Puzzled Pint’s mission is to create and nurture puzzling communities in cities all around world. We target the pure beginner puzzler, and we act as a gateway to more challenging hunts for them in the future. As such, our puzzles are generally much easier than other puzzle hunt puzzles! We make copious use of examples, flavor text, instructions, starting hooks, correct-path reinforcement, confirmers, and self-validation to ensure that our puzzles are as accessible as possible for these beginners. We appreciate that many experienced puzzlers still attend and enjoy our events, even though they are not our target audience.
License
Our puzzles are licensed under the creative commons attribution non–commercial share-alike 4.0 international license. All submissions to us will be assumed to be under that license! Please read the license and make sure you’re okay with all of its provisions. You will retain copyright and ownership of your puzzle. We are only publishing it via the rights you are granting under the CC license.
Length & Difficulty
Our target is to provide beginner teams a 2-hour experience (with some hints), and an intermediate team a 60-90 minute experience (with few hints). Expert teams often finish well under an hour. As we generally have 5 puzzles in the set, this means an average of about 15-20 minutes per puzzle.
International Friendly
Puzzled Pint is an international organization! Our puzzles are written for English speakers, but they should not contain idioms, local pop cultural references, puzzles that rely on particular pronunciations or rhymes, or location based-trivia. Pop culture and general knowledge trivia is acceptable only if it’s truly global. An early round of playtesting will include international solvers to ensure this.
Limited Player Resources
Teams will have access to our code sheet, scrap paper, pencils, scissors, and tape. We encourage authors to not use excessive trivia in puzzles as some location have spotty internet access, especially internationally where it might be needed the most.
As we are targeting beginners, do not assume players will know about online solving tools like anagrammers, crossword clue lookups, or pattern searchers. For the most part, the internet should be used to fill in solver’s holes in their general knowledge, and for general searches in a search engine.
How to Write for Puzzled Pint
First, please review our Puzzle Authoring Requirements which contains more detailed information on our puzzle sets.
Then, please let us know that you’re interested in writing by e-mailing us at gamecontrol@puzzledpint.com. We will put you in touch with one of our puzzle editors who can guide you through our Puzzling Editing and Testing Process and provide feedback on your drafts. We highly suggest you send drafts that contain the basics of the puzzle but without significant work on graphics, layouts, and the like, as it’s common for drafts to go through several rewrites and revisions, so hold off on making it pretty until later!
For first-time puzzled pint authors, we suggest writing just a bonus puzzle first. This will let us get to know your style, and you can become familiar with our puzzle editing process, which can be a bit rigorous. Bonus puzzles can have their own theme separate from the months in which they end up being played.
If you’d like to do a full puzzle set, determine the theme for your puzzles, with consultation from Game Control. All the puzzles should relate to the theme, though it can be a very loose association. We will reserve the theme for you while you work on your set. Please review the upcoming events and puzzle archive to ensure that your theme is new.
Please note that we currently have limited access to volunteers willing to do artwork for puzzles, but our editors can and usually do assist in final graphical layout of the set.
All puzzle drafts must be sent with full, detailed solutions for solving the puzzle, with a list of hints, if possible. These should be completely readable, not obscured by ROT13, for example. Don’t worry about spoiling the editors!
Questions?
E-mail gamecontrol@puzzledpint.com for any questions or clarifications. Thanks for your interest in writing for Puzzled Pint!