2. How to Run a Hunt¶

So you want to run a puzzlehunt…

Here are all of the things you should need to know to run an already created puzzlehunt:

2.1. Staff Pages¶

Below are descriptions of all of the custom staff pages, their features and how to interact with them. All of these pages are accessible under the “Other Staff Pages” header of the sidebar. The first 4 pages are critical to keep up during the hunt, the latter 4 pages are more situational and will likely be more useful before or after the hunt.

2.1.1. Progress Page¶

The progress page shows all the teams, and their progress in the hunt.

Tip

The table is pretty large, it is recommended to click the three lines next to “Django administration” at the top to collapse the side navbar for more room.

The main focus of the page is the large status table. The table lists puzzles across the top, and teams down the side. Each cell in the table is the team’s status on the corresponding puzzle, represented by one of 4 possible states:

From left to right:

Green Box with a Time: The team solved the puzzle at the specified time.
Yellow/Orange/Red Box with a Time: The team has unlocked the puzzle but has not yet solved the puzzle. The time is the time of the team’s last submitted guess. The box will start yellow when they first unlocked the puzzle and will slowly change to red over the course of 4 hours. This can be helpful to see how long a team has been stuck on a puzzle.
Yellow/Orange/Red Box without a Time: The team has unlocked the puzzle but has not yet solved the puzzle and has not yet submitted a guess. The box follows the same yellow to red color scheme as above.
White box with an “Unlock” Button: The team has not yet unlocked the puzzle. The button can be clicked to manually unlock the puzzle for the team.

On the left side of the table there are 3 columns next to the team’s name. They indicate the number of metapuzzles the team has solved, the number of normal puzzles the team has solved and the last time that the team has solved a puzzle. Above the table there is a checkbox alongside 3 dropdowns that allows you to sort the table by these three columns instead of the default A-Z team name sort.

2.1.2. Queue Page¶

The queue page shows team’s puzzle answer guesses as they come in. The main table on the page has one row for each submission. As the table header says, the table shows the team, the puzzle, the submission, the submission time, and the response. The row will be color coded for each submission: red for wrong and green for correct.

The response column also has a “Fix” link next to each response. Clicking it will bring up a form where you can edit the response to the submission. The edited response will automatically be pushed to the team’s puzzle page. This can be used to nudge a team in the correct direction if they are close or have possibly just misspelled something.

Above the table there are two dropdown selectors and a “Filter” button. These can be used to filter the shown submissions on the queue page by Team or Puzzle.

2.1.3. Chat Page¶

The chat page allows staff to chat with teams during the hunt. Every team in the hunt has a button on the lefthand side that will bring up the chat box for that team. The currently selected team will be shown in blue, and teams with unread messages will be shown in red.

Attention

Due to the technical limitations of the server, only messages that have arrived while the chat page is open will cause the teams’ name to turn red, so try not to refresh the page too often after the hunt starts. It’s also not a bad idea to click around the teams every so often to make sure something hasn’t slipped through the cracks.

It is possible to check the checkbox at the bottom to “Make the message an announcement”. This will send the message to all teams in the hunt.

2.1.4. Hints Page¶

The hints page allows you to see hints that teams have requested and respond to them. Hints will appear one on top of another just like submissions on the queue page. In addition to the puzzle and team filters like the ones on the queue page, the hint page also has a “Filter by Status” dropdown that lets you view only the answered or unanswered hints.

Each hint that comes in will start with a space for you to type a response and hit submit. After hitting submit the response is sent to the team, but responses can be further edited by clicking the “Edit Response” link at the bottom, at which point the new response will be pushed to the team.

Finally, there is a button at the top left of the page titled “Show/Hide hint counts”. Clicking this button will bring up a list of all of the teams and the number of hints they currently have available to them. Clicking the plus and minus buttons next to the number of available hints will give or take away available hints from the team.

Note

There is a very small chance that the team will naturally gain a hint in the same time period that you click to give them a hint. The counter will tick up by two in that case, you probably didn’t double click.

2.1.5. Management Page¶

The first of the situational pages, the management page allows you to manage the resources and the overall state of the hunt.

The top portion of the page is list of hunts, one hunt per row. Each row has 3 buttons:

Set current: This sets the selected hunt as the current hunt for all of the staff pages, the site front page and everywhere else.
Download Puzzles: This downloads all PDFs and resources for all puzzles in the hunt.
Download Resources: This downloads all resources for the hunt template page.

Each row can also be expanded to reveal an individual download button for each puzzle.

Underneath the “Hunt Downloads” section is a “Prepuzzle downloads” section which allows the downloading of resources for any chosen prepuzzle.

Finally, there is a single button at the bottom of the page titled “Reset all progress”. This button resets all team interaction that has happened so far with a hunt, all submissions, responses, unlocks, solves, hints, and chat messages are deleted. This is normally only used once between playtesting and the start of the hunt.

