This puzzlehunt features some new experiences and technologies for the MS Puzzlehunt. Specifically:
The MS Puzzlehunt also known as the Microsoft Puzzlehunt is a quasi-annual tradition dating back to just before the turn of the century. The hunt is a weekend-long team puzzle competition that challenges each team to solve a large number of original puzzles of all different kinds. The answers lead to an endgame of some sort, sometimes to a hidden treasure concealed somewhere or (as this year) a small set of puzzles that wrap up the storyline. Participants will enjoy being puzzled by anything from traditional puzzles like crosswords, cryptograms, jigsaws, word play, and logic problems to puzzles that have to be solved on location. The best way to see what’s involved in a hunt is to peruse previous hunts. This puzzlehunt takes inspiration from the MIT IAP Mystery Hunt, which is very similar in concept, although this hunt is for smaller teams.
The hunt is for anyone interested in solving puzzles. It’s a team competition so people of all different skill and interest levels can enjoy it. While hosted at Microsoft, teams can include non-Microsoft employees, so anyone can participate. And, if teams are playing remotely (not on the Microsoft campus), then they do not need any Microsoft employees. Read about Teams below for details about team registration.
Participants can play through the night or take a mid-hunt break. Historically, winning teams have puzzled away through the night rather than sleep. (See next question for more details about working through the night.) But the hunt is designed so that less dedicated teams will also have fun, even if you never intend to go the distance. It’s also all right to have mixed teams that consist of some hard-core and some casual participants. See the Teams section for details about team registration.
Puzzlehunt 24 “PUZA Corp” will run on the weekend of June 7-8, 2025. It will begin at 10am Pacific time on Saturday, and run until 5:30pm Pacific time on Sunday. While you are welcome to solve through the night, there are two things to note:
Nothing. Nada. Zip. This puzzlehunt is free. It was created by volunteers who love puzzles, just like you do. There are costs associated with running hunts though, and covering those costs is always a puzzle. You can help us solve that puzzle by contributing here: https://paypal.me/puzzlehunt
This hunt includes three puzzles that must be solved before hunt weekend.
They are at locations in the greater Redmond area and are intended to be solved at those locations.
Those puzzles will be available to solve two weeks before the hunt.
These count as part of the hunt and
This hunt also includes two puzzles that must be solved on location on the Microsoft campus. These puzzles can only be solved between 6am and 10pm.
The puzzles are not available for remote teams.
If you’ve never done a puzzlehunt before, this will be a new experience. You may be used to sudoku or crosswords or puzzle magazines or apps, but this is more than that. For this hunt, you will collectively see between 60 and 70 puzzles of wide variety, some of which you may recognize and some you won’t. Sometimes your whole team will be collectively working on one puzzle. Some puzzles will be straightforward and only require execution. Others will require a mental leap to figure out what to do.
Often, you will want more than one person looking at a puzzle. Don’t be afraid to call for help from a teammate. If something isn’t working for you don’t hesitate swapping puzzles with teammates.
You will be given a subset of puzzles to work on, and as those are answered new ones are revealed. There will also be one or more metapuzzles that take things from other puzzles and put them together in a new puzzle.
Some previous hunts are available to view on this site, and Microsoft employees can view puzzles from a larger archive of past hunts.
This hunt is hosted by “PUZA Corp,” consisting primarily of Bruce Leban, Jason Rajtar, Jonathan Berkowitz, Megan Quinn, and Morgan Brown. Josh Bodner played a major part in getting the puzzles rendered. Kenny Young provided valuable technical assistance. Other contributors include: Alex Rajtar, Brent Holman, Dana Young, Drew Carlson, Jess McGatha, Joe DeVincentis, Josie Effinger, Justin Melvin, Kelly Moutsos, Mark Engelberg, Rich Rowan, Robb Effinger, Rorke Haining, Roy Leban, and Wei-Hwa Huang. Like all hunts, this hunt relied heavily on alpha and beta testers.
If you are interested in helping run future puzzlehunts, helping author for future puzzlehunts, or helping with the tech for future puzzlehunts, please contact helpout@puzzlehunt.org to connect.
No. This event is not sponsored or endorsed by Microsoft. MS Puzzlehunts are created by volunteers some of whom work, or have worked at, Microsoft. We are appreciative that Microsoft allows us to use their facilities for teams with Microsoft employees and are happy that we are able to share these puzzles not only with Microsoft employees but with the wider puzzle community.
Solving puzzles in a group is fun and easier with more people, so you might not have as much fun if your team has just a few people. If you need more people on your team, see below.
