Colored Keyboard Solution

How It Works

We started the teams off with a parallel direction puzzle, one where there are two independent things to decode. Luckily, everyone did quiet well.

Part A

Notice the numbers written onto some of the keycaps. Taking each number in order, write down the letter of its key. This gives you the string "SNOHOMISH"—a good start, but not precise enough. Besides, there is data left to use.

Part B

Look at the colors painted onto the keycaps. You'll see that each color is used exactly twice, once on a number key, and once on a letter key. If you take the color's letter and shift by the amount of that color's number, you get "KAYALHA" which isn't quite correct. Notice one more thing about the colors? They are all rainbow colors, which you can order: ROYGBIV. Reordering the string by color gives you "KLAHAYA"

Solution

Kla Ha Ya (park), Snohomish

Design Notes

Not a lot of re-design in this one. We took special care to make the colors look like rainbow colors, despite how it might appear on your display.

GC Notes

In the beta, the keyboard was just a color print out. One of the pieces of feedback we had for ourselves out of the beta was that starting with a paper puzzle wasn't really at the level of Game design that we wanted. Luckily, Shane (a beta participant) stepped up and decided to make the physical instantiation work, with Derek's help. In the weeks before the real Game, the much cooler keyboard came together.

Game weekend, there are always a few bumps in the road. We hit one early on with this puzzle: while the Microsoft address book listed such-and-such a room in building 9 as a conference room, unbeknownst to us it had been converted into a temporary office. The location sheets had already been printed, so we just went with it. However, the recently-painted keyboards were a bit smelly, and when the office's dedicated occupant came in later Saturday morning, GC got a phone call telling us he'd stuck our smelly keyboard across the hall.