So, how did you do on the Trivia Quiz? If you found it tough, don’t feel too bad – it was supposed to be! The average score on the quiz was 46%, with a low score of 30% and a high score of 72%. At 6 seconds per correct answer, that means that everyone got at least a little bonus out of it, from as little as two minutes to as much as three minutes and 36 seconds. (Side note: Thanks to Genet and Street for grading the trivia quizzes!) Also: Want to see the trivia quiz answers? Highlight the black boxes in the first post and you’ll be able to see them!

At this point we handed out packets to each team. On the front of each packet was written the team name, a phone number, and the name of the first checkpoint for the team. Inside were thirteen envelopes, a bag of jelly beans, and a Hampton Inn room key. The envelopes were labeled Skwentna , Rohn, Nikolai , McGrath , Takotna , Ophir, Shageluk, Anvik, Grayling, Kaltag, Unalakeet, Shaktoolik, and Koyuk. As I’m sure you know (really?), these are all stops on the Iditarod Trail. The names don’t really have any significance beyond providing a name for each checkpoint that was non-sequential.

The phone number on the packets was intended for the teams to text requests for hints and guesses at answers to. The phone numbers were actually Takaza and my Google Voice numbers, and we had half of the teams reporting to him, and half reporting to me. After about 20 minutes, though, Dan and I got utterly swamped with the incoming text messages. Instead, we switched to having the teams report to the common room for hints and to submit their answers, one team allowed in the room at a time. This turned out a lot better, since it allowed more interaction and allowed us to better gauge how things were going.

Let’s start in with the checkpoints!
The general format for each checkpoint was that the teams first had to solve a puzzle, then use the information derived from the puzzle to answer the question posed in the clue.

SKWENTNA
The title of this puzzle is “Surely You Can’t Be Serious“. The following text was printed below:

jyi acfbvagi cz wvpcgq ycqy moif eagyajjag. cj cz rviafvp a ocgjaqi emniv, agn gmj hdcvj firigjvp. zm jivv dz: xyaj piaf xaz jyi bcrjdfi jalig?

Solution:
This is a straightforward cipher. The plaintext of the cipher is: “the airplane is flying high over manhattan. it is clearly a vintage model, and not built recently. so tell us: what year was the picture taken?” This referred to a picture (shown below) that was on the second floor of the hotel, right outside of the common room. The picture was taken in 1946. The title of the puzzle is a quote from the movie “Airplane!”, which was intended to give a hint as to what the cipher was about.

ROHN
The title of this puzzle is “X Marks The Spot“. The following text was printed below:

Look under the X for your next question.
Solution:
I would have thought that this was lacking enough context that people might have a little problem with it, but only two teams needed a hint – the others found it without a problem. The trick here was that teams should have noticed that in the breakfast seating area there were lights on wires strong across the room, forming “X”s in two locations.

One of the locations had nothing underneath it, but the other had a strategically-placed table there. If teams looked under the table, they found this message:
Find all of the sets of glass blocks.
Multiply the number in each set together.
Text or call us with your answer.

This refers to the glass block walls in hotel lobby area:

If teams multiplied all four (one wall is not shown above), they got 3,780,000.

NIKOLAI
The title of this puzzle was “As Easy As A Clapton Riff” and the following text was printed below:

Use the Jelly Beans.

Find number 66. Text or call us with the ID number.

Solution:
This one was a lot harder than intended, but I still love the puzzle. Teams were given a packet of 10 jelly beans. The distribution was:
One Strawberry Cheesecake jelly bean
Two Dr. Pepper jelly beans
Three Lemon Lime jelly beans
Four Buttered Popcorn jelly beans

The problem was that some of the flavors were really hard to figure out (to me, the Dr. Pepper tasted mostly just “sweet”, but teams figured that out). The trick was to realize that once you knew the flavors, and thus the corresponding letter, the number of beans corresponded to the letters’ location in the final word – one bean = first letter, 2 beans = second letter, and so on. The word spelled out is COKE. “Find number 66” referred to the Coke machine on the first floor of the hotel that had a large “66” on it that no other Coke machines had:

The ID number is 93483.
Incidentally, the puzzle title was intended to be a play on “Cocaine” (Cocaine = Coke) but unfortunately led some teams down the wrong path completely, as they tried to make the jelly beans fit the word “Fire”. Sorry about that!

So that’s the first three checkpoints. More to come tomorrow!