[UGM] Scavenger Puzzle Weekend Signups

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Signups are now closed for this event!

Welcome to the Scavenger Room's UGM Event, the Puzzle Weekend! Taking place from January 5th to January 8th, the event will feature several puzzles, similar to those found in the MIT Mystery Hunt or in Puzzled Pint competitions. Players will participate in pairs to be the first pair to complete all the puzzles and win the competition, and of course receive large UGM point payouts!

This thread will act as a signup thread for the event. To sign up, both of the members of your pair must have a Smogon account. One player must sign up with the following info:
  • Team name (optional, but recommended)
  • Both members' Smogon usernames.
  • Both members' PS usernames. You may only submit answers for the event from these PS accounts.
  • You may sign up by yourself, but the hunt is designed to be completed by a pair of users.
In order for the sign-up to be counted as valid, the other member of the pair must like the first member's sign-up post. I'll like the signup post once I've ascertained its validity.

Sign-ups will end on January 4th, Thursday at 2359 UTC*, which should give everyone hopefully enough time to find a friend to challenge the Puzzle Weekend with. See you all there!

*equivalent to 1859 EST

===============================

Latest: The Puzzle Weekend has officially kicked off!

All the relevant information regarding the hunt can be found on the Puzzle Weekend website: https://ugm3puzzles.weebly.com. Read the guide for more information about the Puzzle Weekend, and when you're ready to go, jump right into the plot, starting with the introduction!

Good luck and have fun, and happy puzzling!
 
Last edited:

Level 51

the orchestra plays the prettiest themes
is a Site Content Manageris a Community Contributoris a Top Tiering Contributoris a Contributor to Smogonis a Top Smogon Media Contributoris a Team Rater Alumnusis a Forum Moderator Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnusis a Past SCL Champion
Signups are now closed for this event (a little late)! The event will officially kick off at 0700hrs EST / 1200hrs GMT, and the Puzzle Weekend website and instructions for the bot will be announced in this thread and on Pokemon Showdown!.

Regarding the rewards for the hunt, there are five puzzles in total for the hunt. Points will be awarded to both members of a team for each puzzle they solve. In total, the five puzzles will give 295 UGM points for completion, along with a 75 bonus UGM points for the team that finishes first, 50 bonus UGM points for second place and 25 bonus UGM points for third place. More details about point payouts will be available once the site goes up!

Everyone who has signed up for the event will be tagged in this thread when the event kicks off, so stay tuned!
 

Level 51

the orchestra plays the prettiest themes
is a Site Content Manageris a Community Contributoris a Top Tiering Contributoris a Contributor to Smogonis a Top Smogon Media Contributoris a Team Rater Alumnusis a Forum Moderator Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnusis a Past SCL Champion
The Puzzle Weekend has officially kicked off!

All the relevant information regarding the hunt can be found on the Puzzle Weekend website: https://ugm3puzzles.weebly.com. Read the guide for more information about the Puzzle Weekend, and when you're ready to go, jump right into the plot, starting with the introduction!

Good luck and have fun, and happy puzzling!

Mass tag:
============================================
Team #51FACE: talkingtree and MajorBowman
Puzzle Party: Devoxys and LordNwahs6
Team H: WhirlwindBulbasaur and Chupps
The Dolphins: Chatter~Seel and ScorrchingTheaph
Sexy Slugma Squad: ptoad and CloudyNatu
4x Stealth Rock Weakness: Ninjadog13 and SunGodVolcarona
IPC: VigilanteVigoroth and tonithetourguide
scarfwynaut&omroom: ScarfWynaut and OM room
Diginerds: Riolu1582 and AndrewGoncel
Spaniards: Lucas87 and Luna
Team Name: Dot Agumon and DarkShinyGiratina
reeeeeeeeeeeee: ga223 and Alexander489
EZertou: Yachi and WeepingDevil
The Great Heroes (Long TTP): Zygardeorder and GuiTheNerd
 

Level 51

the orchestra plays the prettiest themes
is a Site Content Manageris a Community Contributoris a Top Tiering Contributoris a Contributor to Smogonis a Top Smogon Media Contributoris a Team Rater Alumnusis a Forum Moderator Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnusis a Past SCL Champion
Congratulations to Team EZertou!