Find other people who like to solve puzzles or can be convinced to give it a try. Microsoft and the Seattle area are full of smart people who like to solve puzzles. Try showing friends or co-workers the Puzzlehunt site. Each team must have no more than 12 players total.
If you don’t want to make a team, you can apply to join someone else’s team by clicking on the Register link in the top nav bar. (You can only apply to one team at a time.) You can also use the puzzmate distribution list or the Seattle Puzzlers group on Facebook to find a team to join, to find people to join your team, or to find other people without a team.
If you are a local team (solving on the Microsoft campus), you must have at least two members who have valid Microsoft badges. The employees on each team are responsible for registering guests, escorting them while on campus, and following Microsoft rules. For remote teams (not on the Microsoft campus), there is no Microsoft employee requirement. These requirements are set on a per-hunt basis and may be different in any future hunt.
Aside from the above, there are five puzzles that are only available to local teams. Remote teams will be given substitutes for those puzzles and will still be able to finish the hunt and fully participate. Local and remote teams will have separate leaderboards.
No. All of the puzzles are posted on the site and many are enabled to be solved directly on the web pages. They are designed so that your team can include members who are in different locations. (Except for the five puzzles that are designed to be solved at specific locations.)
Keeping your team organized is important both to having fun and doing well. It’s a good idea to make sure that the members of your team understand and agree to the levels of commitment that everyone is making. It can cause problems if some people are committed to work through the night and others are not, especially if not everyone understands and agrees to this in advance. Team dynamics generally work better if all team members have similar levels of commitment.
Individual and team registration is mandatory. You will not be able to access the puzzles without this. The authors need to be able to contact all teams at all times. Also, advance registration allows us to ensure team sign-in goes smoothly and the hunt begins on time. Anyone may create a team. Simply login and create a team, and copy the invite link and mail to your teammates. People who click that link are automatically added to your team, so you don’t want to post that link publicly.
Teams may continue to change names, modify members, and edit their biographical information until the hunt begins.
The implicit instruction for all puzzles is “Figure out the final answer.” Puzzles without instructions are either classic puzzle forms, perhaps with a twist, or puzzles where part of the challenge is figuring out how to solve the puzzle.
Most puzzles have on-page editing enabled and the edits will sync between members of your team. We encourage you to try to solve without printing.
If you do want to print, click the link where it says “Want to print?” This will open the puzzle in a new tab without framing ready to print. If you try to print with control/command-P it won’t print as well.
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Most puzzles that use color also have additional formatting that is redundant with the color. This icon is used on puzzles that use color in a way that may not be accessible to people with color blindness unless they use tools to identify colors. | |
| This puzzle has data confirmation, which means you can generally enter answers to individual clues or other parts of the puzzle to get them confirmed. You can always enter phrases you extract from the puzzle for confirmation. | ||
| This puzzle requires scissors if printed. |
Other icons found on puzzle pages are specific to this hunt or to those puzzles.
Yes and no. Puzzlehunt puzzles run the gamut including everything from puzzles that depend heavily on word meanings and wordplay (like crosswords and cryptic crosswords) to ones that require assembling pieces and shuffling letters to make words (like drop quotes and other variant anagrams) to puzzles that don’t use English at all (like sudoku and other logic puzzles) to picture or audio or video puzzles. Any type of puzzle you’ve ever seen might appear, so be prepared for that. You’ll also see puzzle types you’ve never seen before, so be prepared for that too. See the Resources section of the website for more information.
Anagramming is often a part of certain puzzles (e.g., cryptic crosswords), but anagramming will not be used as the final step to a puzzle unless there is a clue specifically suggesting that step. If, after finishing a puzzle, you have an unordered set of letters, and there is no clue suggesting you should anagram them, look for a way to determine their order. When a puzzle asks you to anagram letters, read the instructions carefully. There may be constraints such as preserving the order of some of the letters.
Anagramming might be clued in various ways. The puzzle might explicitly tell you to rearrange letters. Cryptic crossword clues use specific words to indicate you should anagram a set of letters. Outside of cryptic clues, you should look for more explicit words like shuffle or scramble or some other indication that things are out of order.
We feel the same way about making you put words into a grid in random order. In every puzzle where you have to put something in a grid, there is either logic that constrains where words go or there’s something else that tells you how to fill in the grid.
Generally, if you see a numbers in (parenthesis) after a clue it indicates length. Likewise, a numbers in [brackets] generally indicates indexing.
Each puzzle has a final answer, one or two words, a short phrase, or a longer message. In some puzzles you are explicitly told how to get the final answer. In others, figuring out how to extract the final answer is part of the puzzle. If you solve a puzzle and you get a long phrase, it’s probably a clue to a shorter answer.
