Solver toolbox

Sharpen your tools before the hunt
Curated utilities commonly used in puzzle hunts

General

Search engines

Bing or Google are recommended; Baidu and others work too.

Bing Google Baidu

Encyclopedias

Authoritative references for fact-checking and background research.

Wikipedia Wikipedia (ZH)Wolfram Alpha Britannica

AI assistants

DeepSeek, Tongyi, Kimi for Chinese; ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini for global users.

DeepSeek Tongyi Qianwen Kimi ChatGPT Claude Gemini

Translation

Handy when you hit foreign text or unknown vocabulary.

Youdao Translate Google Translate DeepL

Reverse image search

Find similar images or sources—common for visual puzzles.

Google Images Baidu Images TinEye Yandex

Word lookup

Qat

Powerful word lookup with advanced query syntax and pattern matching.

Open tool

Nutrimatic

Pattern-match partial words across a huge corpus.

Open tool

Onelook

Phrase and wildcard search across many dictionaries.

Open tool

Regex Dictionary

Word matching with part-of-speech filters and regex.

Open tool

Rhymezone

Rhymes, synonyms, and definitions.

Open tool

Ciphers & encoding

CyberChef

Swiss-army knife for encoding, decoding, and crypto transforms.

Open tool

dCode.fr

Classical ciphers, word games, encodings, and more.

Open tool

Cryptii

Clean, fast multi-format encoding converter.

Open tool

Quipqiup

Auto-solve simple substitution ciphers.

Open tool

Cipher Machine

Puzzle Hunt toolkit by philippica, including Chinese word matching.

Open tool

SCIEPH Tools

Idioms, binary/Morse generators, and more from SCIEPH.

Open tool

Chinese tools

Chinese-language hunts often need these references:

Qianp - Chinese dictionary and idiom index.

Zi.tools - Find characters from component parts.

Sou-yun - Search classical poetry by character positions.

HanziFinder - Structure-based Hanzi search beyond radicals.

Helpers

Maps & geography

Places, distances, street view for geo puzzles.

Google Maps Baidu Maps Amap Street View

Music identification

Hum or play audio to name a track.

Midomi Musipedia

Math & calculation

OEIS, Wolfram Alpha, base conversion, etc.

OEIS Wolfram Alpha Base converter

Paper puzzles

Sudoku, slitherlink, nurikabe, and more solvers.

Noq Solvers

Comprehensive

Popular all-in-one solver utilities:

BBLBCH - Cipher toolkit by welkin25.

Cipher Machine (GitHub) - Source for philippica's Hunt cipher tools.

Solvertools - Community solver utilities (rspeer).

Set of Things - Curated sets and categorization aid.

Search by Image - Browser extension for reverse image search.

More resources

For even longer lists:

MIT Puzzle Tools - MIT Hunt's comprehensive tool list.

Have you tried... - MIT Hunt's stuck? checklist (PDF).