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Organizing puzzle contests

Objective

Get an overview of PuzzleMe's contest mode, and how it differs from regular puzzles

PuzzleMe provides several tools that allow you to conduct your own online puzzle competition. Several of the world's leading puzzle tournaments, including the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament and Boswords use our platform to host their online contests.

Contest Mode​

PuzzleMe offers an inbuilt contest mode for crossword, sudoku, quiz, codeword and jigsaw puzzles. You can enable Contest Mode by turning ON the contest mode toggle, from the "Scoring" section in the puzzle creator form.

Contest mode toggle

In your dashboard, such puzzles will have a "Contest Mode" label displayed.

Dashboard indicator for contest mode puzzles

In Contest Mode:

  1. Reveal, Check, Error Check and Hint options are unavailable.
  2. It is not possible for solvers to clear their puzzle progress and restart the puzzle.
  3. The time taken to finish a puzzle is calculated at our server’s end, instead of relying solely on the solvers’ browser.
  4. Solvers have to explicitly submit their puzzle when they are ready using the Submit button in the player interface.
  5. If name/email/mobile number collection is enabled, the form to collect this information is displayed after the users submit the puzzle. Optionally, these fields can be renamed to something else, like "Employee ID" or "Registration number".
  6. The contest mode is secure in the sense that the answers are not available even to a hacker who can interfere with the code on the page. Scoring is performed only on our servers.
  7. Contest mode games can be integrated with site builders like WordPress and Wix to automatically identify logged in users. See the page on user identity for more information.