Pied Piper

Owner:

Ben Andrews (Formerly Joel Phillip)

Solution:

HALFSTEP

GC Notes:

GC to update day-of-game.

Presentation:

The teams will receive a record sleeve with a Pied Piper picture on the front with the title "Direct the Rats" and subtitle "It's All Relative", and a 13x13 grid on the back that are filled with a mix of letters and numbered rats. When they retrieve the flat USB from inside the record sleeve, interns will find that it contains 16 song clips.

Walkthrough:

As the song clips are listened to, it should be realized that each song clip mentions a direction. In addition to there being only one direction in each song clip, the title of each song also matches that direction. The songs, in order, are as follows (with the direction bolded and underlined):

Track #

Once each of the directions are gathered, interns should then notice that there are 16 rats on the grid, so would pair up each rat with the song of the same track number. To get information out of this, the rat is rotated in the direction given by the song clip, with the letter the rat is now looking at being written down. Note that as hinted in the title text, "It's All Relative", all rotations are to be made with the assumption that where the rat is facing is up or north. Doing this for all 16 rats, then taking the letters in order of the rats give you the message EVERY THIRD LETTER.

From here, the interns need to take every letter that is a multiple of three starting from the top left, skipping rats since they are not letters. This will produce the message TAKE RATS OF SAME LYRIC DIRECTION FORM SEMAPHORE IN URDLNESW.

With this information, all that is left to be done is to pair up the rats with the same song clip lyric direction (north and up are two different directions, so there are 8 pairings) and form semaphores with them. Getting the 8 letters, and ordering them in URDLNESW = up, right, down, left, north, east, south, west, will give the final answer, HALF STEP.

Hinting:

• If teams can't seem to get anything useful out of the songs

  • Small: Tell the teams to listen and ask song clips have anything in common

  • Big: Tell them that each song clip mentions a direction

• If they do not understand how to use the song clip directions

  • Small: Mention that the song directions will now work with the grid in some way

  • Medium: Say that one rat works with one song to get information

  • Big: Tell them to rotate the rat in the direction mentioned in the song clip and get the letter they are looking at

• If interns cannot get any information from EVERY THIRD LETTER

  • Small: Tell teams to take the message literally (meaning that they take letters that are multiples of three, skipping rats)

  • Medium: Tell teams that the rats do not count as letters

  • Big: Explain to the team that that are taking the letters that are on the multiples of three starting from the top left reading like a book, and that rats do not count as a letter

• If interns cannot get meaningful information from semaphores

  • Small: Tell them to count how many times each direction shows up; if it is more than 2 then they should listen again

  • Medium: The ordering of the letters were specified in the message, the ending 8 letters are not garbage

  • Big: The last 8 letters (urdlnesw) stand for up, right, down, left, north, east, south, west, which specifies the ordering of the semaphore letters

Data:

Word document with the front and back cover, as well as all 16 songs, where the track number is the song title.

<<Pied Piper.zip>>

Old version (beta)