Database design for Scavenger Hunt Game
Without hunt_teams table, a simple query for the teams playing a specific Hunt would require joining players with team_members and grouping them by team_id. A lot more work compared to querying hunt_teams. And that’s probably a query you’ll be running often.

I can also imagine that this additional source of truth will be nice to have in the long run. Running some stats or dealing with eventual inconsistencies in the database will be much easier.

So the first schema is one I would go with