Masks Solution

How It Works

The puzzle was basically a "Legend of Zelda"-style trading games, but with a slight twist. The players took on different "roles" based on which mask they were wearing at the time (actors would ignore you if you approached them without a mask). The actor masks and player masks used the same color-role pairings to indicate which role the mask represented. The actor masks also had additional colors that indicated which player-roles could trigger meaningful interactions with that actor-role.

Once the teams figured out what role each mask represented, they simply had to work their way through the trading sequence, solving the few mini-puzzles and challenges that came up along the way. Here you'll find the full flowchart for the puzzle, and the scripts given to the actors (which describe the interactions in full).

Solution

Once teams were able to obtain the six items the Scientist requested, they returned to him. He informed them he had repaired their time machine, and gave them the solution to the puzzle: EPONA

Design Notes

This puzzle went through many, many tweaks as I tried to get all the facets worked into the puzzle, and keep it fun and interesting. As I was designing, I usually thought of the puzzle in terms of the six "tracks" that each led to one of the original six items the Scientist needed. I figured that a team member would start down one of these "tracks" and see it through to its conclusion, using whatever masks were necessarily along the way. So I focused on balancing the six "tracks" to keep them all interesting. As it happened, all of the Beta teams just assigned each player a single mask, and had that player perform all of that role's tasks across all "tracks." Because of this, we found out that the work across roles was not well-balanced at all, and a pretty hefty refactoring had to be done between the Beta and the actual Game.

Also, the original design for the masks was to use magic marker and use different patterns along with the colors to represent the roles. In this format, each role would have both a pattern and a color associated with it, and an actor mask would indicate the role it represented by its pattern, and the roles it could interact with by its colors. The Beta revealed two large problems with this: 1) no one picked up on the way interactions were clued, and 2) the orange hue of the lights at WWU made identifying colors nearly impossible. I spent about two months trying to find various phosphorescent paints that would make this scheme work, before I was finally talked into using glow sticks. I�m very glad I was, as the glow sticks looked and worked great (minus a few problems distinguishing yellow from orange).