Sometimes getting to the final answer is trivial or may be explicitly explained. Other times, you may get an intermediate answer which could hint at, or highlight part of, the final answer. The final answer could be signaled by adding an extra or missing word to the intermediate answer, perhaps. Sometimes there are no hints, in which case you should look for some way to combine or connect the intermediate answers. Common techniques are to use acrostics (where the first letter of each word spells something) or for the intermediate answer to be another puzzle of the same kind (i.e. recursion).
If you extract a phrase from a puzzle, you should enter it into the system for data confirmation. It might be the answer or you may get more information. The message “Keep going” means you’re on the right track. Sometimes it means that phrase is simply a clue to the answer. Sometimes it means keep doing what you were doing. Sometimes it means do what that phrase you extracted says to do.
Please read the previous paragraph again.
For example, in Puzzlehunt 1 some teams guessed WINEGLASS as the answer to the puzzle “Sarajevo” because it showed a set of flags arranged roughly in the shape of a wineglass. The puzzle would have been rather uninteresting if that were the answer. The correct answer to Sarajevo involves Morse code; it was not a coincidence that all flags had stripes or dots that formed Morse letters to spell out a word. Teams solved the puzzle by looking for similarities among the flag designs and were pretty sure they had the correct answer before they confirmed it. What are the odds that a collection of flags just happens to spell out a message in Morse code by chance?
A metapuzzle is a special puzzle that takes the final answers of other (“feeder”) puzzles and combines them in some way. There will usually be multiple metapuzzles, especially in modular and threaded hunts. In this hunt, all metapuzzles are labeled as such. A tag of the form (Meta_9) will appear in the upper right corner of all meta puzzles identifying that it is a meta and the number of feeder puzzles (9 in this example). Endgame puzzles are similarly tagged (Endgame_9).
All answers should be submitted through the puzzlehunt site. The system will (a) confirm final answers, (b) provide data confirmation in some cases, and (c) provide helpful clues for common guesses. Teams must confirm the final answer to credit for solving a puzzle.
If you extract a phrase from a puzzle, you should enter it into the system for data confirmation. It might be the answer or you may get more information.
Teams who spam the answer submission system will have their system frozen for an appropriate amount of time, determined by the puzzlehunt organizers. The limits have been increased and decoupled between short-term guessing and over the weekend guessing, so teams who reasonably use the submission system to confirm suspected partial progress should be OK.
The more prepared you are for puzzlehunt weekend, the better time you’ll have participating in it. Here’s a list of supplies that you may find helpful:
If you think there’s a mistake, please describe the error in detail in an email to puzzlehunt24@gmail.com and we’ll try to correct it. Screenshots are helpful.
Winning the hunt requires solving all the meta puzzles and completing the endgame. Teams do not need to solve all the puzzles if they are able to solve metas with partial data. If teams finish the endgame without solving all the puzzles, they can continue solving other puzzles but it will not affect the order of finish.
The best way to win is to solve the most puzzles before any other team and then finish the endgame. The best way to do that is teamwork. Work individually on the easier puzzles so everyone is effective. Work together on the harder puzzles so you can solve them more quickly. If you get stuck, ask your teammates for help or switch to another puzzle. Make sure you keep track of which puzzles you’ve already solved and confirmed.
Not have fun. If you’re not having fun working on a particular puzzle, switch to another one.
You finish the hunt by finishing the endgame. On Saturday, the endgame is only available after you have solved all of the metapuzzles. On Sunday, the endgame will become available with fewer metapuzzles.
You don’t have to solve all puzzles to finish the hunt — as long as you solve enough puzzles to reach the endgame — but you’ll probably need to solve most of them. You can continue solving other puzzles after you finish the endgame but it will only affect your score, not your standing. In fact, you can continue to solve puzzles after the event ends as well although those solves will not affect your score.
Attendance is optional. It’s an opportunity to learn a bit about the parts of the hunt you didn’t see or didn’t solve, and connect with other teams and share trials, tribulations, and interesting stories.
Teams receive points for each puzzle they solve. Some puzzles may be worth more points than others. The goal of the hunt is to win by reaching and finishing the endgame, not by scoring points. Therefore, it is possible to not win the hunt even though your team solves more puzzles than other teams.
Ties will be broken using the following criteria, in this order, as necessary. All puzzlehunt organizers’ decisions are final.
Bragging rights!
See the /ph24/play/rules page for the rules, suggested equipment, and more. If you find a rule ambiguous, even after reading the rest of this FAQ, please ask your teammates, your team captain, and finally puzzlehunt24@gmail.com.