Crosstalk Solution

In Crosstalk, multiple people on a team are given different pieces of information and are forced to coordinate talking over eachother to share that information and solve each round in a limited time.

Key facts:

  • At least 4 players are required (more than 4 is fine)

  • Only 1 user is able to use the narrator/screenreader mode at a time

  • There are 6 rounds

  • Each round is timed, and the times increase over the rounds as complexity increases

  • There are 4 sets of information per round (corresponding to the "at least 4 players" rule)

  • On each round, a single person (regardless of how many people are playing) will be given a question prompt to answer. Everyone else will be given one of the 3 other sets of information (with duplicates as necessary for everything but the question prompt). After combining all information to find the answer the question, the answer to each question is a single integer ("word versions" of numbers are explicitly not accepted).

  • The answer to each round is set and unchanging

  • The answers to each round, in order, are: 6, 5, 2, 3, 1, 4

  • At the end of the 6th round, the players "win" and then the game starts right over again 😃

  • Now, for the puzzle part:

    • On each round, each question roughly reduces to counting a specific item.

    • The items for each round (and the counts of them) are:

      • Round 1: 6 SPLAS**H**ES

      • Round 2: 5 BALE**S**

      • Round 3: 2 E**M**BERS

      • Round 4: 3 JO**B**S

      • Round 5: 1 **A**MMOBELT

      • Round 6: 4 DEP**U**TIES

    • THE KEY: The count of items from each round is both the index into the item being counted AND the canonical ordering of the extracted letters. If you extract those letters and order, you get the answer: AMBUSH.

    • Reordered for visual explanation:

      • Round 5: 1 **A**MMOBELT

      • Round 3: 2 E**M**BERS

      • Round 4: 3 JO**B**S

      • Round 6: 4 DEP**U**TIES

      • Round 2: 5 BALE**S**

      • Round 1: 6 SPLAS**H**ES

For reference, all 4 roles for each round are below:

ROUND 1:

ROUND 2:

ROUND 3:

ROUND 4:

ROUND 5:

ROUND 6:

Solution

AMBUSH

Partial Answers

(all "Keep going")

  • SPLASHES

  • BALES

  • EMBERS

  • JOBS

  • AMMOBELT

  • DEPUTIES

  • 652314

  • HSMBAU

Hinting

  1. Not understanding HSMBAU needs to be ordered once they extract it via indexing:

    1. Most teams will tend to start indexing into other things like the questions themselves if they run into this. Generally, this hasn't needed to be corrected to hard, just implying that they're doing something reasonable to get HSMBAU is good (or ask them if they tried submitting it, it's a partial!)

    2. Just for fun, there's also a little story in ROUND 6 about "Deyupt" the deputy who had wanted to be a deputy his whole life since he realized his name was an anagram of deputy.

  2. Teams will occasionally have a hard time deciding which thing they counted. Occasionally they'll choose something like "item" and "thing" rather than the actual item. Just suggesting that they try submitting their picks should help with that.