About
What are the rules?
- The puzzlehunt starts on and ends on , at which point puzzle solutions will be available.
- Teams have a maximum size of 6.
- We reserve the right to disqualify any team for unsportsmanlike conduct.
- If you have any questions about the hunt, or if you want to contact me for any reason, email alexirpan [at] berkeley.edu and I'll get back to you as soon as possible.
What is a puzzlehunt?
In a puzzlehunt, each puzzle has an underlying pattern or insight, which you need to figure out (somewhat like the theme of a crossword puzzle). 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. 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, or REDDOThunt.
What's the story behind this hunt?
Enigmarch is a yearly puzzle writing challenge, to write one puzzle based on a prompt each day of March. I (Alex Irpan) learned about it this year, and chose to try writing a puzzle per day. I succeeded! After testing them on some friends, I decided I had no reason to keep them private, so I put in some work to prepare a hunt website to run it as a one day event.
What is and isn’t allowed?
- You may use any 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 them.
- You may not create multiple accounts or be on multiple teams.
- Please do not view the source code or try to interact with the hunt site in an unintended way. You can send an email if you're not sure if something is allowed.
- You may not ask an LLM or other generative AI to solve a puzzle or a significant part of one. Treat this like our previous rule about not looking at source code: 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.
- This hunts has primarily been tested on a laptop. Using a phone is not recommended.
What is the format of this hunt?
A few puzzles will be available at the start. A new puzzle will unlock every 5 minutes.
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 20 total guesses for each puzzle. If you legitimately run out of guesses and need more, feel free to contact us, though we won’t grant your request if we see that you were, for example, guessing random thematic answers, or brute-forcing all 10-letter words.
There are no hints for this hunt.
How does scoring work?
A puzzle is worth between 10 and 100 points. Let p be the percentage of teams that solve a puzzle. That puzzle will be worth 100-p points or 10 points, whichever is larger. Ties will be broken by last solve time.
This is resolved retroactively. If another team solves a puzzle you have solved, your points from that puzzle will go down. If more teams join during the hunt, your points will go up.
Puzzle difficulty in this event varies a lot, and without an overarching structure to the puzzles, I decided it was better to make scoring dynamic.
How long did this hunt take to make?
Everything you're seeing was made between March 2026 and now. There was very high variance on how long puzzles took to write, as well as how much time I had free each day. I would estimate that I spent about 60-80 hours on first drafts, then another 40-60 hours on postproduction and making adjustments based on testsolving. Thanks to everyone who participated in the beta tests.
I'm not free during the event time.
Sorry! I know the time is not necessarily time zone friendly, but I wanted to do some experimenting on hunt format, and believe the format is better as a time-boxed event rather than one that runs for an entire weekend. The puzzles will remain public after hunt close, and you're free to look at them or even simulate your own event after the fact.