Difficult as it may be to solve, the chaos known as the Herald Hunt is actually a family affair with a comically questionable moral compass.

At the 19th edition of the Hunt on Sunday, parents taught their children to be skeptical of Christmas carolers and not to be afraid to identify someone by his race.

They needed to do both in order to win the grand prize -- a seven-day Costa Caribbean cruise. Honestly, though, thousands came simply for a dizzying mental challenge on a crisp afternoon. An estimated 5,000 took part.

``In ancient times, men hunted animals,'' said Jeff Rothkopf as he led his family into the second hour of the Hunt just north of downtown Miami. ``Today, we're hunting for clues that are hidden . . . It's still exhilarating.''

The Herald Hunt requires players to scour a neighborhood and figure out brain-teasers. The answer to each is always a number. Those numbers help players figure out the digits to a phone number that a player has to call to be declared the winner.

Rothkopf, known in the virtual world as Jeff the Gamer, teaches people how to solve puzzles for a living -- namely, the pesky questions on the SAT. The trick, he says, is to put yourself in the mind of the test makers: in this case, humor columnist Dave Barry and a former Miami Herald editor, Tom Shroder.

``The mind you need to win? It's a crazy, bizarre mind,'' said Rothkopf, a Kendall resident who won the 1992 Hunt with his wife, Michele, and two friends.

This year, Jeff and Michele brought their 9-year-old son, Adam; Jeff's brother, Rob; and Michele's sister Jerilyn. They packed backpacks with a box of cereal, a 2.2-liter bottle of water and a scientific calculator.

They are an astute group -- even though they didn't figure out that they needed to iron on letters backward to make the wording on their ``Herald Hunt'' T-shirts legible.

``We were so close last year,'' Jeff Rothkopf said. ``But we messed up at the last minute because we didn't keep on our thinking caps and listen to each other.''

Within an hour, they realized that two winged members of a chorus singing outside The Miami Herald building were part of a clue, as was a fictional advertisement in the Herald Hunt program for the restaurant ``House of Montague.'' Young Adam guessed that one -- he had just finished reading Romeo and Juliet.

Inside the Knight Concert Hall at the Adrienne Arsht Center, they watched a murder mystery. Jeff recorded it on a digital camcorder.

In the play, a group of friends huddle around a peer who has been found dead. Then the lights go out. When the group returned, a different actor was playing the fallen Jack -- and that difference was the key to the puzzle.

The family sat on the floor to figure it out. They reviewed the tape and notes they scribbled. Then, it dawned on Jeff. The difference between Jack before and after the lights were dimmed was skin color: Jack changed from white to black.

``Blackjack,'' Jeff said. ``The answer is 21!''

The family looked everywhere for the final clue, even counting the number of orange dots on the sidewalk leading to the Venetian Causeway.

``This might be it,'' said Jeff's brother, Rob.

``Absolutely not,'' Jeff said. ``I think that just might be for people working with the sewers . . . But we can't rule anything out.''

Three hours after the Hunt began, Barry gave participants a final hint outside The Miami Herald. The Rothkopf family figured it out instantly. Rob and Jeff dropped their backpacks and ran west.

That hint took them to back to the concert hall, in front of bricks of fictional donors with the last name ``Foot.'' Jeff began calculating their ages.

But before he could get there, at least three more families -- the Rosses, Hinds and first-place winners, the Streits -- had gotten there first.

The Streit family -- Dan, Chris, Tom and Andy -- also won the 2002 Herald Hunt. According to Dan Streit, this year's Hunt was ``one of the easier ones.''

After figuring out all but one clue within an hour, they noticed the area around the center was being roped off. Tom Streit, 57, stayed there.

When the final clue was announced, he simply dialed the number calculated from the ages of the Foot family.

``All it takes is a little common sense,'' said Dan, 59.

``And intuition,'' Tom added.

Although they didn't win, the Rothkopfs were pleased with their performance.

``We worked together and we ran to the clue as fast as we could,'' Jeff told his family.

Next year, they think it will take another thing to get the answer first: a bicycle.