Draft:Enigame

enigame is a public biannual team puzzle hunt competition organized by members and alumni of the Technical University of Munich (TUM). It typically lasts from Friday to Sunday in the second week of each lecture period. With roughly 1,000 participants in more than 200 teams, enigame is one of the biggest puzzle hunt events in Europe.

Puzzles are generally delivered through a website that tracks team progress. Each time a puzzle is solved, the page updates showing the next one. Onsite events take place at the TUM campus. Since 2020 enigame is happening online only due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

General structure

 * An enigame hunt consists of three episodes that each consist of multiple puzzles.
 * The solution to each puzzle is a word that may contain numbers, whitespaces or unicode symbols. They are case insensitive.
 * Each time a team solves a puzzle, it advances to the next one.
 * All puzzles within an episode need to be solved before advancing to the next one.
 * The first ten teams to solve the first episode will get a head start of 3*(11-position) minutes for the second episode.
 * Between finishing the second episode and starting with the third one, there is 30 minute waiting period.
 * The first team to finish the last puzzle of the last episode (or second to last puzzle, if no one solves the last one and so on) will win the hunt.

Episodes
In the big picture, puzzles get increasingly difficult throughout the episodes.
 * Episode 1: This introduction episode starts on the first day of the hunt and is intended to set the mood of the event and introduce the puzzling mindset. It usually consists of around ten puzzles.
 * Episode 2: The second episode starts on day two of the hunt and consists of around ten puzzles that will require multiple steps and creative solution strategies.
 * Episode 3: This episode does not have a specific starting time but starts after one finished episode 2. It is designed to be hard to crack and a single puzzle might take multiple hours to solve.

Hint Policy

 * For each puzzle, a series of hints is prepared that will be visible for a team after they spent a certain amount of time on the puzzle. Those are the same for each team and the time they have to wait to see them are the same for each team as well.
 * Puzzles might have intermediate results (Eurekas) and a hint might correspond to a Eureka. Entering such a Eureka makes both hint and Eureka appear and immediately starts the waiting time for the next hint.