About
Format
Matt and Emma’s Deep-space Disaster starts and ends .
🚀 The format of this hunt will be somewhat different from past teammate hunts. 🚀
- This is a story-focused hunt that requires interactive participation with the narrative to complete it. We recommend that your team progress through the hunt together.
- There will be a smaller puzzle radius compared to most online hunts, so we are implementing a generous hint policy and encourage using it if you feel stuck.
- There will not be a traditional leaderboard. Instead, teams can collect achievements. It is not necessary to collect all achievements to finish the hunt.
- Teams may have 1–8 members. We recommend a team of 5–6 for the best solving experience.
Solving
- A few puzzles will be available at the start, and the primary way to unlock new puzzles is by solving puzzles. There are no timed unlocks.
- Puzzle answers are case insensitive; lowercase will be changed to uppercase, and whitespace will be stripped before checking for correctness.
- For most puzzles, teams will be rate-limited to at most 20 guesses per 24 hours; i.e. each guess refreshes after 24 hours. This is to prevent random guessing, or dictionary attacks that spam too many requests; however, you will have the option to request additional guesses if you run out. (We expect to grant most requests, unless we find your guess log particularly egregious.)
Hints
- Hints for a puzzle will become available when that puzzle has been unlocked for 30 minutes. Teams can have at most one hint open at a time.
- Hints 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?").
- Some puzzles will also unlock a “rocket booster” after 30 minutes. Activating it will provide extra info to help you get started on the puzzle.
- We highly encourage using hints if you feel impeded in your progress through the hunt, or whenever you are stuck for more than 1 hour on a puzzle. We want you to experience more of our hunt and puzzles!
Other Rules
- You may not create multiple accounts or be on multiple teams.
- You may not stream or post spoilers for the hunt in a place where other teams might see them.
- You may use any source of information, including other people, as long as they aren’t helping other teams or actively participating in the hunt. For example, it is okay to ask a friend not participating to solve a puzzle, but it is not okay to ask for help on a public forum or semi-public Discord server, since this spoils the hunt.
- Please don’t look at or interact with the HTML source/Javascript/CSS on any webpages for any puzzle.
- We reserve the right to disqualify any team for misconduct.
- 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, email the hunt organizers at help@teammatehunt.com. We'll try to get back to you soon.
Frequently Asked QuestionsFAQ
What is a puzzlehunt? How do I solve these puzzles?
If you’ve never heard of puzzlehunts before, here’s a very brief summary: 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. 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 may read a longer introduction here.
If you are new to puzzles and are interested in seeing some examples, or if you’re looking for practice, we recommend looking at our previous teammate hunts or other online hunts like Galactic Puzzle Hunt and Huntinality.
Is this still a puzzlehunt?
Yes. There are puzzles and capstone puzzles (puzzles that culminate a round, often metapuzzles).
...no leaderboard?
We want to decrease the focus on the often competitive nature of puzzlehunts and encourage solvers to enjoy the story. You can view other teams' achievements, but teams will not be sorted based on solve times or given numerical ranks.
How many puzzles will there be?
Around 50.
How difficult is the hunt?
We expect the difficulty will be slightly easier than previous teammate hunts but harder than Huntinality III.
Who’s running this hunt? Who are Matt and Emma?
We are teammate, a group of enthusiastic puzzle solvers and crafters. Most recently, we ran the 2023 MIT Mystery Hunt and are now back with another teammate hunt. You can see our previous hunts in the archive. teammate was first inaugurated in 2014 and now consists largely of former students from puzzling groups of MIT, CMU, UC Berkeley, and friends.
MATT AMEE and EMMA TATE are personas who have materialized and grown over the years. Come join them on their latest adventure!
What exactly happens when the hunt ends?
When the hunt ends, all achievements progress will be frozen and solutions for all puzzles will be released. However, if you have not finished and still want to experience the whole hunt, you will still be able to register new teams, submit answers on the website, and progress through the hunt for a short while. The only difference is that you won’t be able to access hints. Some time in the future, team registration will close, but the puzzles will still be accessible.
Is there a tip jar?
It is completely free to participate in the hunt, but if you enjoy the hunt and would like to support teammate, you can donate here. Donations go to hunt development and server costs.
I think something is wrong with a puzzle, or with the website. What should I do?
Please describe the error in an email to help@teammatehunt.com and we’ll try to correct it. We recommend using the latest version of Chrome or Firefox. While we will look at all reports, we cannot guarantee fixes for all browsers.
How accessible is this hunt?
We aimed to make this hunt accessibility-friendly. If any elements (e.g. colors, sounds, navigation) cause trouble for you, please email us at help@teammatehunt.com and we will be happy to assist.
Can I read the source code or write code that interacts with the website?
This will not be necessary to complete any aspect of the puzzlehunt. Please do not view source code, reverse-engineer, hack, decompile, or otherwise interact with the website in any unintended way. If you're not sure whether something is intended, email help@teammatehunt.com.
I’m stuck on a puzzle. What should I do?
Here are some general puzzle tips that might be useful:
- Thoroughly check the work that you’ve already done. Fixing a small mistake or incorrect assumption can greatly help with getting unstuck.
- Get fresh eyes on the puzzle, or conversely, take a break and look at something else.
- Consider what information you haven’t used yet.
- It can be useful to put everything you have into your favorite search engine.
- Have you tried…
You can also request a hint to get a nudge in the right direction.
What do I need to solve the hunt? Will I ever need to be in a particular location to solve a puzzle?
The hunt will take place entirely online. The main thing you need is an internet connected device. We recommend using a computer to view the hunt, using the latest versions of Chrome or Firefox.
For a few puzzles, you may find the following materials useful, though not strictly required:
- A printer, ideally color
- Scissors
- Voice chat capabilities for your team
- Having two team members (or one team member + a friend) located in the same place
I have a question that’s not on this list!
Contact us at help@teammatehunt.com and we’ll do our best to answer it. We might even add it to this list if enough people have your question!