About | Advent Puzzle Hunt 2025

What is a puzzle hunt?

A puzzle hunt is a series of a particular style of puzzles. These puzzles will not have any direct instructions, but each puzzle will have underlying patterns and structure that are up to you to figure out. This is similar to escape rooms but in written form, or to themes in crossword puzzles but applied to the entire puzzle! Otherwise, the design and format of these puzzles are open-ended and will vary widely. Any content in a puzzle might contain a clue to its underlying patterns. A more detailed introduction to puzzle hunts is available here.

At the end of each puzzle in this hunt, you will get a word or short phrase that is the answer.

Here are some other recent online puzzle hunts if you're looking for examples or practice: last year's Advent Puzzle Hunt 2024, the MIT Mystery Hatch, Galactic Puzzle Hunt, Teammate Hunt, Brown Puzzle Hunt.

What is the format for this hunt?

This hunt is released in the form of an advent calendar, with one puzzle per day from December 1 to December 24, 2025. Daily puzzles will be released at 6:00 a.m. EST (11:00 a.m. UTC).

There will also be four other puzzles—called metapuzzles—that each use answers from some of the daily "feeder" puzzles. Unlike last year's format, the metapuzzles will be separate from the daily puzzles. All four metapuzzles will be immediately available at the start of the hunt, and you'll need to determine when you have enough information to solve them.

There will also be a finale supermeta puzzle that may incorporate answers from any other puzzle. The finale unlocks when you've completed all four metapuzzles.

Puzzle content will always be entirely contained within each puzzle's PDF file. Metapuzzles and the supermeta finale will additionally use answers from other puzzles. No other information from the puzzle's webpage will be necessary in the solution of a puzzle.

I heard there is secret content?

Yes! This hunt has a substantial amount of secret bonus content hidden throughout! For the majority of the hunt, it was kept entirely secret. Some solvers who were especially observant and astute were able to discover and make progress on the hidden content, and we asked them not to speak about it to anyone else. We revealed its existence publicly in an official announcement on Day 17. The secret content is optional and is not necessary to reach a satisfying conclusion to the hunt. Finding and solving the secret content provides an additional layer of challenge for teams interested in more difficult puzzles. See the announcement for additional discussion.

How difficult is this hunt? What is the recommended team size?

This hunt will be similar in difficulty to—but slightly harder than—last year's Advent Puzzle Hunt. Most daily puzzles took our test solvers between 30 minutes to 1 hour. The metapuzzles will be more difficult than the daily puzzles to provide additional challenge. There is no formal team size limit, but we recommend teams of 2-3 people. This hunt is not intended to be competitive, and we encourage you to collaborate with members of other registered teams if that is more fun for you. In other words, you can work with friends on some of the puzzles, but register separately to track your own progress.

How do I register additional teammates to my team?

On this website, one account is one team. You do not need to do any additional registration for members of your team. For access to the puzzle pages and answer checkers, please share the login credentials among your team members.

If your team members would like to receive hunt announcement emails, you can visit the email management page for your account to associate multiple email addresses to your team account.

How do we win?

This is intended to be a relaxed, non-competitive hunt. On the leaderboard, teams will be ordered by: whether they finished the hunt by solving the finale, number of metapuzzles solved, number of puzzles solved. Ties will be shown in an arbitrary order. Solve time does not affect leaderboard rank.

What happens when the hunt ends?

The final daily puzzle of the hunt will be released on December 24. The hunt will continue, with teams still able to submit answers and progress on the leaderboard, until January 5 at 06:00 a.m. EST (11:00 a.m. UTC). At that point, answer submissions will close, the leaderboard will be frozen, and solutions will be posted.

At some point soon after the hunt ends, we will transition to an archival version of the hunt website. Answer confirmation will remain possible with a static answer checker, but submissions will not be associated with any team accounts.

Any other rules?

Don't spoil puzzles for other people! You may not stream or post solutions during the hunt publicly, or in places where other teams might unintentionally see them (But as mentioned above, you may communicate privately with members of other teams consensually.)
We reserve the right to disqualify any team for unsportsmanlike conduct.

Help, I'm stuck on a puzzle! Will there be hints?

Here are some general puzzle tips that might be useful:

Thoroughly check the work that you’ve already done. Sometimes fixing a small mistake or incorrect assumption can make a big difference.
Take a break and come back to it.
If you're solving with others and they haven't seen the puzzle yet, get them to take a look. Fresh eyes can be helpful.
Consider what information you haven’t used yet. Everything on the PDF file is fair game!
Try putting everything you have into your favorite search engine.
Look at similar examples of the puzzle type you’re working on.
Have you tried…

If you're still stuck, we will have prewritten hints that will be available 24 hours after each daily puzzle's initial release time. Hints for the metapuzzles and supermeta finale will be available on December 25 at 6:00 a.m. EST (11:00 a.m. UTC). You will be able to find them above the answer checker on each puzzle's webpage. Using hints does not affect your leaderboard position.

You may also ask for help in the Discord server for the hunt. Last year, there was an active daily community of participants asking for help and other participants providing hints. See the next FAQ entry for more information.

What's this about a Discord server?

We have a Discord server for the hunt! (Discord is a popular instant messaging application.) Joining it is entirely optional! You can use it to connect with the hunt organizers or with other participants. If you're logged in on this website, you'll see an entry for it in the top navigation bar. Please remember to be careful about spoiling puzzles.

I think there's a mistake in this puzzle!

Please describe the error in an email to contact@adventhunt.com. We'll respond by email whether there is actually an error. Be sure to check your spam folder if you don't hear back from us within a day! If there is an error, we will correct it and issue an erratum.

I'm having a hard time copying content out of the PDF and into my spreadsheet.

For some puzzles, there may be convenience features to help you copy parts of the puzzle to transfer to a spreadsheet. These features, if present for a puzzle, will be among the buttons directly above the right side of the PDF viewer.

— Copy puzzle content to clipboard
— Link to a premade Google Sheets template

Who made this hunt?

We are Peppermint Herrings 🎏—Zach Barnett, Karis Jones, Nathan Jones, Eshan Mitra, Jay Qi, Alex Walker, Sara Walker, Chris Yu, and Zach Zagorski—a group of puzzle fans who have played in many online hunts as various versions of the Herrings 🎏 team. Most of us were involved in writing the first Advent Puzzle Hunt in 2024. Many of us also have writing credits including the MIT Mystery Heist, the MIT Mystery Hatch, CRUMS, BAPHL, and internal puzzle hunts for Meta, among others. In the MIT Mystery Hunt, we play as part of team Providence.

How do we contact you?

If you need help or have any questions not covered here, please email us at contact@adventhunt.com. Be sure to check your spam folder if you don't hear back from us within a day or two!