Rules
- Your Antarctic expedition (i.e. the puzzlehunt) starts on Friday, March 15th, 2019 at 6:28 PM EDT and ends on Monday, March 25th, 2019 at 6:28 AM EDT, at which point puzzle solutions will be available. However, we will leave the website running until Monday, April 22nd, 2019 at 6:28 PM EDT so teams can still submit answers and go through the hunt at their own pace (see the FAQ for a more detailed explanation).
- Teams have a maximum size of 10. You may not create multiple accounts or be on multiple teams.
- A few puzzles will be available at the start, and the primary way to unlock new puzzles is by solving puzzles and progressing through the hunt, although puzzles may also be unlocked over time.
- Teams that complete the hunt will be ranked by the time at which they finish. Teams that do not complete the hunt will be ranked by number of puzzles solved and tie-broken by earliest last solve time.
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 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 containing the letters of PI but not E.
Hints
- Starting on Monday, March 18th, teams will receive two advicebergs per day, at 6:28 PM EDT each day, until the end of the hunt.
- You can explore an adviceberg to get help on a puzzle. This can be something like a nudge in the right direction (i.e. you give us your progress on the puzzle and we'll try to get you unstuck) or an answer to a question (e.g. "Which answers to these crossword clues are wrong?").
Other
- 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 publicly stream a solve of our hunt when the hunt is live.
- It won’t be necessary to look at the HTML source/Javascript/CSS on any webpages for any puzzle, but you’re welcome to look anyway. On the static version of the site (which you are viewing now), the source code may contain puzzle spoilers.
- We reserve the right to disqualify any team for unsportsmanlike conduct.
- 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, e-mail galacticpuzzlesetters@gmail.com. We will get back to you as soon as we can.