The 2023 DUAL Puzzle Hunt

The 2023 DUAL Puzzle Hunt (the fifth non-treasure hunt in the series, and the third "Puzzle Hunt") will go live at 5:00 p.m. EDT on Sunday, July 16, 2023. The hunt will be structured in the style of an Australian hunt, with six rounds of puzzles released over the course of a week, and then a final metapuzzle at the end.

The twist on this structure, however, will be that there will actually be two hunts running simultaneously -- an "easy-half" hunt that will be formally presented on the main web page and a "hard-half" hunt which will run "in the background." Solving an easy-half puzzle will allow the solver to access the corresponding hard-half puzzle, so the puzzles for the hard-half will follow the same release schedule as the puzzles for the easy-half.

The easy-half puzzles will be specifically tailored for young kids to be able to solve, so families are encouraged to participate. (The guiding philosophy for writing the easy-half puzzles is that a 4th grader should be able to solve them solo and a 2nd grader should be able to solve them with maybe a little reading assistance from someone older.) Veteran solvers, for their part, will be able to dispatch these easy-half puzzles very quickly and will hopefully merely regard them as cute little "palate cleansers" on their way to the more substantial hard-half puzzles.