The puzzlehunt starts on Friday, September 18, 2020 at 08:00 PM EDT and ends on Monday, September 21, 2020 at 08:00 PM EDT, at which point puzzle solutions will be available.
Teams have a maximum size of 4. You may not create multiple accounts or be on multiple teams.
A few puzzles will be available at the start, and the primary way to unlock new puzzles is by solving puzzles and progressing through the hunt.
Each puzzle will be worth a fixed point value. Solving the puzzle will earn your team that many points.
Teams that complete the hunt will be ranked by the time at which they finish. Teams that do not complete the hunt will be ranked by total number of points and tie-broken by earliest last solve time. There will also be separate leaderboards for middle-school and high-school teams (this was inspired by inteGIRLS Puzzle Hunt).
Solving
Each answer is a string of letters A–Z. Lowercase letters will be changed into uppercase, and any other characters will be stripped before checking for correctness.
You have 20 total guesses for each puzzle. If you legitimately run out of guesses and need more, feel free to contact us, though we won’t grant your request if we see that you were, for example, guessing random thematic answers, or brute-forcing all 10-letter words.
Hints
At 24 hours and 48 hours from the start of the hunt, pre-written hints will be released for all puzzles. You’ll be able to access the released hints for any puzzles you have unlocked from a separate page.
Depending on the number of teams that sign up, if it looks logistically possible for us to additionally offer free-form hints, we’ll try to do so. If so, you’ll be able to give us your progress on the puzzle and we’ll try to get you unstuck, or you can ask a question that we’ll try to answer.
Other
You may use any external sources for help, including other people, as long as they aren’t helping other teams and aren’t actively participating in the hunt.
You may not publicly stream a solve of our hunt when the hunt is live.
It won’t be necessary to look at the HTML source/JavaScript/CSS on any webpages for any puzzle, but you’re welcome to look anyway.
We reserve the right to disqualify any team for unsportsmanlike conduct.
We reserve the right to change any of these rules. If there’s a big change, we’ll announce it to all teams.
If you have any questions about these rules, or if you want to contact us for any reason, email [email protected]. We will get back to you as soon as we can.