/r/PictureGame

/r/PictureGame is a subreddit that plays a succession game where the winner of the previous round posts the image to the next round. Round images should have a well-defined condition of correctness and are usually geographical identification, though sometimes puzzles are posted. /r/PictureGame also often fields several teams to various puzzle hunts.

Subreddit
The subreddit's history starts with a post on /r/pics on February 15, 2014, with an account /u/PictureGame posting an image with instructions that the password to the account was the city of the location pictured. This established the succession nature of the game, with the winner taking over the account and posting the next image. After four rounds, this game was moved to a dedicated subreddit in /r/PictureGame. The password-sharing system was eventually phased out in favor of a system that uses a bot that gives out approved submitter permissions when the host marks an answer as "+correct".

Rounds are usually identification-based, but sometimes standalone hunt puzzles are posted. With the improvement of reverse image searching tools, identification rounds often include "masking" in order to fool these tools. Occasionally, an entire puzzle hunt (puzzles with a meta) is posted, either as a single round or spread out over multiple rounds.

Team
/r/PictureGame first started competing in online puzzle hunts in 2017, with their first hunt being Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2017 under the name OP_Plz. /r/PictureGame often fields multiple teams for smaller online hunts and a single team for larger hunts, such as the MIT Mystery Hunt. Typically, the team names follow the format E... C... of /r/PictureGame (a tradition that started in 2018), with a thematic phrase with initials EC at the front. Additionally team members often follow the EC phrase format as well. This originated with a Discord nickname gimmick, where users would change their nicknames to EC phrases, as a reference to the user /u/EliteCanadian. This naming scheme is sometimes subverted.

In 2022, the ECs of /r/PictureGame announced that they were hosting their first public puzzlehunt, Exploring the Countryside. The hunt ran in mid-October the same year.