Announcement: We have sped up the release of prewritten hints to two days (48 hours) after respective puzzle release.

About

What is a puzzle hunt?

A puzzle hunt is a series of a particular style of puzzles. These puzzles will not have any direct instructions, but each puzzle will have underlying patterns and structure that is up to you to figure out. This is similar to themes in crossword puzzles but applied to the entire puzzle! You may also find that such puzzles can feel similar to escape rooms. Otherwise, the design and format of these puzzles are open-ended and will vary widely. Any content in a puzzle might contain a clue to its underlying patterns. A more detailed introduction to puzzle hunts is available here.

At the end of each puzzle in this hunt, you will get a word or short phrase that is the answer.

Here are some other online puzzle hunts if you're looking for examples or practice: CRUMS Puzzle Hunt, Galactic Puzzle Hunt, Huntinality, EC Puzzle Hunt, Puzzle Potluck, Brown Puzzle Hunt.

What is the format for this hunt?

This hunt is released in the form of an advent calendar, with one puzzle per day from December 1 to December 24, 2024. Some of these daily puzzles will be metapuzzles that use the content from previous puzzles.

The hunt has been designed to be solved in its physical form, as a printed calendar with 24 envelopes. We are running ran a Kickstarter to support the production of this calendar. However, all puzzles in the hunt will also be freely available here on this website!

Puzzle content will always be entirely contained within each puzzle's printed page(s) or PDF file. Metapuzzles will additionally use content from previous puzzles. No other information from the website will be involved in the solution of a puzzle.

Online, each day's puzzle and answer checker will unlock at 12:01 a.m. (midnight) UTC. Owners of the physical calendar are encouraged to open one envelope per day as well, although we can't really stop you if you choose to skip ahead.

How difficult is this hunt? What is the recommended team size?

We aim for this hunt to be on the easier side—most puzzles took our test solvers between 15 minutes and 1 hour. We have released a teaser puzzle, which is roughly the length of two normal hunt puzzles.

There is no formal team size limit, but we recommend teams of 2-3 people, or a driven and experienced solo solver.

This hunt is not intended to be competitive, and we encourage you to collaborate with members of other registered teams if that is more fun for you. In other words, you can work with friends on some of the puzzles, but register separately to track your own progress.

How do we win?

This is intended to be a relaxed, non-competitive hunt. On the leaderboard, teams will be ordered by: whether they finished the hunt by solving the final puzzle, number of metapuzzles solved, number of puzzles solved. Ties will be shown in an arbitrary order. Solve time does not affect leaderboard position.

What happens when the hunt ends?

The final puzzle of the hunt will be released on December 24. The hunt will continue, with teams still able to submit answers and progress on the leaderboard, until December 31 at 11:59:59 p.m. UTC. At that point, answer submissions will close and the leaderboard will be frozen.

At some point soon after the hunt ends, we will transition to a static version of the hunt website with solutions posted. Answer confirmation will remain possible with a static answer checker, but submissions will not be associated with any team accounts.

Any other rules?

  • Don't spoil puzzles for other people! You may not stream or post solutions during the hunt publicly, or in places where other teams might unintentionally see them (But as mentioned above, you may communicate privately with members of other teams consensually.)
  • We reserve the right to disqualify any team for unsportsmanlike conduct.

Help, I'm stuck on a puzzle!

Here are some general puzzle tips that might be useful:

  • Thoroughly check the work that you’ve already done. Sometimes fixing a small mistake or incorrect assumption can make a big difference.
  • Take a break and come back to it.
  • If you're solving with others and they haven't seen the puzzle yet, get them to take a look. Fresh eyes can be helpful.
  • Consider what information you haven’t used yet. Everything on the printed page(s)/in the PDF file is fair game!
  • Try putting everything you have into your favorite search engine.
  • Look at similar examples of the puzzle type you’re working on.
  • Have you tried…

If you're still stuck, we will have canned (i.e., prewritten) hints that will be available three days two days after each puzzle's initial release time. You will be able to find them above the answer checker on each puzzle's webpage. Using hints does not affect your leaderboard position.

Update Dec. 3: We've sped up the hint release delay to 2 days.

I think there's a mistake in this puzzle!

Please describe the error in an email to contact@adventhunt.com. We'll respond by email whether there is actually an error. Be sure to check your spam folder if you don't hear back from us within a day! If there is an error, we will correct it and issue an erratum.

I'm having a hard time copying content out of the PDF and into my spreadsheet.

For some puzzles, a    button is available that helps copy parts of the puzzle to your clipboard for transferring to a spreadsheet. This button, if present for a puzzle, will be among the buttons above the right side of the PDF viewer.

What's this about a Discord server?

We have a Discord server for the hunt! (Discord is a popular instant messaging application.) Joining it is entirely optional! You can use it to connect with the hunt organizers or with other participants. If you're logged in, you'll see an entry for it in the top navigation bar.

Who made this hunt?

We are Peppermint Herrings 🎏—Eshan Mitra, Zach Barnett, Karis Jones, Nathan Jones, Jay Qi, Alex Walker, Sara Walker, and Zach Zagorski—a group of puzzle fans who have played in many online hunts as various versions of the Herrings 🎏 team. Many of us have writing credits including CRUMS, BAPHL, and internal puzzle hunts for Meta, among others. A few of us wrote puzzles for the first time. In the MIT Mystery Hunt, we play as part of team Providence.

How do we contact you?

If you need help or have any questions not covered here, please email us at contact@adventhunt.com. Be sure to check your spam folder if you don't hear back from us within a day or two!

Is there a tip jar?

If you'd like to support the Advent Hunt, you can donate here. For contributions of $5 or more, we will send you a commemorative Advent Hunt sticker (the same one our Kickstarter backers received)!