If you’ve never heard of Puzzle Hunts before, here’s a very brief summary: A Puzzle Hunt is a competition in which teams solve a series of puzzles. 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. (In this hunt, they are all English words or phrases). 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.
Some other examples of Puzzle Hunts I've done:
The Galactic Puzzlehunt (High difficulty) (19th place, but I was carried by the team tbh)
https://2019.galacticpuzzlehunt.com/puzzles.html
Puzzles are Magic (MLP themed, Easy-Medium difficulty) (145th place, but we started like 4 days late)
https://www.puzzlesaremagic.com/hunt/current.html
The Great Food Pyramid (Easy-Medium difficulty) (12th place and I carried the team tbh)
https://sites.google.com/view/the-food-pyramid/puzzles?authuser=0
The hunt will start on Saturday, June 6th at 10:00 AM, Central Time and will run until the following Sunday, June 14th at 10:00 PM. If you do not register before the hunt begins, you may still register and join in anytime before the hunt ends.
NOTHING! It's free!
NOTHING! Besides bragging rights and pride.
This puzzle hunt is designed to be at an introductory level. If you are an experienced puzzler, and have participated in other puzzle hunts, I would recommend having a team of 2-3. If you were on C@roline Syzygy, you can probably do this hunt as an individual.
Otherwise, if this is your first puzzle hunt, and I anticipate this being the case for most participants, I would recommend a team of 3-5, maybe 6 people. The maximum team size is 8.
There will be 3 rounds of puzzles. When the hunt begins, everyone will gain access to the first round of puzzles. Each round includes one "Meta" puzzle, which uses all of the answers from the other puzzles of that round. The Meta puzzle will be clearly indicated so you don't accidentally try to solve it first.
A quick aside on Metas: It is sometimes possible to solve a Meta puzzle without solving all of the previous answers. This is allowed, but note that it will generally become easier to solve the Metas as you solve more puzzles, so I would recommend giving all the other puzzles a solid try first.
Solving a meta puzzle will grant your team access to the next round of puzzles. After the third Meta, there will be a final "Metameta" puzzle which uses the answers from the three Meta puzzles. Solve that puzzle, and you've completed the hunt!
After the hunt, there will be solutions released, as well as an overall write-up. There will be a feedback form that I will email to all the teams to be filled out after the hunt. Please respond to it!
Email me at ha.david.125@gmail.com. It's entirely possible, and even probably that I made mistakes, and if you email me I can fix it quickly and post an errata for the other teams.
Yes! This hunt is designed to be for anyone, the Star Trek theme is really more of a wrapping than anything else. You do not need to care about Star Trek at all to enjoy the puzzles. I myself have only seen The Original Series and the first two seasons of The Next Generation. The hunt is specifically themed around The Original Series for most of the puzzles, but there are at least a couple that cover the rest of the franchise.
Yes. But it is not necessary. Any outside knowledge about Star Trek should be easily searchable online.
I thought it would be fun! And I didn't have much to do. I hope you enjoy!
Some general hunt tips:
Make sure you have a groupchat or something with your team. Communication should be easy.
Personally, I like to make a shared Google Sheets document with my team, and then have each puzzle on a separate sheet so everyone can work on them together.
UPDATE: I have made a template for an example of a Google Sheets you could use to solve. This is in no way mandatory, and I'm not even suggesting this is the best way to solve all the puzzles. It's just a method I prefer, and I thought if you don't know where to start, this might be a good way to do it.
Some general puzzle solving tips:
Indexing is a very common trick in puzzles. If you get a series of words, and each one has a number associated with it, it probably means you need to take that letter of the word. For example, if the word Spock is associated with the number 4 in some way, it probably means you want the letter "c".
If a clue is followed by a number in parenthesis, it often indicates the number of letters in the answer. For example, "Captain aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise (4)" probably indicates Kirk, not Picard.
If certain phrases stick out and seem important, try googling them!
Don't get stuck on a certain assumption about the puzzle; it can be easy to get stuck in a solving rut. Try approaching the problem from a new perspective!
Double check your work!
If all else fails, assume it's Star Trek related and try googling with that in mind. Although, please note that not every puzzle is Star Trek related.
UPDATE: A couple more tips I thought of:
A few puzzles will have links to Google documents that are view only, you can make a copy that you can edit by selecting "File -> Make a copy".
Reverse Google Image search is your friend!