You’ve been following along with all of the puzzles this week, now it’s time to find out how everyone did. Click to see who won, who placed, and who just had a bunch of fun

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?
Click for solutions

The Puzzle Hunt continues! Yesterday we had the first three checkpoints, now here’s the next three:

MCGRATH
The title of this puzzle is “Just Like The Dorsai“. The following text was printed below:

When you solve the puzzle and find the item, text or call and tell us:
What is the sum of these ladies?

Click for solutions

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?

Click for the solutions

This year at Wuffmeet we held the initial New Year’s Puzzle Hunt. Teams spent an afternoon racing around the Hampton Inn Lincolnshire trying to work through the clues and get the answers to the questions we posed to them in the fastest time with the least number of hints. The rules were simple:
1. No asking for help from anyone else or using the Internet.
2. If you leave the hotel You’re Doing It Wrong.

After a bit of sorting out, we got everyone together into eleven teams of two. They were:

We started out with a 50-question trivia quiz. There was no penalty for incorrect answers, but each correct answer was worth a 6-second reduction in the final time. We gave everyone exactly ten minutes to complete the quiz. The quiz is shown below (highlight the black box to get the answer).
The Trivia Quiz…