Run a jeopardy competition on CTF7
Build a board of web, crypto, pwn, reversing, forensics and OSINT challenges. CTF7 handles registration, static or dynamic scoring and the live scoreboard. The Standard plan adds hints, per-team dynamic flags, anti-cheat and your own Docker challenge images.
What is a jeopardy CTF?
A jeopardy CTF is a Capture The Flag competition where players solve a board of independent security challenges, grouped by category and point value, much like the TV quiz show. Each challenge hides a secret string called a flag, such as CTF7{This_is_an_example_flag}. Submitting the correct flag awards points on a live scoreboard. Teams never interact with each other's infrastructure, which makes jeopardy the most accessible and scalable CTF format.
Most well-known public CTFs use the jeopardy format. It is also the natural choice for college tech fests, club practice nights and qualifiers ahead of an attack-defense final.
At a glance
- Players: solo or teams, with limits you set
- Duration: typically 4 to 48 hours
- Skill: beginner to expert on one board
- Scale: 50 free, 500 on Standard, unlimited on Premium
How to host a jeopardy CTF on CTF7
From an empty event to the final scoreboard. Most organizers spend their time on challenges, not the platform.
Full CTF hosting playbookCreate the event and brand it
Set the name, dates, rules, prizes and access mode (public, invite-only or paid). Add your logo, theme colors and custom pages such as rules and sponsors.
Build the challenge board
Upload challenges with descriptions, attachments, external links and flags. Containerized challenges ship as your Docker images. Tag each by category and difficulty so players can plan their attack. Writing your own? Follow our guide to creating CTF challenges with Docker templates.
Configure scoring, hints and flags
Choose static or dynamic scoring per challenge. On Standard and Premium, add optional hints with point costs and switch on per-team dynamic flags for anything that could be shared. The CTF scoring guide helps you pick values.
Plan your waves and test
Decide which challenges go live at the start and which you add later in waves. Dry-run every flag from a test team before launch.
Run it live
Watch solves, scoreboard movement and anti-cheat alerts in the organizer dashboard. Push announcements, and pause a round from the admin panel while you fix a broken challenge.
Close, verify and celebrate
Close submissions, review flagged submissions, publish final standings and issue certificates (on paid plans). Use the post-event analytics to see which challenges worked.
Jeopardy CTF categories you can run
A balanced board usually has four to seven categories, each with an easy entry point and a hard ceiling. Our CTF categories guide goes deeper on each.
Web exploitation
SQLi, SSTI, JWT confusion, SSRF, deserialization and auth logic flaws, usually served from a live container built from your Docker image.
Cryptography
Classical ciphers for beginners, then RSA misuse, padding oracles, nonce reuse and lattice-based attacks.
Pwn / binary exploitation
Stack overflows, format strings, ROP and heap exploitation against a remote service running in Docker.
Reverse engineering
Crackmes, obfuscated binaries, Android APKs and custom VMs, analyzed with Ghidra, IDA or radare2.
Forensics
PCAP analysis, memory dumps, disk images, steganography and log reconstruction.
OSINT
Geolocation, username pivots, metadata and public-record hunting, all within ethical boundaries.
Cloud & misc
Misconfigured buckets, IAM puzzles, scripting, esoteric languages and sanity-check warm-ups.
Static vs dynamic scoring, explained
Static scoring gives a challenge a fixed value: a 300-point challenge is worth 300 to everyone. It is predictable and easy to explain, and it works well for small events and beginner rounds where you calibrated difficulty yourself.
Dynamic scoring lets the crowd calibrate difficulty for you. A challenge starts at a high value and loses points as more teams solve it, down to a floor. Conceptually:
points = max(minimum, initial − decay × solves)The value is recalculated for every solver, including those who solved earlier, so a challenge that turns out easy stops inflating the scores of teams that farmed it. Hard challenges keep their value and decide the top of the board. You set the initial value, the floor and how quickly points decay. Some organizers prefer a curve that decays slowly at first and faster later, but the idea is the same.
Rule of thumb: set the floor to roughly 20% of the initial value, and pick a decay rate that reaches the floor once about a third of active teams have solved it. The CTF scoring guide compares decay curves in more detail.
| Solves | Static (300) | Dynamic (500 → min 100, decay 20) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 300 | 480 |
| 5 | 300 | 400 |
| 10 | 300 | 300 |
| 15 | 300 | 200 |
| 20+ | 300 | 100 (floor) |
Per-challenge choice
Pick static or dynamic scoring challenge by challenge, so a sanity-check flag stays at 50 while a hard pwn task decays from 500.
