Singapore Puzzle Hunt

About the puzzles

A hunt puzzle gives you something to look at — a grid, a story, a diagram, a pile of objects — and asks you to notice what is wrong, extra, or too neat.

You extract an answer. It is almost always a word or a short phrase you could say out loud. The path there might be a crossword, a cryptic, a logic puzzle, a piece of wordplay, or an identification task. Often it is two of those in a row: solve the surface, then read what the surface was hiding.

How to know you are done

The answer should feel inevitable. If you have three plausible phrases and no reason to prefer one, you are still in the middle. Flavours, titles, and enumerations are part of the puzzle, not decoration. Read them again when you are stuck; they are the closest thing to a hint the writer is allowed to give you for free.

A useful order of work

1. Identify the type. What is being asked of you, in one sentence?
2. Do the solving you can do without understanding the trick.
3. Look at what is left over: unused letters, indices, colours, first words, the thing that did not fit.
4. Turn that leftover into the answer, and only then check it.

Closed hunts in the archive are there to practise on. Tools that help with words and patterns are collected under resources.