldn’t get along with the scary Halloween folk".
