Verwald's Treasures starts on Saturday, August 6, at 12 noon Eastern Daylight Time.
Teams have a maximum size of 12. You may not create multiple accounts or be on multiple teams.
A few puzzles will be available at the start, and the primary way to unlock new puzzles is by solving puzzles and progressing through the hunt, although puzzles may also be unlocked over time.
Teams that complete the hunt will be recognized and listed alphabetically. There are no team rankings otherwise.
Solving
Each answer is a string of letters A–Z. Lowercase letters will be changed into uppercase, and any other characters will be stripped before checking for correctness.
You have 50 total guesses for each puzzle. If you legitimately run out of guesses and need more, feel free to contact Nathan, though he might not grant your request if he sees that you were, for example, guessing random thematic answers, or brute-forcing all 10-letter words.
Hints
Verwald's Treasures has a built-in system for canned hints. On any puzzle, you may submit the answer "APPRENTICE" to receive a list of prompts that may be used to get specific canned hints.
These answer submissions will not be counted against your maximum number of guesses for a puzzle.
Starting seven days after they begin, teams have the option to request additional hints, with 2 hint requests unlocked on the first day and 1 additional hint request unlocked each day for the next 30 days.
You can use a hint request to get help on a puzzle.
This can be something like a nudge in the right direction (i.e. you give Nathan your progress on the puzzle and he will try to get you unstuck) or an answer to a question (e.g. “Which answers to these crossword clues are wrong?”).
You can only have one open hint request at a time.
Other
You may use any external sources for help, including other people, as long as they aren’t helping other teams and aren’t actively participating in the hunt.
You may not publicly stream a solve of Verwald's Treasures for the first 2 weeks after the hunt launches.
It won’t be necessary to look at the HTML source/JavaScript/CSS on any webpages for any puzzle, but you’re welcome to look anyway.
I reserve the right to change any of these rules. If there’s a big change, I will announce it to all teams.
If you have any questions about these rules, or if you want to contact me for any reason, email verwalds-treasures@tortoiseshellstudio.com. We will get back to you as soon as we can.