#puzzle hunt

[oneefin]

a good friend and fellow puzzle huh?nter @nivrad00 released an elegant puzzle suite called 🟥🟧🟨🟩🟦🟪⬛ on their itch page! i playtested this and it was awesome, highly recommend :D

go try it: https://nivrad00.itch.io/rainbow-challenge

[welcomeinitiate]

Congrats to our top 3 teams!

Mr Ree Polka (tl) -- the first to finish the Round 3 Meta!

Kat: ) -- second to finish and our favorite submission (so far) to a certain puzzle!

The Hoes of Blackmoor Manor -- third to finish and the first team to solve a puzzle in the hunt! With that said, all three teams have declined running the 2025 welcomeinitiate mystery, so that title is still up for grabs! A few other updates: 1. There is now a Junior Detective version of Recipe Substitution, which is easier than the original version. Either version will work for the Round 1 meta puzzle 2. There are now self-serve hints on all Round 1 puzzles, including the meta. Simply submit "hint1", "hint2", or "hint3" to get hints for a puzzle. These do not count against your guess limit 3. We are still available for custom hints (unlimited for Round 1, 1 a day for Rounds 2&3), so def send a message if you're stuck on a puzzle!

[winterpinetrees]

No idea if anyone would be interested, but this is the puzzle hunt clue that I just sent to some real-life friends to solve. This is the second clue I have ever made. It's not directly connected to anything, so it's barely even a puzzle hunt.

@avetato, if anyone solves it, don't look.

#8000FF #4b0082  #daa520 #000080 #614051 #FF0000 #614051

#C3B091 #614051 #FFFF00

#4b0082 #C0C0C0

#000080 #614051 #FFFFFF #008080 #FF8000 #000080

Jlk wwfpsrxfrq pezvg oihhk gui rbgvopa? Awf yeom bnzi el hur raqh xrc.

Dlrl fph spw jgp prglrk? Kwixchgkaxl gzssi oksp rpzv qqb e sprk. 

Cld gvx mah emlyszc (csv snvjxphmvw) wuskc ilg uozog uws hmuar mfpx uraeg pcgi jwdeczcc epb hrzbsb icpnrr acg TjB? 

Jeqf xm f ulftr qq bmj rvw bglz yt vvchkgm ymi eeav ntzj!

[puzzlenation]

The Puzzliest Hallmark Holiday Films!

Unless you’re trapped under a rock, you’ve probably seen at least one of the barrage of Hallmark holiday films unleashed on the viewing public over the years. They release so many, in fact, that many times, they have more new holiday movies than there are days between Thanksgiving and Christmas! And I’ve watched a LOT of them. This won’t surprise longtime readers, given my extensive reviews of…

[renewherself]

EC Puzzle Hunt 2: Enchanted Castle

Street View Hunt - Solo-solved, including identifying 6/8 of the street view images

Trelawney - 90% solo-solved, up to the last step of figuring out which game had a Baron and which game had a Poisoner

Dichotomous Key - Figured out the method for filling out the "numerical" tree, including that nodes were inconsistent about which side 0 and 1 were on

Musical Numbers - Filled out roughly a third of the crossnumber puzzle - Found the contradictions in the crossnumber puzzle that were causing the team to use the wrong folk song for extraction - Solved the cluephrase SPRING THAT SENDS OUT WATER and figured out the final puzzle answer

Taskmaster - Provided 4/5 submissions that enabled us to solve the puzzle the slow and steady way - Received 5/5 points on task 3, with a bonus "holy shit"

Character Classes - Figured out that the missing letters were spelling out the names of Nethack monsters and that we needed to convert each monster into their in-game symbol/class

On-Site Only — Sorry! - Almost solo-solved, including figuring out the latitude of the on-site location through examining the astrolabe, figuring out the azimuth and altitude of Arcturus, using Wolfram Alpha to identify the on-site location based on that information. (Needed help to figure out extraction involved layering the three sets of letters and reading them interleaved)

The Lexicographer - Figured out the name of each enemy was an anagram of a famous author's name

The Great Hall [Meta] - Identified the Wyoming and Colorado locations clued by the feeder answers (save for the locations clued by Ziggurats, which we had not solved yet, and the locations clued by PREMIER LEAGUE TEAMS because sports)

Solution: Meta Bingo - Solo-solved the Training subpuzzle by coding a Python script to run through all possible bigram combinations

Duality - Helped to unravel and solve some of the entangled crossword clues, including: + "Clock change in excelsis _ inits" DST/DEO + "TLD for martial artist Jet Spain" - ES/LI + "HTML action symbolized by a red circle companion (abbr.)" CSS/REC

First You Go Down Broadway + Identified the productions, venues, and production dates up through step 33/37 post-hunt

[sgt-reckless]

Oh hell yea, Galactic Puzzlehunt is tomorrow! Excited!

[thethinkingaurora]

Well I started a whole new puzzle hunt project last week, combining two of my fandoms (cookie run/homestuck)

Ooh, puzzles, sounds like fun

I know literally nothing about either of those fandoms though

[jad-fm]

the difficulty of choosing between a puzzle I can do but absolutely don't want to because of the busywork and a puzzle I love but can't do because skill issue.

[lunar-solarsystem]

so i have an explanation

so i was talking with a friend, i showed them a draft for something about Lose Clarity and they caught me accidentally saying “Puzzle’s” somewhere rather than just “Puzzle”

so now i have a joke branch off for my own AU

this shall now be known as the Puzzle Pieces branch-off :3

it’s literally just a whole bunch of tiny Puzzles

they multiply :)

[beatrixacs]

And my The Witcher puzzle project is done 🧩🐺⚔️😊

[defiledtomb]

rook be upon ye

[oneefin]

we did vehemusical this weekend! twas enjoyable. we didn't solve everything, so our stage is missing some people, but that's okay:

the hunt is pretty short and it's not too hard (with one significant exception) - optimal for a small team of intermediate solvers with a bit of time to kill.

it's clear that this hunt was "not for me", in the same way that crosswords with tons of old people clues in them are "not for me": musical theatre isn't really my thing, so a lot of the content didn't feel as cool or connected in my head as other hunt stuff i've done, but i had a good time regardless. i'm glad to have teammates who can inform me of the necessary musical trivia and also bounce or riff off of ideas i have - even if we weren't as available as we were hoping to be.

thanks team vehemence for putting this together!

[welcomeinitiate]

Meta Monday Friday!

Howdy folks! With multiple teams now in round 2, we are easing up the hinting policy for round 1; feel free to submit multiple hint requests a day for round 1, one at a time (please wait until a request has been answered to submit a new one though) Teams can continue to request one hint a day for round 2 or round 3 puzzles We also have a little “How to solve a meta” video for you—if you’ve solved two or three puzzles, you should take a look at the round 1 meta!

[winterpinetrees]

It took my friends less than a day to solve the first stage of a puzzle hunt that I made for them. It’s honestly my fault for using something as simple as a caesar cipher.

I have got to get weirder.

[plant-dragon]

So It all started with this page. I went to Thisisnotawebsitedotcom.com And found a code thingy.

After talking to a friend we got this code:

I pressed submit and got this page:

Im not 100% sure what this means but Ill tell the masses.

[renewherself]

Mark Halpin’s Labor Day Extravaganza 2024: Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Actaeon

- Figured out the deer hooves were Braille dots - Figured out some of the images clued Best in Show winners from Crufts and that the paws translated to 6-bit binary

Icarus

- Figured out that the across answers that clashed with down answers in the grid all contained the substring "SOL" i.e. suns