Jolly Roger is a coordination tool for collaboratively solving puzzlehunts like the MIT Mystery Hunt. The team Death and Mayhem created Jolly Roger in 2015 for the 2016 MIT Mystery Hunt, and it is still actively maintained and in production service.
At its core, it allows tracking puzzles and guesses in an ever-evolving hunt structure, and provides a chat room and a Google spreadsheet for each puzzle.
Want to help develop Jolly Roger? Join our Discord server
- Google Sheets — auto-created and shared per puzzle
- Chat — persistent, rich-text, with @-mentions and image uploads
- Audio calls — built-in WebRTC via mediasoup
- Tags — flexible grouping, nesting, and meta-puzzle tracking
- Activity signals — viewer counts and sparklines
- Search — instant filter by title, answer, or tag
- Notifications — dingword mentions and bookmark state changes
- Operator queue — moderated guess submission to Hunt HQ
- Discord — role sync, invite management, bot announcements
- And more — bookmarks, announcements, multi-answer puzzles, dark mode, i18n, mobile
hero-light.mp4
- Collaboration — spreadsheets, chat, calls
- Organization — tags, search, activity tracking
- Coordination — guess queue, announcements, notifications
- Integrations & polish — Discord, mobile, dark mode, i18n
Like many Hunt collaboration tools, Jolly Roger automatically creates a Google Sheet for each puzzle entered into a hunt. If a user has linked their Google account to Jolly Roger, Jolly Roger will additionally share the sheet with that user on first load, which will cause the user's cursor to show their name, rather than "Anonymous Animal".
Users who do not link a Google account (or don't have or use one) can still participate in the sheet anonymously.
See the puzzle page
Jolly Roger provides its own persistent chat with each puzzle. No need to constantly jump between the spreadsheet and a third-party chat service. No losing relevant discussion from last year to a paid service's retention limits.
Chat supports rich text editing, including bulleted lists, _italics_, *bold*, `monospace`, ```code blocks```, and @-mentions with formatting previews. You can also upload images directly into chat.
We work hard to make sure that puzzle chat is visible whenever it is active, so remote hunters desperately trying to get your attention are hard to ignore. While it is possible to temporarily hide it, it always pops out on new messages.
See the chat
Each puzzle has a built-in audio call room powered by WebRTC via mediasoup. Hunters can jump on a call without leaving the puzzle page, making real-time collaboration seamless.
See an audio call
In many hunts, it's not always clear from the beginning what puzzles will be related or may contribute to which metapuzzles. Jolly Roger solves this by eschewing a top-down hierarchical round structure and instead allowing multiple tags to be applied to each puzzle to construct dynamic groupings as you gain more information about the hunt structure over time.
Groups are automatically detected for any tag starting with group:. The
metapuzzle for a group is automatically recognized by having an additional
meta-for: tag matching the group tag. Groups can nest intelligently, and
search handles nested groups sensibly. And since early evaluations of a hunt's
structure often don't hold up as you get deeper into it, we also include
powerful tag management tools for re-grouping and re-organizing puzzles later
on.
We've found this approach able to be capable of modeling every hunt structure we've thrown at it.
See the puzzle list
Once a metapuzzle is solved, the puzzles in that group are usually less interesting from a hunt-progress perspective, so we automatically reorder things on the puzzle list page, sending the whole group to the bottom of the list when you solve the meta for the group.
Hover over any tag to see other puzzles that share that tag. This is particularly useful for metas where you want to see the answers that feed into the meta, or for backsolving to see what constraints all answers in that group appear to satisfy.
See tag hover
Several features help you discover which puzzles need attention. Viewer counts in the puzzle list show how many hunters are currently looking at each puzzle. Activity sparklines show recent chat, call, and document activity per puzzle at a glance. You can also bookmark puzzles you're interested in to quickly find them later.
See activity sparklines
Find puzzles in the growing list by searching for any piece of the title, answer, or tag.
See filter search
Set dingwords — keywords that trigger a notification when mentioned in any chat message across the hunt. Bookmark puzzles to receive notifications when their state changes (e.g. when an answer is found).
See a dingword notification
Avoid irritating Hunt HQ with your team's excessive ill-fated backsolving attempts by staffing an operator queue that can tell people "I'm not calling this in until you convince me you're not just submitting every possible combination of three letters."
See guess submission
Or just make sure your team is ready to receive callbacks before calling things in. Operators get a notification (which appears on all pages), and anyone can review a detailed history of guess submissions.
See the guess queue
If you don't like the overhead of tracking and requiring operator submission, you can turn it off and let people mark their own answers as correct or not.
Some hunts have puzzles with multiple answers, which present a challenge for many systems: how do you track a correct answer while still indicating that there's more to be figured out? If you make a separate puzzle for each answer, you lose the context of the discussion/spreadsheet; if you just comma-separate answers, it's hard to tell which puzzles are finished vs. ones that are only partially completed.
Jolly Roger has first-class support for puzzles with more than one answer, and it Just Works™ with all the smart sorting too.
Make sure everyone on the team sees teamwide announcements, whether they've been actively hunting the whole time or are dropping in and out and just need to get up to speed.
See announcements
Jolly Roger integrates with Discord for server invite management, per-hunt role assignment (for access to hunt-specific private channels), and bot announcements of puzzle state changes in Discord channels. Jolly Roger also uses users' Discord avatars within the application.
Jolly Roger is usable on mobile devices, handy for runarounds and on-the-go coordination.
See the mobile view
Supports dark, light, and auto (system-following) color schemes. (If your system is set to dark mode, you've been looking at dark-mode screenshots this whole time!)
Available in English and Chinese.
See Chinese localization
You never need to refresh the page. Everything tracked in Jolly Roger updates in realtime. It's delightful.
Interested in developing or testing Jolly Roger locally? See DEVELOPMENT.md. Looking to run a production instance? See DEPLOYMENT.md.