Motel Solution

How It Works

To solve this puzzle, you must:

• find all seven items
• notice (possibly without decoding all of them) that six of the items decode to quark flavors
• realize that the Connect 4 board is not a quark flavor, and decode it.

The flickering lamp was blinking in Morse code, and decoded to UP. The clock on the wall was stopped at 8:59:53. Its hands, taken in all possible pairs, formed the semaphore for TOP. The gloves were laid out forming the ASL for DOWN. The pens and binder clips were showing the pigpen encryption for CHARM. The hand of cards was using the encryption scheme taught by the Breakroom pregame puzzle     (red ace-king are letters A-M, black ace-king are N-Z) and decoded to BOTTOM. The comic books were fanned out in order, with a pseudo-acronym (prominent word used, not     necessarily first word) spelling STRANGE.

Finally, the Connect Four board was laid out like so:

    XO.....
    OOX....
    XOOO...
    OOXOO..
    OOOXOO.
    OOOOOOX

Each of the quark flavors can be overlaid on this board, with the X's indicating which letter of the word to use in the final answer. Reading down in order, we have the final answer:

UPDATE