Finding Answers

Introduction
This document is to help explain some of the more common puzzling techniques - to assist in understanding just where some of the answers have come from and what things might be worth looking for.

Paths to Answers
There are a few different skills that are greatly valued in the world of puzzle-solving.

Experience
Sometimes, the puzzle will feel similar to a puzzle you've already solved! The solution can be discovered by trying standard techniques for the type of puzzle it appears to be. Some specific examples are discussed down in Techniques.

Being able to identify what sort of pattern the puzzle might fall into, will help you apply the techniques that may just solve the problem.

Constraints
When trying to tackle a new puzzle, it's worth considering how the puzzlemaker has actually injected the puzzle into real things. What do they have control over?

For example, the Road to Utopia puzzle had a lot of confusion about where to start measuring the time. Some people thought it was from the start of the Periscope broadcast. Some people thought it was when the first logo appeared on screen. The answer turned out to be when the video was started.

If you think about it carefully, you come to realise that the times were written on the menorah and therefore set in stone early in the hunt - well before the day where the video was played. It's unlikely given Dad's personality and adventures that they would have lined up correctly, so it is more likely to start the timer from the thing the puzzle master had control over - when the tape started.

Word-based puzzle constraints often come in the form of how natural a word or phrase appears. For something like the Storytime CD, they needed to cleverly hide almost the entire alphabet (missing two characters per speaker) in each dialogue section. Something that seems odd, and was noticed by a few people, is the amount of letters like Z, X and J that were being used.

Sometimes, a puzzle-master will have to use a particularly unusual word, like 'Grandpa AKA Zayde' in the podcast - this is, in retrospect, quite an obvious sign that something is amiss; 'Why did they have to use Zayde?'. Sadly, none of us did notice that, but thankfully we solved the puzzle they were hinting us on anyway.

Elegance
This one is less definable than the other sections so far, but if presented with one hundred different options for any given piece of information, it is worth considering "What has pointed me to this information?" or "Does this use the information we have?"

When presented with an album of baseball cards, with a hundred different statistics and ways to put that information together, the options are almost limitless. But if we take MARCIA AND GREG WENT TO THIRD BASE TOGETHER as a hint, and the fact that the Major League totals were highlighted (by both being circled and Dad commenting on them), the puzzle is pointing us in a direction.

Nothing talked about color, or position, or team, or handedness. If 9-4-7-8 had been wrong, maybe we could have moved to those ideas next, but the puzzle asked for a four digit code. The clearest thing we could do provided us with four single digit numbers. Clean, elegant, cued.

If you can answer, "Why would this be an awesome solution to the puzzle?", it's a very good sign.

Backtracking
One of the things we have now learned about the puzzle this year is that some puzzle chains are long and complex, with many separate clues all being tied together.

A big stumbling block is trying to offer a solution that doesn't use all of the known clues in the 'set', with the explanation that whatever the result is will tie back to the missed clues. A good puzzle will never work this way; the solution will always use all of the clues, and once found, ends the chain.

For example, the lockbox. We needed a three digit code, and we knew the menorah times and the VHS were part of it, both from the Time hints and the puzzle recap page. It was suggested that 3-1-4 was the code for the box, because adding the menorah times together sums to pi, and something else had pi on it. This solution leaves out the VHS entirely, and is very unlikely to be correct.

Built-In Verification
It can often be said that "you'll know it works before you try it". Good puzzle making builds in assurances that make it very obvious when you have found the solution. This is especially important this year since a lot of the solutions we need are just a few digits or letters long. In general, the shorter the solution, the more work you have to do to make sure the players know it is right. You can expect that the puzzles that result in the shortest solutions to have the longest steps.

Indexing
Indexing is using a given number to extract a letter or word from a given phrase. For example, given FORD and 3, the answer would be R. 'Apple Computer' and 7, the answer is O. Indexing generally ignores spaces and punctuation.

Acrostics
Another word-based puzzle construction, once you have ordered a given set of information in a particular way, a word or phrase can be read from the first letters of the given set. We have already seen this sort of puzzle a few times this year! WWWBADASSCASH from the Night Four gift and HINTUSEDLETTERS from the Storyline CD.

Credits
This page was assembled, mostly from a reddit post by AsmadiGames and subsequent comments by jrbudda. Edited by auran98.