Tie-breaks
Equal scores are ranked by time taken. The team that reached the score first ranks higher.
Jeopardy features included
Dynamic flags
A unique dynamic flag per team (per player in solo events), on Standard and Premium. If team A's flag shows up in team B's submission, both are flagged for review automatically. Read more in dynamic flags and anti-cheat.
Docker challenge images
Bring-your-own Docker challenge images on Standard; managed container deployment on Premium, with the CTF7 team running the container side for you.
Hints with point costs
Unlock hints free or for a price. Stuck beginners keep moving, and strong teams still get rewarded for solving unaided.
Round control
Upload challenges mid-event, pause a round from the admin panel and track submissions live, so a 24- or 48-hour event keeps its momentum.
Registration & fees
Open, invite-only or paid entry with fee collection, so sign-ups and payments sit in one organizer dashboard.
Anti-cheat & logs
IP and browser tracking, flag-reuse alerts and full submission logs. Premium adds advanced anti-cheat analytics.
Team modes
Solo entry or teams with size limits you set. Mentor roles with limited permissions are included.
Live scoreboard & feed
Rankings, points, solves and time taken update in real time, ready for a projector at the venue.
Post-event analytics
Solve trends per challenge and leaderboard insights for your next edition.
Flag sharing, caught at submission time
With static flags, one flag leaked in a group chat can reshuffle your top ten. Dynamic flags make every copy traceable.
Each team receives its own flag for the same challenge. When a submitted flag belongs to another team, CTF7 logs both teams, records IP and browser signals, and raises an alert in the organizer feed. You decide whether to warn, dock points or disqualify, with the evidence in front of you.
A 24-hour college jeopardy CTF, hour by hour
A realistic plan for a national-level online CTF with about 300 participants (100–150 teams), run on the Standard plan. For a first-time club event, halve the challenges and drop Docker and hints; Free covers up to 50 participants.
| When | What happens | Organizer focus |
|---|---|---|
| T − 6 weeks | Event page live, registration open, fee collection on | Promotion, sponsor pages, team-size rules |
| T − 3 weeks | Challenge freeze: 30–35 challenges across 6 categories | Peer-testing every challenge from a clean machine |
| T − 3 days | Full dry run with a test team; Docker images load-tested | Flag checks, hint text, visibility waves |
| Hour 0 | Wave 1 opens: 18 challenges, including a sanity-check flag | Discord or forum support, welcome announcement |
| Hour 8 | Wave 2 opens: 10 harder challenges | Watching solve curves, fixing unsolved ones with hints |
| Hour 16 | Wave 3 opens: final 5, including two 500-point pwn/rev | Anti-cheat review queue |
| Hour 23 | Final-hour push; no new challenges released | Resolving flagged submissions |
| Hour 24 | Submissions close; winners revealed; writeups invited | Certificates, post-event analytics, prize verification |
Jeopardy CTF launch checklist
- Every challenge solved start to finish by someone who did not write it
- Flag format published in the rules (for example
CTF7{...}) - At least two easy challenges per category for newcomers
- Dynamic flags on anything that is easy to share
- Docker images pinned, resource-limited and rebuilt from scratch
- Hint text reviewed so it nudges without giving the answer
- Wave release plan written down, with times in your event's time zone
- Rules on flag sharing, automated scanning and infrastructure attacks
- Support channel staffed for the first two hours
- Prize eligibility and writeup requirements published
Plans for a jeopardy event
| Capability | Free | Standard | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| Participants | 50 | 500 | Unlimited |
| Static flags & attachments | |||
| Hints | |||
| Dynamic flags & anti-cheat | Advanced | ||
| Docker challenges | Bring your own | Managed | |
| Custom domain & SSL | |||
| Price | ₹0 | ₹9,999 / event | Custom |
Full details on the pricing page.
Who runs jeopardy CTFs on CTF7
Other competition formats on CTF7
Practicing solo instead? War Zone bundles challenges, missions and raw targets into time-boxed operations.
Plan your next event with us
A free jeopardy event for up to 50 players goes live when you publish it. For flagship events, our team can build the challenges and run the managed formats: attack-defense, King of the Hill and SOC simulations.
