Big Farma Solution

The whole puzzle is about teams putting together pitches for wacky medicines and having fun trying to sell them to a staff member. Teams begin with a page like this:

Using either the three blanks, or the "Pick a pitch for me!" button (which populates the three blanks randomly), teams construct a medicine to try and pitch to the staff member. Each option on the three blanks is also associated with one of the three emoji at the bottom of this page.

The staff member can see the pitch that has been shared to the screen. The team makes their pitch, and the staff can go back and forth with them to make a fun pitch (there's no real criteria here - the main goal is for the team to have fun saying wacky things).

Based on the permutation of emojis in the pitch, staff would give back a particular prescription. Say for example, the team pitched:

Since the emoji permutation is 💊⚕💉, the staff member would give back https://bigfarma.westward.live/Prescription/?name=Upton's+Linament. Staff (or GC) can figure out what permutation corresponds with which prescription by going to https://bigfarma.westward.live/CheatSheet and punching in the permutation they care about.

The three emoji form a ternary encoding, with:

  • 💉 = 0
  • âš• = 1
  • 💊 = 2

Using this ternary, the prescriptions will all decode into something that makes sense. For example, this prescription would decode into:

Take 2 per week for the next 4 (11 in ternary) months.

32 (1012 in ternary) doses.

This makes sense since (2 doses/week * 4 weeks/month * 4 months) = 32 doses

The name of the game here is for teams to gather enough prescriptions to be able to figure out what the emoji map to, and then decode the message at the bottom of https://bigfarma.westward.live as ternary triples. Considering them as triples yields numbers from 0-26. There are no 0s, so we have numbers from 1-26, which map to A-Z.

The one exception to this is 💉💉💉, which is ternary 0. This doesn't map to anything. See the "Hinting" section below.

Teams that never figure out that the emoji from ternary can still solve the puzzle. There are 27 prescriptions, each corresponding to one of the permutations of the three emoji. Each prescription starts with a unique letter. So, for example:

💊⚕💉 is 210 in ternary, which is 21 in decimal, which is U - the prescription for this is Upton's Linament https://bigfarma.westward.live/Prescription/?name=Upton's+Linament

⚕💉💊 is 102 in ternary, which is 11 in decimal, which is K - the prescription for this is Ketamine https://bigfarma.westward.live/Prescription/?name=Ketamine

Solution

FRIENDLYNEIGHBORHOODPHARMACY

Hinting

If the team pitches 💉💉💉 (ternary 0) they get https://bigfarma.westward.live/Prescription/?name=%3F%3F%3F%3F. This might be confusing. In Beta, teams were able to work their way past it. If a team gets super tripped up here, ask them to think of how many possible permutations of emojis there are, and why this single one might be different. (The answer you're looking for is there are 27 different permutations, and if one of them is invalid, there are 26.)

GC Notes

The first playtest of this puzzle was physical, with cards serving as the options for the pitches. The puzzle is basically unchanged from that time, except for the move online.

The second playtest of this puzzle was a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure style novel, which didn't involve any staff interaction. This version of the puzzle has staff interaction instead of typing your pitch into a box.