CCBC 13

CCBC 13
The CCBC 13 Logo
Running Teamsimplicissimus
No. of Registered Teams1521
Winning Team喵喵喵 (Miao Miao Miao)(CCBC-13)
闲散解谜!(Laid-back Puzzling)(CCBC-14)
No. of Rounds4
No. of Puzzles (Feeders and Metas)123
Timeframe and Location
LocationOnline
Start TimeAugust 11 2023 20:00 CST
Finishing Time (Winning Team)August 13 2023 18:31 CST
Official End TimeAugust 20 2023 20:00 CST
Links
Hunt LinkLink
CCBC Chronology
← CCBC 12


Cipher & Code Breaking Competition (CCBC) 13 was the 13th iteration of CCBC, a Chinese puzzle hunt since 2008. This hunt was organized by Cipherpuzzles and written by simplicissimus, the winning team of CCBC 12.

Click to revealThe hunt has two parts, CCBC 13 and CCBC 14. 266 teams finished CCBC 13, while 129 teams solved the final meta "CCBC 13-14" and finished CCBC 14.

Plot[edit | edit source]

Teams started the hunt as cosmic explorers in an organization called Center for Cosmic Boundary Cartography, and discovered a strange galaxy, but their spaceship ran out of energy in its asteroid belt. They had to land on the asteroids to gather energy from a mineral named Puzzlium. After solving some puzzles in the Asteroid Belt, solvers discovered a new tetrahedron-shaped planet and named it CCBC-13.

 
The real hunt logo
After solving the meta of CCBC-13, solvers discovered that CCBC-13 was not a single planet, but a double-planet system, and discovered another tetrahedron-shaped planet CCBC-14 near it.

After solving the meta of CCBC-14, solvers found that the two planets merged and formed a shape like Double Planetoid by M.C. Escher. Teams gathered energy from these two planets in order to make them stable again. They found the final answer: platonic love in the depth of starry sky. In particular, the hunt finished just before the Double Seventh Festival (the equivalent of Valentine's Day in China), and "1314" sounds like "(Love you) all my life" in Chinese and is considered a classic word for lovers.

Structure and list of puzzles[edit | edit source]

CCBC 13 featured 4 rounds and 123 puzzles (88 "small puzzles", 32 "normal puzzles", 3 metas) in total.

  • Puzzles marked (c) require some Chinese knowledge apart from simple translation.
  • Puzzles marked (C) require a lot of Chinese knowledge.

小行星数据库 (Asteroid Database)[edit | edit source]

This round contains 88 fairly simple "small puzzles" without titles, which are later used in the puzzle "宇宙航线".

CCBC-13[edit | edit source]

 

CCBC-14[edit | edit source]

CCBC-1314[edit | edit source]

Write-ups (in Chinese)[edit | edit source]

From simplicissimus[edit | edit source]

From others[edit | edit source]