Con Flat Competition 2025:
Puzzles for Polyglots
Welcome to the SPAMCon flat-solving competition. The competition will begin on Saturday, July 19, around 3pm CDT and will run roughly 50 minutes.
This year’s flats each include a foreign word or phrase as part of their base. Scoring will be lenient on spelling for these foreign words and phrases as long as the flat’s requirements are met (so, for example, if the flat is a consonantcy and your consonants don’t match, you will be marked incorrect, but if the consonants match and the answers are otherwise recognizable as the intended answer, you’ll get full credit). You will get partial credit for incomplete solutions (except for rebuses, for which the entire answer must be correct). You do not need to submit the partwords for acrostical enigmas or the reading for rebuses.
You may solve solo, in a pair, or in a group. Solo and pair solvers are eligible for prizes. No references other than The Guide to the Enigma are allowed if you intend to submit your answers for the prizes. (If you’re just solving for fun, use whatever tools you like!) Whether or not you submit answers, you are encouraged to submit kudos, because prizes will be awarded for the top kudos as well as the top solvers.
You can download the flats PDF at any time. The password you need to open it will be released once the competition starts. The password will be shared via the npl-announce email and on the NPL Facebook, Slack, and Discord groups.
You can download a PDF with explanations of the flat types used in the competition. This is not password-protected and can be viewed at any time.
If the links above don’t work, alternate links are available:
Submitting answers and kudos
Submit answers with this Google Form. Solutions are due roughly 50 minutes after the competition starts; any extensions will be announced as best as possible (at least through npl-announce).
Submit kudos with this Google Form. Kudos are due by 8 p.m. Central time on Saturday, July 19.