Date: June 26-27, 3PM EDT to 3PM EDT
About the Puzzles
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Each puzzle generally consists of a title, a small description, and a main body. All information, including the title, can be useful to solve the puzzle.
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Solution methods can vary from combinations of multiple codes and cyphers, looking things up around the web, anagrams, indexing, riddles, and much much more.
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For an idea on how puzzles in puzzle hunt competitions are generally solved, or for any example puzzles, you can look at other hunts such as the MIT Mystery Hunt, Colby's Curious Cookoff, or PuzzleHunt CMU, which are previous competitions our team drew inspiration from.
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Our theme will be Disney! This means every puzzle and/or answer will be directly or loosely related to Disney.
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As for difficultly, we tried making this puzzle hunt for beginner to intermediate solvers with what we think are a couple of hard puzzles. All levels of puzzlers are welcome to participate!
Rules
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You can use anything. Literally any virtual or non-virtual resource you can find is available for your use.
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Please only receive help or information from your team members. This means do not get any outside help from any non-team member or any online question forums.
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Please limit your team members to 8.
Prizes
We ask for donations from participating teams (anything helps). This will go to a prize pool which will be donated to the winner's charity of choice (the charity will need to be verified). The prize pool is solely dependent on donations from participants, so please help out even if it's only a little :) We thought this would be a fun way to give back to the community while also having an incentive to win the hunt. Good luck!
The way this process will work is that after the hunt ends, the winner will be contacted through the email they registered with. Then they will send us the charity that they want the money to go to, and we'll check to make sure it's a registered charity. If the team does not answer within 24 hours, we will ask the team in second place. PLEASE CHECK YOUR EMAIL IF YOU WON. A picture of the donation to the charity will be posted on this website after it's made.
If for whatever reason, you feel uncomfortable donating to the link above and don't want to participate in the prize pool, please donate to a charity of your choice and indicate the donation amount in your registration.
Donations are not required but highly encouraged.
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Donations will no longer be accepted after June 29th. If you plan to donate, please do so before that date.
Submissions
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All answers will be submitted through a google form.
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The email and team name used for submission must be the exact same email and team name used when you register. If a team submits using an email or team name that has not been registered, the submission will not be accepted.
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Please use a real email! This is not only the only way to reach out to you but how we identify your team for submission.
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Teams can submit multiple times by editing the initial submission of the google form. This not only means you can submit each puzzle as you solve them, but that you have an infinite number attempts per puzzle.
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When you resubmit (edit the form), it must be through the same account and same google form that you used initially or else it will not be accepted. Copy and paste the edit link or save it so that you can access it in the future.
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Please do not resubmit too fast or it may overload our program. Please email us if there are any errors in your submission process.
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Answers could be any word or phrase (or string of letters, if indicated in the puzzle) all in uppercase, with no punctuation, including spaces.
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For example, if the answer is "Puzzling Elves," you must type "PUZZLINGELVES" into the google form.
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If you have any further questions on how an answer is to be formatted you can email us and we can assist you. We won't tell you if it is correct, only how you should format it.
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All submissions are automatically graded and updated by the spreadsheet, so you can check you score through the live leaderboard.
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Teams will be scored by the points gained from the puzzles they solve.
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All ties are broken by fastest solved.
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If you’ve finished the hunt, DO NOT edit your form. This will update your submission time, and if it comes down to a tiebreak, your time will be later.
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If you see a problem with your position on the leaderboard, please let us know your issue and we will try our best to resolve it.
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Submissions start and end with the rest of the hunt (3PM to 3PM)
Hints
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6 hours after the hunt begins (9PM EDT on June 26), teams will be able to email us questions if they are stuck on a puzzle. We will then respond with enough information to push them to the next step.
There is zero penalty for requesting hints, but you are limited to a total of 5 hints until the end of the hunt.
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To request a hint, email us from the email used to register for the hunt. If you can’t use that email, mention it in the body of the email, and state the email used originally. In the subject of the email, say “Hint Request _”, with the _ being the number hint you’re requesting. We will check this number so there’s no point in lying. In the body of the email, state your team name, and follow it up with the puzzle you’re stuck on. The more details you provide about how much progress you’ve made, the more we can help you. Give us as much information about your progress as possible. We will then respond as quickly as possible.