Team EZertou has successfully exposed Rory Mercury's true intentions for beating up Painter Espeon in a time of just 6 hours and 19 minutes; congratulations to them for bagging not only bragging rights for having vanquished the Puzzle Weekend, but also a bonus 75 UGM points! For everyone else though, there's still lots of points up for grabs, so press on—we need Rory Mercury banished from Alola ASAP!
 

Level 51

the orchestra plays the prettiest themes
is a Site Content Manageris a Community Contributoris a Top Tiering Contributoris a Contributor to Smogonis a Top Smogon Media Contributoris a Team Rater Alumnusis a Forum Moderator Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnusis a Past SCL Champion
A little bit of history would be in order here. Planning for the hunt—well, that's not right, let me add some inverted commas: "planning" for the hunt began way, way back in April, under a different guise. The Puzzle Hunt of the past featured 15 puzzles and was designed for teams of 4-6 to compete in. Unfortunately, we only decided that it could be part of UGM in October, and eventually procrastinated our way to about a week before the deadline before coming up with anything more concrete than random puzzles thrown around. We didn't have much time to come up with new ones, so we set about moderating the difficulties of what we had—these ultimately became the Gate, Red and Blue puzzles. Overall, in designing this hunt we weren't sure where to peg the relative difficulty of the hunt, so we attempted to make up for this with a variety of puzzle structures and determined that we would give hints anyway to help players through the more difficult puzzles.

Next up, the solutions for the hunt!

GATE
Each of the tiles is a red letter, a green letter, and a blue letter overlapped, with the overlapping colors adding together (e.g. red + green = yellow, red + green + blue = white). Reading the individual letters spells out MALE ADMIN IN / TEAM ROCKETS / JOHTO SECTION.
The answer is therefore ARCHER, the leader of Team Rocket in Johto. Due to a slight oversight, all three of us designing the puzzles completely forgot that there were two other male admins in Johto's Team Rocket, but thankfully everyone just kept trying all the admin until they got them, since the clue phrase is fairly unambiguous anyway.


Design notes: This puzzle was designed to be a fairly quick visual puzzle, since I solved the prototype pretty fast and thought the CMY colors lent themselves to a pretty obvious R/G/B extraction. I had this as a "gate" puzzle because I thought it was too easy to be put on par with the rest of the hunt, and since I thought the solution was trivial I was sure it wouldn't impede progress much. I was wrong: turns out a lot of teams had a lot more trouble with it than I imagined, but I'm glad to say that all teams but one beat it in the end. In the future, expect the gate mechanism to never return ever.

RED
The board is a big Lights Out puzzle, while each Pokemon on the board can be found in Pokemon Conquest. For each Pokemon, flip the tiles which it would target using its attack in Pokemon Conquest. Once all the tiles are flipped, the board spells out THE ART OF WAR.

Here's an example showing the first R transforming into a T:


And here's the whole transformation:


Design notes: We all knew this was going to be a difficult puzzle, but I personally figured that once people got the notion that it was going to be a Conquest puzzle it would become more accessible since the actual mechanics of the puzzle weren't that difficult (all the data required for the puzzle can be found on a single page). However, getting people to realise it involved Conquest, and on top of that involved attacks, was more difficult than we anticipated, sadly.

GREEN
As hinted by the title ("Inv8sive Species"), this is a Str8ts puzzle, a variant of Sudoku (in fact, Googling "straight logic puzzle" leads you to Str8ts—maybe pay a little more attention to Looker next time!). Once the board is filled according to the requirements, index into the name of each Pokemon on the Poke Ball symbols by the number written beneath the corresponding Poke Ball symbol. The resultant letters spell LUSH JUNGLE.

