About Tricky Bits

Welcome to Tricky Bits, a platform for curious minds who enjoy solving problems, exploring ideas, and tackling challenges, one puzzle at a time.

What is Tricky Bits?

Tricky Bits is a client-side puzzle platform built to host collections of challenges around a common theme, topic, or idea. It is designed to be flexible, interactive, and fun, whether you enjoy logic problems, technical riddles, creative thinking, or something entirely different.

Rather than focusing on a single type of puzzle, Tricky Bits aims to be a framework for challenges, adaptable to many formats and difficulty levels.

The site itself is generated by TBB (Tricky Bits Builder), a static site generator that reads markdown files with YAML frontmatter and renders them into a self-contained HTML site with client-side answer checking.

How puzzles are organized

Puzzles in Tricky Bits are grouped in a simple hierarchy to keep things structured without being restrictive:

• Campaigns group related challenges together under a common theme or goal.
• Each campaign contains individual stages, linked in a linear chain, meant to be solved independently or progressively.

This structure allows authors to:

• Organize puzzles in a meaningful way
• Offer a sense of progression (when relevant)
• Mix different kinds of challenges under the same umbrella

The core idea remains: clear structure, minimal friction, maximum focus on the puzzles themselves.

What a challenge can include

Each challenge may contain:

• A problem statement or scenario
• Optional hints to help you if you get stuck
• A way to validate your solution (answers are checked in the browser using SHA-256 — no server required)
• Supporting content such as text, visuals, or interactive elements

You are free to explore at your own pace. Tricky Bits does not try to "gamify" everything, it simply gives you the tools to think, experiment, and solve.

Sharing, progress, and fair play

Tricky Bits is designed to be easy to share and easy to enjoy:

• You can share direct links to individual challenges with friends, even if they have never solved anything on the site before. No account, no prerequisites, just send the link and start puzzling.
• You can probably find ways to cheat. That's fine. We're not here to police solutions or enforce purity. If bypassing a puzzle is fun for you, enjoy it.
• That said, if you're stuck or frustrated, we would much rather have you reach out, ask questions, or discuss the problem. Puzzles are more fun when shared and talked about.

The goal is curiosity and enjoyment, not competition or scorekeeping.

Who are we?

We are three engineers at Hornetsecurity who enjoy puzzles, problem-solving, and building things for fun.

Tricky Bits started as a way for us to design and run internal coding-based events at our company. Over time, we realized that:

• Designing good puzzles is a challenge in itself
• Running them raises interesting technical and organizational problems
• Many enthusiasts out there enjoy both solving puzzles and understanding how they are built

This project is our way of sharing those challenges and ideas with the wider community. We want to:

• Experiment with puzzle formats
• Open up the design process
• Provide a platform others can learn from, use, or extend

Tricky Bits is built by enthusiasts, for enthusiasts.

Open source

Tricky Bits and TBB are fully open source. You can explore the code, report issues, or contribute improvements on GitHub: View on GitHub

If you enjoy the site, the challenges, or the platform itself, consider leaving a star on GitHub, it helps more than you might think.

Frequently asked questions

Will I lose my progress if I clear my browser data?

Yes. Clearing browser data will remove your progress. Use the export feature to back it up if you want to keep it.