Solution: Communiter

Answer: IGLUE

Written by Jonathan

These puzzle answers all have famous pairs, Romeo and Juliet, Lewis and Clark and Mario and Luigi should all come to mind pretty quickly. The flavortext clues one thing in common, and these pairs each share 1 letter in common, and we can extract these letters. Lastly, the flavortext also clues the shared paired puzzles, and we note that we can do the same thing with those puzzle answers, and extract a shared letter that provides the ordering:

Author's Notes

We have come full circle, back to the pure metas! Because we were using the answers to a round as well, the other metas all had to be pretty backsolvable as well. Fortius was probably the hardest to backsolve, and even then had quite a few constraints (specifically Islands had an answer that should have came up as the first reasonable answer in a nutrimatic search query). It was also generally possible to solve the Communiter puzzle with the relevant puzzles not fully solved (e.g. you don’t need all 8 grids from I know my 123s to get I know my patterns). We got really lucky that we could even get the A-E working, given that we had almost entirely fixed answers for all metas but the stronger one (which even then had limited options).

We always intended to have a single gimmicked meta, and when we first had the idea of an Olympics theme, aki and I originally planned it for the higher round, where we brainstormed a pyramid type unlock structure, but those plans fell through. With the introduction of this meta, I felt it fit the theme well, and being last in the hunt, would provide something more interesting for teams that got to this point. Most importantly, ahas are great to add to the puzzlehunt experience, and this round ensures a couple of fun but simpler ahas for these puzzles in the form of “which puzzles should match to this puzzle”, and “how do I use these other puzzles to solve this one”.

The subpuzzles to this round tended to be common puzzlehunt ideas with a twist e.g. Einstein puzzle, Drop quotes, mangled clues etcetc, because these lent themselves well as familiar ideas where we could hide additional information pretty easily, with the guarantee that puzzlers would know these concepts and should be able to solve them more easily or at least would be more willing to attempt these puzzles, so as to ensure that they were solved by the time the corresponding Communiter puzzle unlocked, and I tried my best to play with how the Communiter round puzzles used their constituent puzzles in different ways to provide the most variety to hopefully feel unique and fresh to all teams regardless of experience level. I really love how each Communiter round puzzle turned out, and hopefully this gimmick was fun for most teams!

Would we do this again? From a solver perspective, hopefully yes. From a writer perspective, probably not. Testsolvers in general all praised different sets of the Communiter puzzles, between all the testsolves we heard good things about all of them. However, as a writer, I think the biggest issue with interlinked puzzles is how difficult puzzle rewrites are. When it extends to 3 puzzles it gets even worse. Disney and Connect the Dots and their constituent puzzles in particular were rewritten multiple times, 6 flags had many changes because of Shapes being rewritten as well and the entire I Know My triplet had to be rewritten when the Italian grid in 123s had an error. We luckily budgeted way more time for testsolving, and we really needed it.