Solution: Taskmaster
Answer: BIOSTATISTICS
Written by Jonathan
This puzzle is about the British show Taskmaster. Each line represents something a candidate has done in a task on the show. Index into the task description by the number of points the candidate got for it, and sort by season to get the answer YOUR TIME STARTS NOW.
| Season | Task Description | Person | Score | Index |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Buy a gift for the Taskmaster | Frank Skinner | 3 | Y |
| 2 | Conceal this pineapple on your person | Doc Brown | 2 | O |
| 3 | Surprise Alex when he emerges from the shed | Sara Pascoe | 2 | U |
| 4 | Destroy this cake | Joe Lycett | 5 | R |
| 5 | With this camera strapped to your head, record the most incredible footage | Sally Phillips | 5 | T |
| 6 | Wearing these high heels, create the best dot-to-dot picture on this canvas | Tim Vine | 5 | I |
| 7 | Make the best noise | Rhod Gilbert | 1 | M |
| 8 | Do the most powerful thing with your little finger | Joe Thomas | 5 | E |
| 9 | Lasso Alex | Rose Matafeo | 4 | S |
| 10 | Make the largest object properly vanish | Mawaan Rizwan | 5 | T |
| 11 | Make the best babushka meal | Charlotte Ritchie | 2 | A |
| 12 | Spread jam on a slice of toast in a really cool way | Victoria Coren Mitchell | 3 | R |
| 13 | Get the most surprising thing delivered to the Taskmaster house | Judi Love | 4 | T |
| 14 | Most useless thing that you've bought that cost over £20 | Fern Brady | 3 | S |
| 15 | Invent an imaginary companion | Frankie Boyle | 5 | N |
| 16 | Choose a new nickname based on something you do in the next 20 minutes | Sue Perkins | 3 | O |
| 17 | Work out who you are shaking hands with | Steve Pemberton | 1 | W |
Upon completing the interactive, teams will get the answer to this puzzle BIOSTATISTICS.
Author's Notes
I’m a fan of having answers that directly reference something in the subject matter that those in the know would get instantly. In REDDOTHunt 2017, which was the first hunt I participated in, I shouted out the answer to this meta when my team got it. Hopefully fans of Taskmaster got this answer phrase just as quickly. (At least 1 testsolving team mentioned the phrase while doing the puzzle!)
I was looking out for a fun creative task for everyone to do, and I have always been a huge fan of Taskmaster. Taskmaster has also featured contestants using the idea of Where’s Waldo twice now, once in the Taskmaster New Zealand series 4 Prize Task: Most unlikely thing to find in a public restroom, as well as Taskmaster UK series 4 task Camouflage yourself (which unfortunately didn’t have the R I needed). I wanted to write a Taskmaster themed puzzle for Puzzle Rojak 1, but I had to wait 3 more years to get the right number of seasons to make this puzzle work :)
Really, this hunt could have been run anytime after 4/18 when we got the last letter we needed, but we decided to wait till summer when everyone was hopefully a bit more free to have fun doing this hunt (we also had a start date on a long weekend for people based in the United States, which was nice). It turned out that we were pretty fortunate: as of Episode 9 when the hunt started, there was only 1 task that gave us the W we needed.
It was pretty nerve wracking waiting for all these other large hunts from 2023 to finish while praying our puzzle ideas did not get sniped again (I'm sure Xue Heng still has Internet Cafe nightmares), I think the closest we ended up to getting sniped this time was in CMU Spring last month where an adaption of Taskmaster was featured, which was also a submission task that very luckily asked for a parody of the department store rather than doing a Taskmaster task (really dodged a bullet there!). I really really wanted to submit YOUR TIME STARTS NOW then, but I refrained just in case the CMU hunt team did Puzzle Rojak 2 too. (Mid-hunt update: And the CMU author submitted a very thematic submission too!)
We joked that it would be funny if a team tried to do this: "Send the Taskmaster an anonymous cheeky text message every single day for the next 5 months." Please don't.