Gears of Lore
Owner
Vipul
Presentation
Teams are given a board with a large ring gear with teeth on the inside and pegs at various places. Many of the pegs have letters written around them. Additionally they receive a bunch of additional gears that can be placed on the pegs on the board.
Walkthrough
Place the 3 sizes of gears into the board, using gears with holes on pegs with letters and ensuring that the "hands" on each gear point to each adjacent gear (excluding outer ring). Which are arranged as follows:
From here, reading the letters roughly clockwise from the 10:00 position gives "THECONSTELLATIO"
Now by rotating the outer ring clockwise until all gears with holes (including the big ones) show another letter, the message will continue with letters in the same original order as before, to yield the following:
THECONSTELLATIO NTHATWASDESCRIB EDBYAFRENCHASTR ONOMERANDDEPICT SAPENDULUMCLOCK
And then it starts to repeat.
A quick search will lead to the answer "Horologium"
Design Notes
Prior to it's physical construction, we used a simple web page simulation to beta test. You can download that here and give it a try.
This has essentially the same gear positions, but different letters for the extraction phrase.