Dear Diary

Owner:

Greg

Solution:

REST AND RECUPERATION

GC Notes:

GC to update day-of-game.

Presentation:

Seven half-sheets of paper, representing pages torn out of a diary. They're all different, and in no particular order when teams acquire them.

Walkthrough:

1. Each entry contains a phrase that seems to clue an item, but some of the clues are very broad: "style of socks," "Greek goddess," "Michael Bay movie," etc.

2. The common thread is that each phrase has one item whose name starts with an "Arr" sound. (Or, "What's a pirate's favorite _____?")

   1. Note that it's phonetic and not spelling, so while most entries start with the letters "AR," not all of them do.

1. Order the pages by the general progression of the story. (Acquire ship -> set sail and get map -> decode map -> arrive at island -> find treasure -> get betrayed -> die)

2. Use the days of the week on each entry to index into the item name minus any leading article: Sunday = 1, Monday = 2, etc. (The days are in order on each page, and the only pages to have Sunday have it first.) This spells the answer, REST AND RECUPERATION.

Hinting:

There are two ways to get the "Arr" ah-ha: Look at the ones that only have one or two possibilities and see what they have in common (Georgia rock band, Star Wars droid, group of small islands, Parisian monument), or recognize the stupid pirate jokes (Style of socks, vegetable, holiday, type of crime)

These are the clues that I found tripped people up:

• "Protoss air unit:" The Arbiter unit wasn't in Starcraft 2, so if teams that aren't familiar with Starcraft go searching they might find the Archon, which is not an air unit.

• "Vegetable:" Arugula starts with the letters A R but not the sound "Arr"

• "Star Wars droid:" For the final indexing, it needs to be spelled R2-D2, and not "Artoo"

Submitting R AND R is a partial telling them to go back a step; if they actually got the phrase, they should submit that.

Data:

Blank lines = page breaks