Playroom Solution

How It Works

The Poem is the main catalyst for the entire room. Each line of the poem you see points the teams to one of the stations around the two rooms. But there are only ten verses of the poem and more than ten stations to go to. That is because solving a station will often point you toward another station. There are three types of stations: stations that reveal a single letter, stations that make you solve a code that point to another station with a letter, and stations that reveal a code that tell you how to solve another station.

Here is the text of the poem, and the station each verse is pointing you to.

As you can probably already tell, this puzzle is extremely intricate. The full description of how each station works is contained in a separate document.

Solution

The first nine verses of the poem each eventually lead to a letter. The tenth verse takes players to Builder Central, where they discover the remaining two verses. Verse 11 tells them to arrange their toys, thus the station names of all the toys they were sent to should be arranges in alphabetical order. This order also dictates the order of the associated letters for the final answer. The letters either came from that toy or form a code which led to another toy (which then produced the letter), but the first toy visited per verse is what each letter goes with.

Sorting the toy names per the instructions in verse 11 produces the answer, SNOW WHITE.

Design/GC Notes

The inspiration of this puzzle came from several places. I wanted to do something involving stuffed animals. I was meeting a friend at Microsoft to talk about puzzles and he was busy playtesting for another puzzle competition that contained paper puzzles all of board games. I thought it would be a fun idea to actually do that live action and to make the age range lower so that it was only games in that kids played.

Furry Storytime was originally going to be a logic puzzle.

Most of this whole puzzle was devised by going to Value Village, buying whatever I found and contemplating how to make a puzzle out of it. The Blocks were the best thing I found from those shopping trips.

Dominoes was a substitute puzzle for a puzzle that didn't work: Pit. Pit involved three hands of cards and a scoring sheet that had indexes reading into the names on the Pit cards. It was brutal and was scrubbed for the simpler Dominoes.

Other puzzles that didn't make the cut: Viewmaster, Twister, Connect Four

Marbles drove me crazy. Everyone wanted to see a puzzle in it when it was just a letter, especially with all the colors and noise on the Aggravation game board I used. So I flipped the board over (its back was black) and drew an old-timey Marbles circle so that the I would stand out more. It still needed a little prompting so I (as Scruffy) wander over to the Marbles with my mop and asked "Hey what are you doin?" The answer would be some lost intern kind of answer about the puzzle. I would then ask. "Well, what do you see?" They would say "I see an I." I would simply say "Yup, that's what Scruffy sees too." And walk away. This usually did the trick.

The poem was originally in a different order, but I found that people would wander around the room lost if not directed to the main puzzles that start the whole room. So I made Furry Storytime first on the list as that was an easy one that people ended up doing first frequently and moved Chutes and Ladders up to the 3rd line as that was the hardest puzzle that was one of the main thrulines of the room.

At one time the poem had no order. At another its order was the games associated with the final letter. Neither of these worked properly though.

The Dominoes were indeed positioned in such a way for them to look like they might be letters.

No one was getting baseball cards in the playtest until I arranged the bear to be pointed to the word POLAR. Then everyone got it.

Cathedral's original message was "FIX THE BELL", referring to the Pit bell I placed next to the board. I taped a letter to the bottom of bell so that it made the bell not work. But everyone would immediately pick it up and screw with it and see the letter before directed. It would also be logistically impossible to have people fix it when others still needed the clue, so I changed the message to my much-loved Scrabble board.

The CD used to only have 6 songs instead of 7 but "The Elmo Song" was added at the insistence of one of the staff.

The Scrabble board was the second board used. I needed more letter tiles so I bought another. This one had cuter, cartoonier artwork on it, but different words, so those clues had to be rewritten. (Letter Dice clue used to be "Where Plant Crosses Apples OK"

After several weeks in Playdoh, cardboard letters deteriorate. Several Ws were stolen from other Scrabble Junior sets in thrift stores near you.

The original Boggle board (Letter Dice) was a REALLY nice one that belonged to a friend of mine. I couldn't see destroying an entire boggle set that belonged to someone else, but I could not find another in any thrift store. FINALLY a week and a half before the event I found one and found the perfect clue for it.

Originally NOTHING was glued down and setup took 3 hours or more. After the second time of doing this, I knew the Leads were right and I got good use out of the remainder of Derek's Stinky glue 6000 and glued down Stratego, Dominoes, Chutes and Ladders, and Spinner. I then taped letters to the animals, taped down the Letter Dice into the tray, taped the baseball cards together. The only things that needed reset up for the puzzle was the Cathedral message and the coloring book pages.

Jay and Ben did the coloring on the two pages that looked like mentally disturbed, Ritalin-filled children did them.

Scruffy had to scold many teams for moving his baseball cards until he finally taped them TO the counter. He also had to redo the Cathedral setup many times.

Baseball Trivia: One of the baseball cards that was torn was Mike Hargrove when he played with the Indians. Hargrove was a manager for the Mariners.

Baseball Cards was very difficult. There are no players in my collection that have a last name that ends in V and C and few that ended in I, A, or P. For this reason the message changed from "Polar Bear Transport Without Rain" and "White Bear Transport Without Rain". There is no team name that begins with N. There were even more problem with finding first names that ended in several letters or Last Names that began with those letters. Thus the end of Last names were used and two cards ripped. (boohoo)

During a playtest, Andy and Jamie broke out into singing Sesame Street in hopes of a solution.

Some playtesters (including our own Jay) would try laughing for the teacher after Elmo finished rapping, interpretting the poem as "After Elmo's Second Rap, Laugh!"

Trivia: Raggs is a character on PBS show. It is a blue dog that is in a rockband with his doggy friends. The loony creator of this puzzle actually played this character in California once for a week.