2.1.6. Info Page¶

The info page lists information about teams that are signed up for a hunt and the people on them. Along the left is a list of all of the teams separated into 3 categories: “Needs a room”, “Has a room”, and “Off Campus” with each team having a text box next to their name with their current location. You can bulk edit team locations, for example assigning rooms to “Need a room” teams, and then click the “Update Locations” button at the bottom to save all the edits for a certain section.

Note

Teams are listed in signup order with the first team to sign up at the top so rooms can be assigned easily in sign up order.

Along the right side of the page is a statistic of how many people are registered for the hunt for things like ordering food, followed by all listed dietary restrictions of the registrants. Clicking any dietary restriction will take you to the corresponding user so you can either contact the user for more details or edit the restriction if the user has abused the field.

2.1.7. Email Page¶

The email page allows hunt staff to send an email out to all people registered for the hunt. To send an email, simply enter a subject, a body and hit send email.

If you want more customization or formatting than is available from the two simple textboxes, you can click the button at the bottom of the page to show the emails of all registered users to allow copy and pasting into your preferred email client.

2.1.8. Charts Page¶

Finally there is the charts page. There are no actions to take on the charts page, just a bunch of interesting charts. Most charts are pretty self-explanatory, and offer very helpful mouse-hover information.

The last item on the charts page isn’t a chart at all, it is a table showing the first team to solve a puzzle and when that first solve happened.

2.2. Preparing for the Hunt¶

2.2.1. Download Puzzles¶

Before anybody can start playing your hunt, you have to download the puzzles. Sign into the staff part of the website located at {server URL}/staff and head over to the “Management” page located under the “Other Staff Pages” sidebar header. From there, click the “Puzzles” button next to the current hunt, which will download all of the puzzles. It takes a few minutes, be patient.

That should just work. If it doesn’t, check your links and PDF accessibility and try again. (If you really think it is a bug, feel free to submit an issue on the github project)

If any individual puzzle fails to download or you just want to re-download a single puzzle for some reason, remember that you can un-collapse the hunt and click the download buttons for individual puzzles.

2.2.2. Playtesting¶

You probably want people to test your hunt before the actual event. This is easy using the puzzlehunt server. Just have the team of playtesters sign up like normal. Then navigate to the “Teams” page on the sidebar, find the team, check the “Playtester” checkbox on their edit page, fill in the playtest start and end dates and save the team. They will then have access to the puzzlehunt as if it was open to them during the given dates.

Attention

Playtest start and end dates are a new required part of having a team playtest as of version 4.0 due to the number of time based features now available.

All interactions with the playtest team should be done as they normally would be through the various staff pages described above. Things like the queue, the progress page, chat, puzzle unlocking, and hints should all work. The only feature currently not working for playtest teams is time released hints. If you want playtest teams to get hints, you will have to award them manually from the “hints” page.

Attention

Again, in a bigger orange box: Time released hints currently do not trigger for playtest teams, you must manually award hints from the “hints” page.

2.3. Running the Hunt¶

2.3.1. Pre-Hunt Checklist¶

Okay, the hunt is almost ready to happen, you’ve downloaded all the puzzles, you’ve had people playtest the hunt, and now you’re ready to turn it over to the public. Below is a short checklist of items to consider before the hunt starts.

Before the hunt:

[ ] Make sure the hunt start time is accurate
[ ] Reset all progress from the management page
[ ] Ensure all puzzles have working PDFs and images
[ ] Ensure teams have been assigned rooms on the info page

2.3.2. During the Hunt¶

Hopefully your opening information session went well, the puzzles released flawlessly and people are now solving puzzles. Time to sit back and watch/make the magic happen. It is recommended to have the progress, queue, chat and hints pages open.

With version 4.0, puzzles should now automatically release at the set hunt start time, removing the need for the “release initial puzzles” button.

2.3.3. Hunt End¶

The hunt is nearing completion, hopefully everything went well and enough teams have completed the hunt for it to end. If you think the hunt hasn’t run long enough, be sure to update the hunt end time before you reach it.

Once the hunt end time is reached, all puzzles will be available for the public and all hunt interfaces will update to indicate that the hunt is over.

2.4. Random Info and Common Issues¶

Teams can view their room assignments from the “team info” page: Let teams know that if they forget or lose their room assignments (or you just don’t feel like telling them) that they can view their room assignments by clicking “View Registration” link on the front page.

What if I find a typo or other issue with a puzzle?: Simply fix the puzzle, make sure the new version is uploaded to Dropbox and click the download button for that puzzle from the management page.

What if I accidentally unlock a puzzle for a team I shouldn’t have?: You can go to the “Unlocks” tab under the “Huntserver” section of the side navbar and delete the unlock object for that team/puzzle combo. The team will lose access to the puzzle.