Past Puzzle Hunts

Since July 2020, Solving Fun has been organizing and creating custom online puzzle hunts for various events. They are particularly adapted as a fun social activity to be held during an otherwise serious online conference. Participants are usually split into teams of 3-5 people, they gather in breakout rooms and solve puzzles collaboratively.

If you’d like to spice up your online meetings, with a novel/custom/puzzling/clever/entertaining/social activity like these ones, feel free to contact us! We work in English, Spanish or French.

Recent puzzle hunts we organized are visible in the subsections of the Past Puzzle Hunts tab in the top bar (except for the public events, the sections with puzzles are password-protected and available only to the participants of the events). Below is a short description of all our past events, in reverse chronological order.

• AlCoVE 2022 Puzzle Hunt: Alluring Conondrums for Vivacious Explorers. June 6-7, 2022. Created for the conference AlCoVE 2022 (Algebraic Combinatorics Virtual Expedition). 5 puzzles.

• EnigMarch 2022. March 1-31, 2022. Participation in the daily puzzle creation challenge, with a prompt posted each day by the EnigMarch HQ. We published (for free) about 38 new puzzles that month (most of them in English, some in Spanish and French), of various difficulty and various quality.

• PosadAcertijos 2021. 16-24 de Diciembre, 2021. Publicamos un acertijo original y gratis cada día en Facebook y en esta página, inspirados por las Posadas (fiestas tradicionales mexicanas que se celebran durante los 9 días antes de la Navidad). 9 acertijos.

• La Solución Misteriosa: acertijos químicos. 23-27 de noviembre, 2021. Creado para el Departamento de Química de la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa en México, en el marco del Día de las Químicas y los Químicos 2021. 5 acertijos.

• Virtual Chair Anniversary Puzzle Hunt. October 22, 2021. Created for the celebration of the first anniversary of the company Virtual Chair (organization of online academic events). 3 puzzles.

• EC’21 Puzzle Hunt: Enthralling Conundrums. July 19, 2021. Created for the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC’21). 4 puzzles.

• QTMC Puzzle Hunt: the Quest for the Three Mysterious Codes. June 24, 2021. Created for the conference QTMC 2021 (Queer and Trans Mathematicians in Combinatorics). 5 puzzles.

• LPC Puzzle Hunt: Let’s Puzzle Crazy!. June 21-26, 2021. Created for the conference Lattice Paths, Combinatorics and Interactions. 6 puzzles.

• AlCoVE 2021 Puzzle Hunt: Alluring Conondrums for Vivacious Explorers. June 14-15, 2021. Created for the conference AlCoVE 2021 (Algebraic Combinatorics Virtual Expedition). 2 puzzles.

• El Misterioso Legado de Carlos Graef 2021 — Juego de acertijos para la UAM. Mayo 23 – Junio 19, 2021. Creado para el programa Instituto Carlos Graef 2021 Jóvenes hacia la Ciencia y la Ingeniería, programa de divulgación de la ciencia organizado por la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa en México y dirigido a alumnos de preparatoria. 5 acertijos.

• ACSV Puzzle Hunt: Abstruse Conundrums in Several Varieties. May 30, 2021. Created for the AMS-MRC workshop Combinatorial Applications of Computational Geometry and Algebraic Topology (research project Analytic Combinatorics in Several Variables). 4 puzzles.

• GSCC Puzzle Hunt: Gimme Some Cool Conundrums. April 23-25, 2021. Created for GSCC 2021, Graduate Students Combinatorics Conference, online-hosted by the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. 8 puzzles.

• Dartmouth House Communities Puzzle Hunt. April 3, 2021. Created for the House Communities at Dartmouth College, online-hosted by the Dartmouth Interhouse Council. 4 puzzles.

• East Wheelock Puzzle Hunt. January 22, 2021. Created for East Wheelock House, a House Community at Dartmouth College. 4 puzzles.

• Math Institutes Puzzle Hunt. January 6, 2021. Created for the Mathematical Institutes Open House which took place during the virtual Joint Mathematics Meeting. 3 puzzles.

• Virtual AIM SQuaRE Puzzle Hunt. December 14-18, 2020. Created for a group of mathematicians working in a virtual meeting (Virtual AIM SQuaRE) organized by AIM (American Institute of Mathematics). 4 puzzles.

• UMass Amherst Puzzle Hunt. November 4-11, 2020. Created for the Math Department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 5 puzzles.

• El Misterioso Legado de Carlos Graef — Juego de acertijos para la UAM. Octubre 3 – Noviembre 7, 2020. Creado para el programa Instituto Carlos Graef 2020 Jóvenes hacia la Ciencia y la Ingeniería, programa de divulgación de la ciencia organizado por la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa en México y dirigido a alumnos de preparatoria. 5 acertijos.

• Berkeley Connect Puzzle Hunt. September 21-25, 2020, and February 23-24, 2021. Created for the math undergrads in Berkeley Connect (mentorship program for undergraduate students at University of California, Berkeley). 5 puzzles.

• Duluth REU Puzzle Hunt. August 5, 2020. Created for the participants of the Duluth REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates at the University of Minnesota Duluth). 9 puzzles.

• FPSAC Puzzle Hunt: Fantabulous Puzzle Solving for Amateurs and Connoisseurs. July 6-24, 2020. Created for the participants of the international math conference Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC 2020 online). 13 puzzles.