Nobody Knows What Your Perfect Puzzle Is, But You Will After Answering These Nine Questions

Are you writing an exam that just isn’t your style? After you take this short quiz, you’ll get a puzzle suited to your puzzle tastes.

1. What’s your favourite part of a puzzlehunt?
2. What best describes your experience with puzzlehunts?
3. You’re now a puzzle expert. What’s your superpower?
4. What is a logic puzzle?
5. When do you start putting letters into Nutrimatic?
6. How much effort do you like to spend solving puzzles?
7. What’s the optimal number of people working on a puzzle?
8. What “generation” of puzzles matches your interests?
9. You have a list of identified information. How do you sort and index into these clues?
Sort by:
Index:
Team Acknowledgement

▼ Section 2. Short Answer (1 puzzle)

Submit section 1 first!

You’d love a conundrum: a long list of instructions you have to carefully follow in order to get the answer!
Your teammate says, “I already spent the last eight hours on this puzzle, just check my sheet. I know that Bob is on the far right...”
Their sheet is incomprehensible, and no one wants to check their work.

Alice sends a message to Bob: Hello, I’m Alice!

Oh no! Some interlopers are between Alice and Bob, who modify the message, and instead of Alice’s name, Bob ends up receiving the answer to the puzzle instead.

All messages start with Hello, I’m. Messages are case-insensitive and ignore all non-alphabetic characters.

Every message is sent to the person immediately to the right of the sender, and only that person.

Interlopers are all in a line, receive the message from their left, modify the message, and send the modified message to their right.

Correctly order the interlopers to find out what message Bob received!

Interlopers:

  • Count von Count counts the number of ‘count’s in his name, and inserts that number, spelled out in English, after Hello, I’m, but before the rest of the message.
  • Eve overhears the message, records it on her cold storage blockchain wallet, and retransmits the message unmodified.
  • Mallory makes sure every L in the message is paired, adding one L to any odd length sequence of consecutive Ls.
  • Monkey randomly hits keys on their keyboard, appending an infinite number of random characters to the message.
  • Sunny melts (deletes) ICE in the message as well as everything after ICE.
  • Zero looks for a written number in the message, and thinks of that number. She inserts the number one less than the number she’s thinking of, spelled out in English, one letter after Hello, I’m in the message. Hey, the length of the message is now the number she’s thinking of to the power of four!
  • Zulu moves the fourth last letter in the message x characters to the left and replaces it with y, where x is the length of the NATO phonetic alphabet codeword for that letter, and y is the next letter in that codeword.
    • (Example: if the fourth last letter is B, move it 5 characters left and replace it with R, as in BRAVO).

Order: (before = left, after = right)

  • Count von Count is (at most the number of ‘count’s in his name)th, among the interlopers, from the left.
  • Eve is second among the interlopers.
  • Mallory is not fourth or fifth.
  • Monkey is right after Mallory, but not last.
  • Sunny is before the person after him, and after the person before him.
  • Zero isn’t last either.
  • Zulu is right after Zero.
  • Actually, all the interlopers are in alphabetical order, left to right. Good thing you read this first, right?

Wow, we’ve found the perfect puzzle for you, one that requires absolutely no effo—Wait, your team already backsolved this puzzle somehow? They’re saying it solves to the cluephrase FREE ANS IS STONEWALL. Huh, okay.

You’re one of the types that like to discover key insights.

Your team marked this puzzle as SOE: stuck on extraction.

  • Administrative Command, Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet Subordinate Command
  • Automated Teller Machine, Human Immunodeficiency Virus, Redundant Acronym Syndrome
  • By the way
  • Eddie ate dynamite, good-bye Eddie, every good boy deserves fudge
  • Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, γ-aminobutyric acid, monosodium glutamate
  • Exempli gratia: si vales bene est ego valeo, Senatus populusque Romanus, anno Domini, requiescat in pace; quod erat demonstrandum
  • Extracellular matrix metalloproteinase inducer
  • HERschel Observations Edge-on Spirals
  • Large Binocular Telescope Near-infrared Spectroscopic Utility with Camera and Integral Field Unit for Extragalactic Research for the win, Chicago Air Shower Array; Broad LAteral Non-imaging Cerenkov Array for the lose
  • Laugh out loud! As far as I know, in real life (away from keyboard) I love you, too much information. What do you mean?
  • New Spring, Lord of Chaos, Knife of Dreams, A Memory of Light
  • North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Commonwealth of Independent States, Unión de Naciones Suramericanas, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
  • On behalf of United States Code Congressional and Administrative News, Statute of Limitations, Supreme Court of the United States
  • Role playing game, kill, deaths, assists, damage per second, downloadable content, area of effect
  • Service Level Agreement: end of day. For what it’s worth, Chief Executive Officer out of office
  • There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, except bacon lettuce tomato
  • Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle
  • Today I f***ed up, original poster, am I the a**hole? Ask me anything. Too long; didn’t read
  • Well developed, well nourished / negative to date
  • What You See Is What You Get, Formula Translation, Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart
  • YAML ain’t markup language, GNU’s Not Unix, PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
  • You only live once

Oh, that’s what you like? How incredibly niche... just like this infuriating puzzle game about an inscrutable film!

(click inside the game to focus)

You love identifying things? You’re in the right place, here’s a bunch of random identities! Click the images to reverse search them. After you’re done identifying, index the given numbers to extract one or two letters from each identity, read in the given order, and close your million browser tabs.

4
3
7
2
1
5
3
4
6
5
3
Magic Words
An Interaction Fiction
Release 1 / Serial number 170220 / Inform 7 build F4K3 (I6/v6.33 lib 6/12N)
Sealed Chamber

You once again find yourself stuck in a black-and-white, half-century-old, barely-passable work of ‘fiction’ with no way out. If only you knew the magic words.

>

Don’t you hate it when you solve your favorite logic puzzle but get stuck on extraction? Here’s how you extract this one: read the letters traversed by the loop, in loop order.

Masyu:

  • Draw a single closed loop through all circled cells.
  • white circles: loop goes straight through, then turns in at least one of the cells before/after loop
  • black circles: loop turns, and goes straight in both cells before/after loop
  • grey circles: are either white or black circles

SOCAT
NELL
LL
OWAI
TSN

Links to solve online (no answer checking): penpa-edit, puzz.link

The perfect puzzle is like a recipe — it requires creativity, gives just as much as you put in, and is always a little different each time.

You know what, why don’t you make it yourself?

Write a (very easy) puzzle and send it to us at galacticpuzzlesetters+mypuzzle@gmail.com.

Why cross your words when you can check them twice with the same clue?

You like cryptics? Great!
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