Today was the grand finale of Enter the Passphrase puzzle hunt! So how did it go? Well…
We didn’t win! Not a huge surprise, but I still thought there was a chance. The contest was won by a ten person superteam that blazed through the metapuzzles and solved everything in just around thirty minutes. It was really impressive.
My team still had a lot of fun. We ended up having three participants which was more than I expected, and that helped us get off to a strong start. We made some good connections, revealed a secret message instructing us how to get our answer (EVEN ODD MORSE)… Then we couldn’t figure out exactly how we needed to apply that instruction!
This is sometimes a challenge with puzzles- when you know the right method but have a few different areas or ways to try it. We had two different sets of numbers in the puzzle – which are we supposed to be working with? Is zero even, or is it the delimiter between Morse Code characters? Do the line breaks also break up our characters? Do we read left to right first or top to bottom first?
Ultimately the answer to the puzzle likely lies somewhere within those permutations, but we didn’t find the right approach by the time the winners finished. I’ll be eager to go back after solutions are posted to see what we missed, plus to understand better a few of the puzzles that we backsolved.
Overall this was a really fun setup for a puzzle hunt. The Puzzler team was vague about how long the final day would take, and that concerned me since I didn’t want to spend the full day working on the hunt. I appreciated that it was over quickly and that I was able to go about my day! Christina and I were able to use the rest of the day to explore the Crivitz Museum and learn all about the history of farming and logging in northern Wisconsin!
I fondly bid farewell to the Puzzler Hunt and look forward to picking up the book sometime. A daily dose of decent puzzles is something I didn’t know I was missing.
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