Shattered Disc Golf

Clue Design

Nick

Development

Nick

Special Thanks To

John Conte and the West Sound Disc Golf Association

Staffing

Zach, Tricia, Chris, Christina

Presentation

Teams arrived at NAD Park in Bremerton, where they were met by staff and received the following instructions:

Entropy has shattered the message you seek into many variants, and you will need to reconstruct it.

Each hole will unlock the shattered variants of a word in the message. Neither the words nor their letters have been rearranged, but each point of entropy represents a letter that has been replaced by a random substitute. The substitutions in each variant may not be related to those in the other variants.

Any letter that has been replaced in a variant has vanished entirely and is not substituting for another letter in that variant.

Each team then received two discs with which to play a nine-hole round of disc golf. Up to two people played each hole, and the best score between the two was used to determine the team’s score for the hole. As they completed each hole, they received a message that contained some data of the following form:

Hole 1
Par 4
Score: <filled in by staff>
Made Par? No
Entropy: 3
Shattered Words: align, cairn, knits, olive, oxide, prior, trios, unify

Reconstructed Word: ?

Depending on whether the teams made par on that hole or not, the entropy would be 2 (if par was made) or 3 (if par was missed), and teams could replay holes as they deemed fit. For the full set of data for this puzzle, see this spreadsheet.