Arbor Day Puzzle Hunt

Ricki Heicklen talked me out of puzzle retirement again! I led a puzzle hunt for Tradegala, the high-concept launch party of her new organization Arbor. Fittingly, it was on Arbor Day (4/25/25). And I got paid for it — I'm a professional puzzle hunt czar :)

It's an approachable, small hunt: only seven puzzles, each accessible. Even guests without puzzle hunt experience solved some puzzles! Testers from puzzle servers online found it smooth, and tended to finish in under an hour.

At the party, the puzzles were hidden around the venue. One of them was hidden on the trading platform for the event, but I've transcribed it into a pdf.

I'll imagine you've found all the puzzles! As usual with puzzle hunts, ultimately, the answer to each puzzle will be a word or short phrase — except for the final "meta" puzzle, which tells you what you'd have to do at the Tradegala bar to win. (Also, it's perfectly allowed to ask the internet, AI, whoever you want.) Here, you can check your answer by going to tinyurl.com/arbor-hunt-ORDER-PASSWORD. (Replace ORDER and PASSWORD with the order and password, respectively.)

Click me for a printable PDF of all the puzzles!

If you want to solve the puzzles individually, click each puzzle's link for a printable PDF:

• The Giving Tree by Joah Macosko

• Connect the Tents by Joah Macosko and Jacob M. Cohen [or solve on puzz.link]

• Phrase Tree by Eric Neyman and Jacob M. Cohen

• ASCII by Ricki Heicklen

• The Magic Treehouse by bolgat

• False Friends by Jacob M. Cohen

• Be Here Or Be Square by Jacob M. Cohen

• Answer key to the entire hunt

Writing the puzzle hunt was a team effort! As you can see above, I only wrote a couple of the puzzles — they were also contributed by Joah Macosko (who was honestly the MVP), Eric Neyman, bolgat, and Ricki Heicklen (who also helped a lot with the structure and theming). Thanks also to Allison, Audrey, Edric, Benji, *xrm, HRoll, noneuclidean, and my parents for testing; Joyce for hiding the puzzles; Amina for visual design help; Yoav for coding; Saul, Ross, Austin, and Nicholas for ideas and support; Alice, Ben, and future-Guest-of-Honor-at-my-next-Partiful-event-because-they-won-it-in-an-auction Kathy Garcia for bartending; kormad for a long-ago conversation on the Crosscord that inspired one of my puzzles. There are surely people I am forgetting to mention, and I am grateful to them too.

Arbor has such a sense of mission, culture of nerdsniping, and collaborative attitude that made it a joy to work for. You can experience our work at our upcoming puzzle conference called MetaGame, running from September 12-14 at Lighthaven in Berkeley, CA! I'll be helping plan the event, and I've learned that empirically, anything run by Ricki Heicklen is extremely fun. You should come!

(also she appealed to my ego by listing me as a featured speaker, alongside the former CEO of Twitch and OpenAI, even though I'm not really famous enough. the ego appeal worked)

photo from [insert puzzle hunt party here]!

PS: Sorry this post took such a long time since the actual event. My excuse is that we were considering adapting the puzzles into a Puzzled Pint or something, but then we didn't :)