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Competition Rules

Competition Dates

• Mon 12 Sep, 2016 - Site open for team registration.
• Mon 10 Oct, 2016 - Competition begins. Monday puzzles released.
• Tue 11 Oct, 2016 - Tuesday puzzles released. Monday hints released.
• Wed 12 Oct, 2016 - Wednesday puzzles released. Monday, Tuesday hints released.
• Thu 13 oct, 2016 - Thursday puzzles released. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday hints released.
• Fri 14 Oct, 2016 - Friday puzzles and metapuzzle released. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday hints released.
• Sat 15 Oct, 2016 - Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, metapuzzle hints released.
• Sun 16 Oct, 2016 - Thursday, Friday, metapuzzle hints released.
• Mon 17 Oct, 2016 - Friday, metapuzzle hints released.
• Tue 18 Oct, 2016 - Competition closes. Puzzle solutions released. Prize winners contacted.
• All events occur at 18:00 Australian Eastern Daylight Time (07:00 GMT; 03:00 US Eastern Daylight Time). This time in other time zones.

Prizes

• Grand Prize: The first team to solve the metapuzzle will receive a copy of The Witches: A Discworld Game.*
• 1st Prize: The highest ranked team to not win the grand prize will receive a copy of Codenames.*
• 2nd Prize: The second highest ranked team to not win the grand prize will receive a copy of Hanabi.*
• 3rd Prize: The third highest ranked team to not win the grand prize will receive a copy of Sushi Go!*
• Teams from anywhere in the world may win the prizes.
• The puzzle competition creators and testers are ineligible for prizes.
• * Prizes may be replaced with prizes of equivalent value if we have trouble sourcing a copy of the prize for delivery.

Registration

• Registration is open to teams of 1 to 5 people, from anywhere in the world.
• Each team member must give a name or nom de plume and a valid e-mail address.
• Teams may register at any time until the competition closes.
• Additional team members may be added to teams of fewer than 5 members, using the form on the registration page.
• Participants may be a member of no more than one team.

Solving Puzzles

• There are 25 daily group puzzles, plus a metapuzzle, for a total of 26 puzzles. All 26 puzzles are worth points. Teams may attempt to answer all puzzles.
• Answers must be submitted to the answer server at http://mezzacotta.net/solve.php. Answers submitted by any other means will not be accepted.
• Answers contain only one or more of the 26 lower case letters a-z. The answer server converts upper case letters to lower case, and removes spaces, numbers, and other characters before checking the answer.
  Example: If an answer is "twodollars", entering "Two Dollars" will be considered correct, but "$2" will be incorrect.
• There is one canonical correct answer for each puzzle, but in some cases the answer server has been programmed to accept specific variants that solvers might reasonably come up with as a solution, such as UK/American spelling variations. Solvers should not rely on the server accepting variant answers.
• Teams may submit up to 100 answer attempts in total for the group of puzzles released on each day. i.e. 100 answers for the 5 puzzles released on Monday, 100 for the 5 puzzles released on Tuesday, and so on. The metapuzzle has its own allocation of 100 answers, separate to Friday's group. The day the answer is submitted is not important: If you answer a Monday puzzle on Friday, it counts as one of the Monday answers.
• Once a team has submitted 100 answers for a given day's group of puzzles, no further answers from that team will be accepted for any puzzles released that day. Unused answer attempts do not carry over to puzzles released on any other day. If a team submits an answer that it has already submitted for the same puzzle, it does not count as a new answer attempt.

Points and Team Ranking

• Teams score points by submitting the correct answer to a puzzle. Once a team has submitted the correct answer to a puzzle, it cannot score any more points for that puzzle.
• Puzzles, including the metapuzzle, are worth points as follows:

  5 points before any hints for that puzzle are released,

  4 points after the first hint has been released but before the second hint,

  3 points after the second hint has been released but before the third,

  2 points after the third hint has been released.

• Teams are ranked in order as follows:

  1. Highest cumulative point score.

  2. Teams with the same point score are ranked in order from the earliest team to have reached that point total to the most recent, as determined by the timestamps of the submitted answers.

General Rules

• Teams may use any references or resources at their disposal, including the Internet.
• Each team must work independently of other teams.
• Violating any rule or abusing the competition in any way will result in disqualification.
• Disqualification decisions are final and no correspondence will be entered into.
• Teams may send administrative or technical inquiries to puzzles@mezzacotta.net.

Privacy

• mezzacotta collects participants' e-mail addresses for the purposes of the competition only, and does not share them with any third party.