Here's the before-and-after of the grid:


Design notes: This was a last-minute contribution by LM, originally presented in its pure form as a Str8ts puzzle with all the rules clearly spelt out. Flavour-nerd Level 51 thought "this won't do" and sprited the field from FRLG assets. Unfortunately, in my zeal to convert the puzzle to a more flavourful form, I failed to make the rules super clear, so that's unfortunate too. Oh well.

BLUE
Each Visit ID is a combination of a Trainer ID and a number. The Trainer IDs are all notable Trainer IDs from within the games, either corresponding to prominent characters (e.g. Kukui, N), event Pokemon TIDs (e.g. WORLD14, PKLATAM, Juanita, Ray), or in-game trades (e.g. Jasmine, Sill). Index into each trainer's name by the corresponding extra digit to get a letter. The letters spell out IDENTITY CRISIS.

Here's the full table of the details:


Design notes: I had had this puzzle in the back of my mind for the longest time up until like 4 days before the deadline, when I finally got cracking on it. Originally, the first letters of the words were supposed to spell out the answer phrase, but I realised there was like one trainer whose name started with I, so I had to ditch that attempt. I tried to make the indexing numbers fairly obvious without making them too obvious (the original puzzle had the indexing numbers as "number of visits made"). Most teams picked up on it fairly quickly, which was good.

META
The mechanics show that each laser is reflected by mirrors of its color and also black mirrors. The trick is to realise that the answers to the previous questions can be written along the path of a laser with the same length as the answer such that it ends exactly into a wall; this can only be achieved with the GREEN answer on top, the RED answer in the middle and the BLUE answer at the bottom. After the answers are written out, taking the letters from the 21 marked squares on the board spells out the final answer and Rory's motivation to beat up Painter Espeon: apparently, he THOUGHT IT WAS JUSTIFIED. Turns out he was just trying to boost Painter Espeon's Attack stat!


Design notes: What a mess! It quickly became apparent how unintuitive the solution was, since the lack of predetermined laser paths meant there was nothing for teams to compare the lengths of their answers to. There's nothing much to say about this, really, except it really just wasn't a strong puzzle at all. The requirement that it be based on the answers to just 3 puzzles was very, very restrictive, and this was hard enough to come up with. In future, I suppose it wouldn't be an awful idea to increase the number of puzzles, if only so that the metapuzzle could have more freedom in its design.

And there you have it! Thanks to everyone for participating, and congratulations to the four teams who completed the hunt. Feedback is always appreciated and welcome, so please post in the Discord server if you have any! See you next time!
 
A little bit of history would be in order here. Planning for the hunt—well, that's not right, let me add some inverted commas: "planning" for the hunt began way, way back in April, under a different guise. The Puzzle Hunt of the past featured 15 puzzles and was designed for teams of 4-6 to compete in. Unfortunately, we only decided that it could be part of UGM in October, and eventually procrastinated our way to about a week before the deadline before coming up with anything more concrete than random puzzles thrown around. We didn't have much time to come up with new ones, so we set about moderating the difficulties of what we had—these ultimately became the Gate, Red and Blue puzzles. Overall, in designing this hunt we weren't sure where to peg the relative difficulty of the hunt, so we attempted to make up for this with a variety of puzzle structures and determined that we would give hints anyway to help players through the more difficult puzzles.

Next up, the solutions for the hunt!

GATE
Each of the tiles is a red letter, a green letter, and a blue letter overlapped, with the overlapping colors adding together (e.g. red + green = yellow, red + green + blue = white). Reading the individual letters spells out MALE ADMIN IN / TEAM ROCKETS / JOHTO SECTION.
The answer is therefore ARCHER, the leader of Team Rocket in Johto. Due to a slight oversight, all three of us designing the puzzles completely forgot that there were two other male admins in Johto's Team Rocket, but thankfully everyone just kept trying all the admin until they got them, since the clue phrase is fairly unambiguous anyway.


