Puzzle Hunt

[Grim Ranger]

Will there be a puzzle hunt at this year's PaizoCon?

[Brian Bauman]

There will indeed! It made its rounds through the office for testing a few days ago.

[Grim Ranger]

Fantastic! We've had a lot of fun with this the last couple years.

[Trastone]

Yay!!! Loved doing this a couple years ago. Missed out on PaizoCon last year, but will be there this year!

[Jason Keeley]

I think people are going to really enjoy this year's puzzle hunt! We got some... very enthusiastic... individuals to help us out.

Also, everyone should use this thread to talk about the puzzles and maybe trade hints for those who need them!

[Jason Keeley]

And if you like puzzles, Joe Pasini, Ron Lundeen, and myself will be talking about them in our Solving Puzzles seminar at 4pm on Friday. We'll have some copies of previous puzzle hunts there too!

[Grim Ranger]

Jason Keeley wrote:

And if you like puzzles, Joe Pasini, Ron Lundeen, and myself will be talking about them in our Solving Puzzles seminar at 4pm on Friday. We'll have some copies of previous puzzle hunts there too!

I've a game at this time and can't make it -- any chance this will be available on Twitch (or Youtube) afterwards? I'd love to see it.

[Jason Keeley]

Unfortunately, I don't believe this will be one of the recorded seminars.

But maybe find one of us during the con and we'll be happy to talk about puzzles if we have a minute!

[Faetan]

Where can we find a link to last year's puzzle hunt? I'm dying to sink my teeth into more of these, this year's was so creative and fun!

[Joe Pasini]

Faetan wrote:

Where can we find a link to last year's puzzle hunt?

here!

[Faetan]

Thank you very much!

[Brattany]

Anyone have any hints for the story puzzle on the last page? We have gotten the rest of it ourselves but seem to be a bit stuck on the second part of the story. Thanks!

[Grim Ranger]

For the bridge puzzle, what does the rule "The bridges only orthogonally" mean? I assumed it meant that the bridges can only be orthogonal, but the rule just below it seems to say that.

[NielsenE]

@Brattany -- What are you considering the second part? Maybe I can help? I'm pretty confident I've got all the components from the story, but can't make sense of them yet.

@Grim, I talked to Jason (I think) about that and he said there's at least one word missing, by accident. But it sounded like it was meant to mean the bridges run horizontally and vertically. Specifically it did not mean that bridges only meet at right angles.

I'm still trying to solve the word search -- I'm assuming I found an unintended word, but even with the ones I feel confident of, I've ruled out all possible words that can fit in the meta puzzle....

Definitely hoping I can catch Joe or Jason, on Sunday since I would love to finish this and I'm close. But still have to resolve final bits of two puzzles, so....

[Axoq]

@NielsenE -- the words from the word search are all strongly related to each other, and the average length of the words is around five or six letters. None of the words in the word search is the answer to the puzzle.

I'm stuck on the back page, which seems to require familiarity with the RPG, but I'm a card gamer so I lack a lot of vocabulary to know whether the things I want to use are Things or not.

[Grim Ranger]

Familiarity with the Pathfinder RPG is probably needed for the back page. Although I suspect the ACG also has many of the terms you would need in it (I've only played it a few times, so I can't say that every single one is there).

Brattany, I'm not sure what you mean by the second part of the story, but I'll give a general hint:

Story puzzle hint:

The words just before the square-bracketed numbers (e.g. "flame runts") represent a creature or spell, but they are wrong/backwards. Fill in the correct terms and use the clue inside the square brackets in a certain way to get closer to the final answer. If you need something more specific than this (I'm not sure how much to spoil) please post more details

[Jason Keeley]

Thanks to everyone who tried out this year's puzzle hunt! And congratulations to the nearly 50 finishers and prize collectors!

Sorry we didn't have enough opportunities to jump onto this thread and help out, but I'm glad some other solvers were!

Now that the con is over, though, we will try to keep a better eye on this thread if people still have any questions and want to try to solve the hunt!

Also, if you have any questions about puzzles and puzzle-making in general, ask away!