Scurvy

Owner:

Jon/Christine

Solution:

COOKIE

GC Notes:

GC to update day-of-game.

Presentation:

Each team is handed 3 identical pill packs filled with various colored candies visible through the plastic on the front, and various letters on the back.

Walkthrough:

There are three messages embedded in the data. Data is: candy type, candy color, letter, letter color.

Colors and Letters

The first message to find is hinted by the ROYGBV color of the Scurvy logo. Knowing that the colors are important and should be rainbow ordered gives a hook. After a few exploratory attempts, team should realize that the letters behind the red candies spell CURE and then wonder what is behind orange…

Now teams should wonder where is the ASCII and where is the MORSE? They can do this in either order.

Morse

There are long candies (tictacs) and there are round candies (M&Ms and Skittles) and there are tiny blob shaped candies (Nerds). Tictacs make great dashes, and the round ones great dots. The bloby Nerds are letter breaks.

The Morse message is - .... . -- .- -. -.. -- … which says THEMANDMS.

ASCII

The data on the back looks very nice for ASCII. There are four connected rectangles and each rectangle has 8 segments in it. Treating the black letters as 0 and the white letters as 1:

Put it all together

The brackets in the long message are begging to be replaced.

CURE SCURVY WITH [ASCII] ROT6 ON [MORSE] THEMANDMS.

The letters behind the M&Ms are WIIECY

Adding 6 to each letter results in COOKIE

Hinting:

1. Teams might try to read the letters left-to-right as viewed from the back. This will result in a jumbled message. The correct way to read is left-to-right as viewed from the front with X-Ray eyes. Usually teams self correct this as a part of reading the message, but they might anagram without thinking about why they needed to anagram.

2. Teams sometimes try to lump the Nerds in with the other round candies. The way I hint this is "think about why there might be three classes of thing when trying to read Morse."

3. Teams might discover the THEMANDMS message first and rathole on WIEECY. Since the puzzle is no longer a loop, this is a danger but the colors are so much in people's faces it hasn't shown up anywhere yet.

Data:

Front	Back

(Imagine these are folded together along the vertical. For example on the top row, the rightmost purple Skittle is matched to the leftmost [, the yellow M&M with the W, etc.)