Logistics:

• The hunt is entirely virtual.

• Our theme this year is Food! All 25 puzzles will be clearly (or loosely) related to food (yum).

• The puzzles will be released and you can start solving on August 13th, 2020 at 6:00PM EDT. The submission period ends on August 16th, 2020 at 6:00PM EDT. 

• Each team can have 1-5 members.

 

About the Puzzles:

• Puzzles generally have three parts:

  • Title

  • Flavortext (extra info, usually located under the title)

  • The actual puzzle

• Pay super special attention to the title and the flavortext! Keys to solving the puzzle are often hidden here.

• The answer to each puzzle is a word or phrase in English. It can be a proper noun or a name, so the word may not always be in the dictionary (ex. It could be a brand name like Downy). 

  • Any brand or person mentioned in this hunt is well-known/highly Google-able :)

  • A few of the puzzles encode questions, so if the answer you got seems to be a question, submit the answer to that question and not the question itself!

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Submission and Scoring:

• All answers will be submitted through a Google Form that will be released when the hunt begins.

  • Answers should be submitted in all capital letters with no punctuation marks! Spaces do not count as punctuation. For example, if your answer is Salt Lake City, you should submit SALT LAKE CITY.

    • If you're unsure about your formatting, feel free to send us an email. We won't tell you if you're answer is right, but we'll tell you the correct formatting for whatever answer you're about to submit.​

  • The form should indicate when you’ve gotten the answer right, but you can always check the rankings spreadsheet.

•  You can attempt each puzzle as many times as you want.

  • We do ask that you don't submit too many times in a short period of time as it might overwhelm our algorithm! 

  • The only thing that having many puzzle attempts will affect is your accuracy rating, and the only thing that will affect is potentially tie-breaking (still ironing that out!).

  • To be completely clear, there will be no point deductions for having many attempts on a puzzle. We encourage you to solve as many of these puzzles as you can!

• Every puzzle’s point value is next to its title in parentheses.

• Rankings are updated automatically; if you think there’s a mistake, please email us at copuzzleinfo@gmail.com; this is our first hunt, so our program definitely might not be perfect!

 

Hints:​

• Hints will be available 24 hours after the hunt starts - just send us an email!

• For each purchased hint, you get two options:​​

1. For the cost of 30% of the original point value of the puzzle, we can give you a pre-prepared hint to get your team started. This will be helpful if you feel like you haven’t really gotten anywhere. You can purchase only one of these hints.

2. For the cost of 20% of the original point value of the puzzle, we can answer one yes-or-no question. The only answer we will give is “yes” or “no” (no justification). This will be helpful if you’ve solved a portion of a problem but are stuck somewhere. You can get a maximum of 5 of these (5*20%=100%; you'd be getting 0 points).

• We encourage you to get hints if you need them! You’d rather solve the puzzles for a reduced number of points than not answer at all :)

 

Outside Help:

• You ARE allowed to use the following resources:

  • Published internet sites (Wikipedia, etc.)

  • Published written materials

  • The brains of your team members

• You are NOT allowed to use the following resources:

  • Non-team members

  • Forums or other internet communication like Quora, Reddit, etc.

• By signing up, you acknowledge that your team will be disqualified if it’s found that any team member is cheating.

 

Reporting Errors:

• Email copuzzleinfo@gmail.com with any potential puzzle errors you find.

• We will be sure to announce any errata on our website and over email.