Enigame: an extreme puzzle hunt
Enigame is an online puzzle hunt event created by people at the Technical University of Munich for people who enjoy the combination of logical and out-of-the-box thinking. There are also other puzzle hunts out there by organizations like Microsoft or MIT, but enigame stands out with its charming questions and friendly community.
Enigame (name derived from the word "enigma", a device used for encrypting and decrypting secret messages) is an exciting and engaging event that typically involves a variety of challenges, puzzles, and activities related to anything you can imagine. It often serves as a platform for people to showcase their problem-solving skills and technical and general knowledge.
Besides that, enigame is also a team event where players create up to 10-person teams, which makes the teamwork and collaboration aspects for the participants even more crucial.
The event has been organized every 6 months, once in spring and once in fall since 2019. It consists of two stages, the first is on Friday, which serves as a warmup to the teams with around 10 puzzles. In the second stage, the questions get slightly more challenging and teams have the time to finish around 15 puzzles in the span of the whole weekend.
Last weekend (27-30th of October 2023) there was the fall event based on the theme "Dance to the Beat". Yes, they come up with a new theme every event and some of the puzzles are related to this theme. The last events had around 200 teams and 800-1200 participants.
The game simply goes as follows, you see a question, and you try to solve it. If you desire, you can turn on a hint timer with no penalty, which brings out a hint every 10 minutes. There are also "eureka" words, which simply tell you that you are in the right direction when you find them. You can also (and probably will need to) use the internet or any tool to solve these puzzles, basically no restrictions other than inter-team communication about the puzzles.
After solving each puzzle, you see your team's standing and understand how fast you are compared to the other teams. As you can see below, some puzzles are easy, requiring a few minutes to solve, and some are very tough and you can get stuck in a puzzle for hours, even with the hints sometimes. Because of how tough some questions may get, moderators can also come and help your team if you reach out to them on Discord.
Our team stats last year, the first question being on the bottom
Question and its hints
The prize for completing the event and getting the podium is rather humble with custom keychains and more importantly, getting into the "Hall of Fame" page on the enigame website. They are also starting to get some extra money from sponsors. However, I strongly believe that the biggest prize here is the experience and fun of taking on a challenge with your teammates.
I also want to talk about the enigame community, whether participating competitively or enjoying some time with friends (or both), the community is always nice to each other, and the atmosphere on Discord is always very welcoming with people discussing, creating and sharing memes and artworks.
A meme submitter by Discord user lopaikicuchifomeno
Lastly, I would like to give a very special shout-out to Georg Wechslberger aka tauu, and his friends at eniteam for being open and providing very detailed information about their craft that helped me write this blog.
Oğuz Arslan
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