Dueling Fundamentals

Owner

Gage Ames

Presentation

Teams were seated at a table, with a screen on the wall next to them. Teams will be handed two spell scrolls and two Kano wands. Each of the spells on the scroll comes with a name, description, and gesture illustration.

Walkthrough

The descriptions of the spells clearly states whether a spell is offensive or defensive. Each spell also has a "type," one of earth, water, fire, or wind/air. The types are inferred from the one-sentence description provided for each spell.

It's best to start by determining the "type" of each spell from the description. That will aid in narrowing down the spells that should be paired later, when casting the spells.

Here is the list of spells, their types, and whether they are offensive or defensive.

The next step is to determine which spells are "paired" together (i.e. produce an "interesting" result when cast at each other). The "pairing rules" are as follows:

• One spell must be offensive and the other defensive

• The two spells must be of the same type (e.g. Water)

• The two spells must have the same number of words in their name

These rules must be discovered through trial and error (by casting the spells and observing the result) but should produce a unique pairing of spells.

When casting correctly paired spells based on the rules, the team should observe these results:

Taking the first letter of each animal and putting them in order by the quantity of animals gives "ATOMICNO," which is intended to be interpreted as "Atomic Number" This hints that an atomic number needs to be obtained from each spell pair.

Looking at the pairs of spells, one should notice that a single spell from each pair contains the name of an element in the spell name. Taking the atomic number of each element yields values in the ASCII range. Mapping these atomic numbers to ASCII letters yields:

Placing these letters together in the same order as before (based on the number of animals resulting from each spell pair gives "ALAKAZAM" which is the answer.

Spell Details Table