Solution: Looking Back, Looking Forward
Answer: THERE'S NO LOSS IN LOS ANGELES
Written by Jonathan and Xue Heng
We are presented with 24 minipuzzles, and we have to use each of the Round 2 puzzles to solve one of these minipuzzles. The full solutions are as follows:
| Puzzle it is associated with | Solve Path | Extracted letter |
|---|---|---|
| 东西 | 打草惊蛇, which in the puzzle is associated with the letter T | T |
| Connect the Dots | This is the NE line in the puzzle, NE4 is Chinatown | H |
| Measuring Kurrent | This is the track Cheese Land, with current 3 as index | E |
| 6 flags | The transformation is yellow cross, 4 red rectangles, which corresponds to the nautical flag R | R |
| Slide Away | Fastest to get there takes 5 moves | E |
| Contractual Obligation | Second largest imp difference was 19 imps | S |
| Game Theory | The nash equilibrium in the new grid gives the Braille letter N | N |
| Patterns | The center letter of the Sudoku grid is an O | O |
| 25 Characters | The missing letter in this sentence is a L | L |
| 40 Pages | Per the depiction of 40 pages where only the names of each square is used, the only monopoly square with 2 letters is GO | O |
| Islands | The more common name of the Island of Death Behind is Sentosa | S |
| I know my ABCs | Trace the Matilda path starting from A | S |
| Zebra | There's only 1 row in the solved Yin Yang grid that fits this | I |
| Songs | The 2 Lady Gaga songs in the grid intersect here | N |
| 52 pages | Extract the letter in the center of the cryptic grid | L |
| Notable and Honored | The only letter left after transformation 14 is this | O |
| Jenga | Row 30 has 2 S and 1 N | S |
| Shapes | BROACH became BROOCH | A |
| Taskmaster | This is season 1 | N |
| Segmented | This is the letter G | G |
| The Case of the Many Blanks | The first book in the Perry Mason series is The Case of the Velvet Claws | E |
| Difference in Opinion | Take the letter associated with the series | L |
| Colors | The yellow transformation gives WELL | E |
| Disney | This is Ariel, and the character in The Little Mermaid was Vanessa | S |
Waldo cheers everyone up by suggesting THERE'S NO LOSS IN LOS ANGELES.
Author's Notes
The Communiter round gave us many new constraints to work around. For the metameta, we took inspiration from REDDOThunts, which offers a nice throwback while being a relatively chill puzzle to end the hunt on (admittedly our team didn't finish the 2018 REDDOThunt because we were stuck on the metameta but well).