About
What is this?
This is an online puzzlehunt that can be done at any time, created by one person (me!). This puzzlehunt contains one round of 12 puzzles, one metapuzzle, and a set of minipuzzles as part of the hint system. You complete the puzzlehunt when you solve the metapuzzle, which uses the answers from all other puzzles. Completing it earns you a spot in the Finishing Teams page.
You may solve these puzzles in any way you want, but it is recommended to use Google Sheets, especially if you are solving with others. All puzzles have a copyable Google Sheets link at the top-right. The sheet for the first puzzle contains instructions on how to make a copy. The sheet is only for convenience and never part of the puzzle.
What is a puzzlehunt?
Puzzles in a puzzlehunt include a variety of puzzles (e.g. crosswords, logic puzzles, identification puzzles, etc.) and are mainly characterized by a hidden pattern or insight that is not obvious at first sight. These will often require you to think out-of-the-box to figure out how to solve them. There will be subtle clues of what to do, but you will have to figure that out yourself.
You can read a longer introduction to puzzlehunts here, which also contains examples of other puzzlehunts.
How difficult is the puzzlehunt?
This puzzlehunt is designed to be enjoyable for both inexperienced and experienced puzzlers alike. A small team of 1-4 people is suggested, although there are no rules on team size. Compared to other puzzlehunts, this puzzlehunt leans easy-to-medium, with later puzzles around average small-scale puzzlehunt difficulty. This puzzlehunt is intended to be solved at a relaxed pace, possibly over multiple sessions; there is no time pressure.
New to puzzlehunts? It is highly recommended that you solve with a team. Puzzlehunts in general can be challenging and take some time to get used to. Please take a look at the section "I am new to puzzlehunts!" below. You should not hesitate to use the hint system if you are stuck.
Experienced? These puzzles should hopefully still offer a fun challenge! For an additional challenge, you may want to avoid the use of hints, though the puzzlehunt does not track that.
What are the format and rules of this puzzlehunt?
You start with four puzzles available and unlock more as you progress through them. After solving 10 out of the 12 puzzles, the metapuzzle will be unlocked, which requires the answers from the previous puzzles to solve. The puzzlehunt is considered complete once the metapuzzle is completed, even if you have not solved all puzzles.
All answers are words or phrases in English. Answers will only have A-Z letters: they do not have special characters and case does not matter.
While making educated guesses is part of the experience, brute force guessing is discouraged. To limit that, you receive 20 guesses per puzzle. This should be more than enough, but if you run out of guesses, they will be automatically replenished within one hour of the last guess.
You are allowed to do (almost) anything to solve the puzzles. Puzzlehunts, including this one, require external knowledge. Many puzzles expect you to search over the internet. You may ask for help from anyone, stream solving the puzzlehunt, etc. There are a few exceptions:- Please do not try to tamper with the website or run code that interacts with the website, including brute forcing solutions. There are no puzzles that require looking at source code, although you are free to look if you'd like.
- Please avoid posting spoilers anywhere that may show up as a summary in a search engine. Searching over the internet is fundamental for this puzzlehunt and this could cause other solvers to be inadvertently spoiled.
How do hints work?
You can earn hints by solving the minipuzzles in the special Take a Break puzzle, linked in both the hints page and the main puzzle page. The number of minipuzzles will always be equal to the number of standard puzzles. Once used, hints will be given in steps that can be individually revealed, so that they do not spoil the entire puzzle. You can click them in order until it gets to the part where you are stuck at. There is no penalty for using hints.
Unfortunately custom hints are not available since this puzzlehunt is maintained by one person, but fully-revealed hints include complete instructions on how to solve the puzzle (though not the actual solution).
Complete solutions are available right after completing each puzzle. They will show up as a new button in the puzzle page.
I am new to puzzlehunts! What should I know to solve this puzzlehunt?
- Google Sheets is useful to organize your solving process and collaborate with others. Links to copyable Google Sheets are available for all puzzles.
- Word search tools such as Onelook, Nutrimatic, and Qat are probably the most useful type of tool in a puzzlehunt. You may want to find words matching a certain pattern or anagram, or related to a certain concept.
- In general it is useful to be aware of basic ciphers and encodings, though this puzzlehunt in particular is very light on these. For these, dCode is very useful.
- Whenever you have a number and a word/phrase, it is likely that you will have to index the number into the word. This is typically unclued and very common in puzzlehunts, including this one. "Indexing" is obtaining a letter given a word-number pair by taking the n-th letter of the word (e.g. the word EXAMPLE and the number 4 gives us the letter M). Conventionally, you should ignore spaces and special characters when indexing. Lacking a word, this also can be done with the alphabet (e.g. 5 maps to E).
- If indexing produces letters that might form an answer but seem jumbled, you may also need to worry about ordering. Consider if there is a way to order your extracted letters in a way that makes sense in the context of the puzzle.
- See also this website for a more comprehensive list of tools. The tips from the above introduction to puzzlehunts can also be helpful.
- Most importantly, have fun! Don't hesitate to use hints if you're stuck!
How can I contact you?
If you are having issues, find an error in a puzzle or the website, or want to contact me for any reason, email me at vertex@vertexthisshouldnotappearhunt.com. Responses may be slow and not guaranteed, as I am only one person maintaining this in my spare time. If you need hints, please use the hint system.
Who are you? What's the story behind this puzzlehunt?
My name is Christian and I am simply an enthusiast in puzzles of any kind and puzzle design!
I originally wrote a small set of winter-themed puzzles as a personal "warm up" to practice puzzle design. I decided to expand it to a proper puzzlehunt and kept the theme and title. Don't worry though—while the initial intent was practice, I spent a lot of time (too much!) polishing these puzzles as much as I could!
"Vertex Hunt" is a nudge to my background in mathematical optimization: solving a linear program can be viewed as "hunting" for an optimal vertex of a polyhedron.