The Ducks are Right Solution

How It Works

This is a Duck Konundrum: the key is to follow the directions carefully, making sure that you can always back up if you mess something up.

  1. The first thing to do is put the board in its initial setup state by copying it verbatum from the "initial state" image.
  2. The duck will start off to the side of the board at first (as shown in the solution PDF) but will never leave the board from that point onward. * From here on out the bulk of this is following the instructions. The "cultist instruction" tells you how you are allowed to manipulate the tiles, the "star chart" shows you a set of patterns to look for with 5 different "phases", or sets of patterns. *
  3. You find a pattern (or constellation), and the pattern indicates a direction the duck should move. All moves are knight moves. If the pattern for example is in the North North West of its chart, you move Duckthulhu a knight move NNW. In the later steps, the cultist instruction is ambiguous, but there's only one possibility that forms a valid pattern.
  4. When, and only when, all the patterns from a given phase are used exactly once, that phase should be set aside and the next phase should be used.
  5. As soon as Duckthulu has "consumed" all celestial entities, the team can now look at the consumed entities (in the order that they were consumed) to retrieve data.
  6. The letters on the tiles they removed spell out READ BACKSIDES WITHOUT STARS.
  7. Flipping the tiles over, only considering the ones that don't have stars on them, and reading those letters in the same order, you get EIDER SIGN. (An eider is a duck, and an elder sign protects you from Cthulhu.)

Solution

EIDER SIGN

Design Notes

Many of the mechanics of this puzzle come from the board game The Stars Are Right. Since that game is pretty puzzly anyway, and we just had a Puzzlehunt with a lot of board game-themed puzzles, it seemed like a good one to adapt.

The first version of this puzzle referred to the tiles as the "cosmos." The original answer phrase was HE WIPED OUT STARS IN KATAMARI, referring to how you "roll up" the tiles in the puzzle. A playtester suggested the two-stage answer, which I liked better.

Construction Notes

The duck I used in the original tests was far more squeaky, but the one used in the final was more demonic. I sort of preferred the latter, but having a squeaky duck in the van at 3 AM when half the team is trying to sleep is evil in its own way.

GC Notes

The final step can be a little tricky, since the back of the tile with five stars has no stars, and the sun is a star. We had to help teams on both fronts. Even when they had the right thing, quite a few teams hadn't heard of an "eider." and thus didn't really buy the answer. We even got one call on Sunday night from a team that had finished the entire Game asking us to explain it.