Design notes: This puzzle was designed to be a fairly quick visual puzzle, since I solved the prototype pretty fast and thought the CMY colors lent themselves to a pretty obvious R/G/B extraction. I had this as a "gate" puzzle because I thought it was too easy to be put on par with the rest of the hunt, and since I thought the solution was trivial I was sure it wouldn't impede progress much. I was wrong: turns out a lot of teams had a lot more trouble with it than I imagined, but I'm glad to say that all teams but one beat it in the end. In the future, expect the gate mechanism to never return ever.

RED
The board is a big Lights Out puzzle, while each Pokemon on the board can be found in Pokemon Conquest. For each Pokemon, flip the tiles which it would target using its attack in Pokemon Conquest. Once all the tiles are flipped, the board spells out THE ART OF WAR.

Here's an example showing the first R transforming into a T:


And here's the whole transformation:


Design notes: We all knew this was going to be a difficult puzzle, but I personally figured that once people got the notion that it was going to be a Conquest puzzle it would become more accessible since the actual mechanics of the puzzle weren't that difficult (all the data required for the puzzle can be found on a single page). However, getting people to realise it involved Conquest, and on top of that involved attacks, was more difficult than we anticipated, sadly.

GREEN
As hinted by the title ("Inv8sive Species"), this is a Str8ts puzzle, a variant of Sudoku (in fact, Googling "straight logic puzzle" leads you to Str8ts—maybe pay a little more attention to Looker next time!). Once the board is filled according to the requirements, index into the name of each Pokemon on the Poke Ball symbols by the number written beneath the corresponding Poke Ball symbol. The resultant letters spell LUSH JUNGLE.

Here's the before-and-after of the grid:


Design notes: This was a last-minute contribution by LM, originally presented in its pure form as a Str8ts puzzle with all the rules clearly spelt out. Flavour-nerd Level 51 thought "this won't do" and sprited the field from FRLG assets. Unfortunately, in my zeal to convert the puzzle to a more flavourful form, I failed to make the rules super clear, so that's unfortunate too. Oh well.

BLUE
Each Visit ID is a combination of a Trainer ID and a number. The Trainer IDs are all notable Trainer IDs from within the games, either corresponding to prominent characters (e.g. Kukui, N), event Pokemon TIDs (e.g. WORLD14, PKLATAM, Juanita, Ray), or in-game trades (e.g. Jasmine, Sill). Index into each trainer's name by the corresponding extra digit to get a letter. The letters spell out IDENTITY CRISIS.

Here's the full table of the details:


Design notes: I had had this puzzle in the back of my mind for the longest time up until like 4 days before the deadline, when I finally got cracking on it. Originally, the first letters of the words were supposed to spell out the answer phrase, but I realised there was like one trainer whose name started with I, so I had to ditch that attempt. I tried to make the indexing numbers fairly obvious without making them too obvious (the original puzzle had the indexing numbers as "number of visits made"). Most teams picked up on it fairly quickly, which was good.

META
The mechanics show that each laser is reflected by mirrors of its color and also black mirrors. The trick is to realise that the answers to the previous questions can be written along the path of a laser with the same length as the answer such that it ends exactly into a wall; this can only be achieved with the GREEN answer on top, the RED answer in the middle and the BLUE answer at the bottom. After the answers are written out, taking the letters from the 21 marked squares on the board spells out the final answer and Rory's motivation to beat up Painter Espeon: apparently, he THOUGHT IT WAS JUSTIFIED. Turns out he was just trying to boost Painter Espeon's Attack stat!


Design notes: What a mess! It quickly became apparent how unintuitive the solution was, since the lack of predetermined laser paths meant there was nothing for teams to compare the lengths of their answers to. There's nothing much to say about this, really, except it really just wasn't a strong puzzle at all. The requirement that it be based on the answers to just 3 puzzles was very, very restrictive, and this was hard enough to come up with. In future, I suppose it wouldn't be an awful idea to increase the number of puzzles, if only so that the metapuzzle could have more freedom in its design.

And there you have it! Thanks to everyone for participating, and congratulations to the four teams who completed the hunt. Feedback is always appreciated and welcome, so please post in the Discord server if you have any! See you next time!

Last-minute contribution because the earlier one felt 'anti-climactic'. Still had fun though :)
 
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