And now, the last checkpoints in the New Year’s Puzzle Hunt!

SHAGELUK
The title of this puzzle is “Rockin’ Around The Clock“. The following text was printed below:

Donnie was a player, all right. But he got played. He was supposed to pick up his girlfriend, Veronica, for the darts at her place at 12:33 PM. Little did he know that she had just had a cozy little lunch with his best friend, Leon, that finished at 12:21 PM. She rushed home and got there at 12:30 PM, just before Donnie did. She checked her text messages and saw that Leon wanted to meet again at 12:45 PM, so she told Donnie that she wasn.t feeling well, and left poor Donnie standing at her front door at 12:33 PM, right when he was supposed to be there.

Go to where you commonly lose these, and text or call us and tell us: How much does it cost to get these wet?
Solution:
This was a great puzzle that got a little messy at the end. The title hints at clocks, and the teams needed to think of the dartboard like a clock. 12:00 is 20, 12:30 is 3, and so on. 12:33 is 19; the 19th letter of the alphabet is S. If you decode the times in the clue above in order, you get the word “SOCKS”.

So, where do you go to get your socks wet? The Guest Laundry, on the first floor of the hotel. We should have specified “According to ALL the signs, how much does it cost to get these wet?”, because the answer we were looking for was the $1.25 on the washing machine, as well as sum of all of the other signs on the wall.

$1.25 + $0.25 + $0.10 + $0.25 = $1.85.

ANVIK
The title of this puzzle is “Double Feature“. The following text was printed below:
The last few months have produced some great movies! If you like train flicks, there was Unstoppable. Disney gave us some cute animation with Tangled. Prefer westerns? There.s Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, too. All the reviews say Natalie Portman is great in Black Swan. Unfortunately, there are some bad ones out there, though, like Yogi Bear. And the plot in Tron: Legacy got somewhat muddled. As long as you didn.t want something deep or profound, though, it was a fun movie to see.

There are some very interesting movies coming up, also. The French film La Chance de Ma Vie asks, .What if Eve had not eaten the apple in Eden?. In Season of the Witch, Nicolas Cage plays a Crusader battling to save a woman everyone thinks is a witch. Ong Bak 3 moves the martial arts action to Hawaii. And I hope that they will not screw up the story with The Green Hornet. More than likely the producers are going to mess that up, though.
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So.now that you know what to look for, find them and text or call us with the sum of all of them.
Solution:
This problem with this puzzle is that we didn’t provide enough context for teams to decipher the clue. The title “Double Feature” should have directed teams to look at the double letters in the text. If you take the double letters in order you get P-O-O-L-D-E-E-P-T-I-L-E-S. Teams were supposed to go to the pool and sum up all of the tiles stating the pool depth.

If you sum up all of the depths, you got 62 feet. The problems with this question were twofold: “Deep” was misleading – “Depth” would have been better, except I couldn’t think of a word with a double h (Stevie supplied “hitchhiker” after the fact, and I could kick myself for that!). This led some teams to wonder if they had to count all of the tiles in the deep end of the pool. Another source of confusion was the 4′ 8″ depth tiles – should they be added as 4.75 feet, or should they be added as 4+8=12? Once teams started coming back with answers we saw where things were going awry, and as long as they could explain how they arrived at their answer, we accepted it. This was a lesson in considering all ways that teams could approach a problem, and a reminder to remove all ambiguity whenever possible.

GRAYLING
The title of this puzzle is “Mastering Administration“. The following text was printed below:
Find this picture:

When you find it, text or call us and tell us: What is the number on the phone?
Solution:
This one was actually pretty straightforward. The title hints at the location of the picture – the Guest Business Center, on the first floor of the hotel. A slight trickiness is built-in because the picture is actually rotated 90 degrees, but if you look closely you can see a faint reflection of Takaza from where he is taking the picture. The phone was located directly below the picture:

KALTAG
The title of this puzzle is “Well, That.s Just Dandy“. The following text was printed below:
You see, this is the fifth year of Wuffmeet. That.s a lot of parties. When we started these things, we had
an idea that they might be fun, but never expected how well they would take off. From the La Quinta to
new digs at the Hampton Inn, we.ve been through four hotels and have provided twenty or thirty or so
kinds of meals and entertaining things for folks to do. At first it was just a nice get-together, a muddled
event where we got some friends together for Memorial Day. Then came the first FRAC, a fun race where all .
even those who didn.t finish . had a fun time. After that, we decided to schedule Wuffmeet on New Years. Eve.

Growing each year, we continued to get more and more ambitious. The second FRAC had the participants going
outside The Loop, into River North and battling crowds in Wrigleyville, and Lincoln Square. Then, the runners bid adieu
in grand style to the city, solving a difficult puzzle on the way back to the finish line. We were afraid the race might flop .
never were we so glad to be wrong! Will we do it again? You bet! Puzzle hunts are too fun to stop so soon, period.
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So, here.s a question: Where can we find uncle? Text or call us when you know.
Solution:
I thought this one would be pretty obvious, but I was wrong. Teams had to read down the first and last letters of each line. Broken up by paragraph, this resolves to YANKEE DOODLE GOING UP (period). In each of the elevators, the Hampton Inn had pictures of landmarks that they were refurbishing. In the north elevator was this:

The answer is Ottawa Lake, Michigan.

The last three envelopes in the teams’ packets were fakes 🙂 This was a way for us to make sure that no one was just opening envelopes indiscriminately. The clues in each of these read “Text or call us with the word .Derp. and we.ll tell you your next clue.”

Oh, and the room key that was in each packet? That was another red herring – it was blank.

So, how did the teams do? Tune in this weekend for the full results!