Knot Bad

Owner

Bridgette Kuehn

Presentation

Team will arrive to location with a snazzily dressed illuden. The illuden attempts a magic trick of pulling the scarves from their sleeves. After some scarves have been pulled out, the illuden gives up and throws all the scarves over to the team. The illuden huffs and says "I keep getting worse at this trick. I tried to tie these knots. I don't know what went wrong. Maybe I forgot some of them"

The team then receives a pile of randomly ordered 16 scarves. The scarves are made up of 4 equally sized color blocks, three of which have knots tied into them. There is a tag on one end of each scarf. You can see the layout below (where each row is a scarf, the left side is the one with the tag, and the *s represent knots for that particular color):

Walkthrough

1. Identify that each scarf is unique, there are 4 blocks on each scarf and there is one block that has no knots per scarf. Note that the tagged side is where you start on each scarf.

2. Index into the color of the block based on the number of knots. For example, the pink strand (first row above) is _-I-N-K

3. Realize that the knots the illuden forgot to tie (based on the intro) is also a letter. Since it would be indexing into the color, the option for that strand is PINK, IINK, NINK, KINK. Of which PINK is the correct term (sorry, KINK).

4. After turning every strand into a word, you end up with the list below:

   Color 1	Color 2	Color 3	Color 4	Knot Order	Word
   Pink	Pink	Pink	Pink	_/**/***/****	Pink
   Orange	White	Green	Pink	**/_/*****/****	rink
   Red	Black	Pink	Black	*/***/_/*****	rank
   Blue	Black	Orange	Black	*/***/****/_	bank
   Blue	Orange	Blue	Black	_/***/**/*****	balk
   White	Orange	Yellow	Pink	****/***/_/****	talk
   White	Black	Black	Pink	****/_/****/****	tack
   Purple	Black	Black	Pink	*/***/_/****	pack
   Pink	Orange	Purple	Pink	*/***/***/_	park
   Pink	Yellow	Green	Black	*/**/_/*****	perk
   Purple	Green	Black	Pink	****/_/****/****	peck
   Red	Green	Black	Black	_/***/****/*****	deck
   Red	Purple	Black	Black	***/_/****/*****	duck
   Red	Purple	Green	Pink	***/**/_/****	dunk
   Red	Purple	Orange	White	_/**/****/*****	dune
   Red	Orange	Pink	White	***/_/***/*****	done

5. At this point you should notice you can order the scarves based on a word ladder, where one letter changes each time.

6. Pick the letter from each scarf for the corresponding space without knots and put in word ladder order

7. You get: PINKBLACKREDUNDO

8. Find the only strand that is pink, black, and red. Undo the knots. The red knot contains the answer AMATEURHOUR.