Hunts Upon a Time

About

Huntinality is an online puzzle hunt consisting of rounds of puzzles and metapuzzles written by Cardinality. It is designed for teams of up to 6 people and is open to people of any and all puzzling experience.

This page is not a puzzle.

Rules

Format

  • Huntinality III: Hunts Upon a Time starts on Friday, December 1, 2023 at 03:00 PM PST and ends on Sunday, December 10, 2023 at 07:00 PM PST, at which point puzzle solutions will be available. However, we will leave most of the website (including the answer checker) running so teams can still submit answers and go through the hunt at their own pace.
  • Teams have a maximum size of 6. You may not create multiple accounts or be on multiple teams. If you would like to include additional inexperienced puzzlers on your team, please email us and we'll consider your request.
  • A few puzzles will be available at the start, and more puzzles will be unlocked as you solve them. In total, there are about 35 puzzles in the hunt.
  • There will be 2 tracks: Expert and Casual.
    • The puzzle content will remain largely the same across the two tracks but may differ slightly (e.g. certain keywords may be highlighted for the casual track).
    • You may switch tracks in either direction before the hunt begins. After the hunt has begun, you may only switch from Expert to Casual (and not the other way).

Ranking

  • Besides pride and joy, there are no prizes for finishing first (or second, or last...)
  • Expert track teams that complete the hunt will be ranked by the time at which they finish the final metapuzzle. Teams that do not complete the hunt will be ranked by number of metapuzzles solved, then number of puzzles solved, and tie-broken by earliest last solve time.
  • Casual teams will not be ranked - they will be ordered alphanumerically.

Solving

  • Each answer is a string of letters A-Z. Lowercase letters will be changed into uppercase, and any other characters will be stripped before checking for correctness.
  • You have a budget of 20 total incorrect guesses for each puzzle before you are locked out of guesses.
    • There will be cases where partial answers will yield an automatic response. These do not count against the budget.
    • If you run out of guesses, you can email us and request more guesses. However, we reserve the right to deny your request if it looks like your team was making wild guesses unsupported by your actual solve state.

Hints

  • Freeform hint responses will be available during the hunt.
    • For expert teams, hint credit will accrue over time. The first 2 hint credits will be granted 18 hours after the hunt begins (at 9:00 AM PT on Saturday, December 2). Teams will then receive an additional 2 hint credits every 12 hours.
    • Casual teams will have easier access to hints than Expert teams. Hints will be available from the start of the hunt with no set limit on hint credits, but we will aim to respond to at most 2 hints per hour per team. We reserve the right to adjust this as we see fit depending on bandwidth and whether teams have explored advice given in the last hint.
    • When requesting a hint, teams should provide as much detail as possible about what they have tried. Someone from the organizing team will respond with a hint to nudge you toward the next step(s).
    • We aim to respond to hints within 30 minutes until 10 PM PT on Sunday, December 3, but do note that most of our hinters are on the west coast (PT), so there may be delays overnight. After that, you can still request hints until the end of the hunt, but our turnaround time will be closer to a few hours due to work / other obligations.
  • After the hunt, you can always feel free to email us at contact@huntinality.com with any questions, and we will respond when we see it.

Other

  • You are highly encouraged to use external resources during the hunt, including other people, as long as they aren't also helping other teams and aren't actively participating in the hunt.
  • While the hunt is going on, do not post about the content of the hunt on any public platform (e.g. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, skywriting, etc); we don't want you to spoil the experience for other participants. Feel free to post about the hunt in general (e.g. "I love Huntinality. #hype") or wait until after the hunt is over.
  • You may not view source code, reverse-engineer, hack, decompile, or otherwise interact with the website in any unintended way. If you're not sure whether something is intended, email contact@huntinality.com.
  • We reserve the right to disqualify any team for unsportsmanlike conduct. This includes trying to hack the hunt website or cheating in any other way. It is not necessary or recommended to look at website source code or decompile any source code. Nor is it necessary to partake in any illegal actions to solve any puzzles.
  • 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, email contact@huntinality.com. We will get back to you as soon as we can.

FAQs

What is a puzzle hunt? How do I solve these puzzles?

If you've never heard of puzzle hunts before, here's a very brief summary: in a typical puzzle, you receive some information and have to extract an answer out of it, which is almost always an English word or phrase. Puzzles can come in 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.

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 DP Puzzle Hunt, Teammate Hunt, or Galactic Puzzle Hunt.

For teams puzzling together virtually, we recommend using tools to communicate and collaborate, such as Discord and Drive.

Who is hosting this hunt?

Cardinality is a puzzle hunt team that formed at Stanford circa 2010, mostly competing in smaller hunts. In recent years, our full team (e.g., for MIT Mystery Hunt) has expanded to a large group of friends and friends-of-friends who all share the same love of puzzles. Huntinality is written by a subset of the larger Cardinality team.

This is a puzzle hunt, right?

Yes.

How long / how difficult is the hunt?

This hunt will be about the same length as Huntinality 2.0. There are about 35 puzzles in this year's hunt, about the same as in last year's hunt. This hunt will still be moderately less difficult than previous years' Galactic and Teammate hunts. (This does not include GPH 2023.) The first set of puzzles is intended to be beginner-friendly.

How accessibility-friendly is this hunt?

There may be puzzles that involve colors, images, sounds, and fast page navigation. If any of these cause an issue for your team, please do reach out to us at contact@huntinality.com so we can figure out a workaround and try to make the hunt as enjoyable for you as possible.

How did you make your website?

Our website is based on GPH-site and tph-site. This hunt pulls some images and characters from various corners of the internet. We do not claim to have invented them. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. (Please don't sue us!)

What browsers are supported?

We recommend the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox on Windows or Mac when using our website.

How will hints work?

As with last year, you will be able to send us free-form hint requests. Please include your questions, progress on the puzzle, public links to your sheets, and a summary of what you have tried. We will do our best to respond appropriately. The more detail you put in, the more we'll be able to help.

Our hint philosophy is that we want to give you just enough of a nudge to get you unstuck, but we don't want to rob you of any "aha" moments. (Aren't "aha" moments the whole reason we all do puzzles?) You can read more about our approach to hinting in our Huntinality 2021 wrap-up or Huntinality 2022 wrap-up.

If you find a hint unhelpful or would like clarification, don't hesitate to follow up by email.

I think there's a mistake in this puzzle!

Please describe the error in an email to contact@huntinality.com and we'll take a look. If there is a mistake, we will post an errata on the Updates page and send an email out to all teams.

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.
  • Write down progress on the puzzles. This will make it easier for teammates to jump into a puzzle, as well as help you organize your thoughts.
  • Consider what information you haven't used yet.
  • It can be useful to put everything you have into your favorite search engine.
  • Think back to common puzzle hunt mechanisms and encodings. Our resources section contains lists of some of these under "Common Hunt Mechanics."

Once hints are available, you can also use them to get a nudge in the right direction.

I have a question/comment that hasn't been addressed!

Contact us at contact@huntinality.com. Please include any relevant info that will help us help you, like your team name.

Is there a tip jar?

Huntinality is completely free, but if you would like to help support us, you can donate here. All donations are greatly appreciated.

Resources

This is not meant to be an all-inclusive list.

Audio Tools

Ciphers

Image Tools

Logic Puzzles

Word Puzzles

Word Puzzle Tools

Common Hunt Datasets

Common Hunt Mechanics

Collaboration Tooling