About
Format
- The puzzlehunt starts on and ends on .
- At that time, the scoreboard will be frozen, hints will be closed and solutions will be released. However, if you have not finished and still want to experience the whole hunt, you'll still be able to register new teams, submit answers on the website, and progress through the hunt until .
- Teams have a maximum size of 8. If you would like to include additional inexperienced puzzlers on your team, please message us or email us at [email protected] and we'll consider your request.
- 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 how much progress they have made through the hunt and tie-broken by time.
Solving
- Unlike our previous hunts, teams will have a large number of unlocked puzzles from the start.
- Each puzzle answer is a string of letters A–Z. Case does not matter in your answers, and any other characters will be stripped before checking for correctness.
- You have 20 guesses per 24 hours for most puzzles. If you legitimately run out of guesses and need more, feel free to contact us. (We expect to grant most requests, unless we find your guess log particularly egregious.)
- Subpuzzle answers and intermediate cluephrases will not be checkable.
Hints
- Over the course of the hunt, your team will gradually earn hint tokens, which you can spend on help with puzzles.
- If you are not having fun and have no available hints, please message us or email us at [email protected] and we will see if we can help.
What is and isn't allowed?
- You may not ask an LLM or other generative AI to solve a puzzle or a significant part of one. It bypasses our intended solving experience and goes against the spirit of the hunt. More limited uses, such as doing research into a topic you're unfamiliar with, or interpreting an individual crossword clue you're stuck on, are left to your discretion. We urge you to treat LLMs as tools and to use them only to the extent that they make the hunt more enjoyable for you.
- You may use any other 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 stream or post spoilers for the hunt in a place where other teams might see it when the hunt is live.
- You may not create multiple accounts or be on multiple teams.
- You are welcome to inspect the source code on the website, unless otherwise specified. If you're not sure, please message us or email [email protected] first.
- You may not write code that interacts with the website. You will not need to do this.
Other
- 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, please message us or email [email protected]. We will get back to you as soon as we can.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a puzzlehunt? How do I solve these puzzles?
Generally, a hunt puzzle comes with some information, and the goal is to extract an answer out of it. The puzzles can take many different forms; the only real commonality is that you usually receive no direct instructions, so it's up to you to figure out how to make sense of the information you're given. In this hunt, a cursory understanding of common encodings (such as A1Z26, ASCII, binary, braille, flag semaphore and Morse code) is expected. You can read a longer introduction to puzzlehunts here.
If you are new to puzzles and are interested in seeing some examples, or if you're looking for some practice, we recommend looking at puzzles from other online hunts such as Galactic Puzzle Hunt, Teammate Hunt, Puzzle Potluck, Huntinality, or REDDOThunt.
Who is running this hunt?
We are the ECs of /r/PictureGame (/r/PG for short), a group of puzzle enthusiasts that emerged from the wider PictureGame community on Reddit. This Reddit game is generally focused on image identification, but from time to time, people like to post various puzzles there too. The ECs of /r/PG have been hunting together in some form for about 9 years now. In 2022, we ran our first EC Puzzle Hunt (Exploring the Countryside). In 2024, we ran the second ECPH (Enchanted Castle).
What's with the EC thing?
EC stands for Everything Conceivable! It's a tradition on our team to have EC names. You can often find our EC team names when scrolling through the list of registered teams on other online hunts.
How long and difficult is this hunt?
We expect this hunt to be about the same length as Enchanted Castle, and longer and harder than Exploring the Countryside. There will be around 40 puzzles.
Should I solve with a large team?
The hunt will be sizeable, so we recommend having a team size close to the maximum of 8 if you want to be competitive. That said, we believe the hunt will still be fun for teams of all sizes.
How accessible is this hunt?
There may be puzzles involving colours, images and audio. If you encounter an accessibility issue, please message us or email us at [email protected] so that we can try to set up an accommodation.
I think there's a mistake in this puzzle!
Please message us or email us at [email protected] and we'll try to correct it.
I'm stuck on a puzzle. What should I do?
Here are some general puzzle tips that might be useful:
- Thoroughly check the work that you've already done. Fixing a small mistake or incorrect assumption can greatly help with getting unstuck.
- Get fresh eyes on the puzzle, or conversely, take a break and look at something else.
- Consider what information you haven't used yet.
- It can be useful to put everything you have into your favourite search engine.
- Look at similar examples of the puzzle type you're working on.
- Have you tried…
If you have hint tokens, you can request hints to help you get unstuck.
Is there a tip jar?
This hunt is completely free, but if you would like to support us, here's a link to our Ko-fi. We deeply appreciate any donations.
I have a question that's not on this list!
Message us or email us at [email protected] and we'll do our best to answer it.