How It Worked

As with any mystery, the best place to start is at the end – in this case, where to hide Phil? The location must be precisely identified, and someplace participants cannot directly access. I believe I stumbled on this year’s location a year or two ago when I noticed the sadly unused hot dog pot sitting on the counter in Dirty Franks. The wonderful symmetry of the name “hot dog pot” convinced me to use it this year. Let's see, three three-letter words with “o” in the middle of each... Instantly, I thought of a wheel with six spokes (containing the outside letters at the edges) revolving around the middle “o.” And the “o” could be camouflaged as just a circle... or the sun, which conjured up Phil looking upwards (well, six Phils, one in each slice) at the sun. So, the final solution would the letters h – d – p – t –g – t circling the center o to give you HOT DOG POT. Now to come up with the rest!

There were actually three ways to get the correct solution, though the first two were a bit obscure. The first method only required the aforementioned sheet (entitled “Psychedelic Phil”) – and noticing the somewhat unusual names for the colors on the page. The colors in order were: Hot pink, Dandelion, Purple, Teal, Green and Tan, along with the Orange sun. Reading across each line gave you HOT DOG POT. A bit obscure, but doable if you only had that sheet… which you didn’t.

The second way was to look at the first letters of all the sheets you got – in order – during the evening: Hoppin’ Phil, Out & About 1, Trivia, Digitmania, Out & About 2, Gopher It, Psychedelic Phil, Out & About 3, and The Solution, which again spell HOT DOG POT. Also obscure, but there for someone to stumble into it.

And the way that most teams worked toward the correct answer involved using all of the papers and objects given to them. In the first batch of materials (given at Cherry Street), teams noticed the reversed “ask for card” on the back of Hoppin’ Phil, which gave them the fan cards that would be used later (I decided to minimize what I gave everyone and had them hunt for instructions to pick them up!). They then worked on solving the puzzle, which proved to be much harder than I expected. In the end, everyone succeeded, which was good since they would need the solution later.

After getting some answers on the Out & About 1 sheet, they received the Trivia and Digitmania sheets at Elephant & Castle. The hidden message on the Trivia sheet had them ask me for a block – they would need both the correct answers and the question listing on the Trivia sheet for later. When teams solved the Digitmania story they were instructed to “GIT A LUCKY FRM ED.” It was spelled oddly, since the letters had to match another hidden answer that they would find later. I then gave them a coin envelope with a collector’s coin and an important hint. I had actually inadvertently flipped something, so I also gave them the Blab newsletter (rather than have them find it), which was in the form of a T. The Blab gave them a “motto” that would come into play at the end, a riddle contest (for the fastest team to win a prize) and a letter grid that conveniently fit nicely around the block they got earlier. More on that later.

Teams then traveled to the Black Sheep, using the Out & About 2. There they got Gopher It and Psychedelic Phil. Gopher It challenged teams to do letter substitutions on four-letter words to convert them into other words. This was done to hide an important final clue (and that’s about it). Psychedelic Phil had a letter substitution on back which spelled out: USE THE CORRECTED TRIVIA ANSWERS ON BLAB LETTERS – so once you used the highlighter to block out all the trivia words on the block, teams got: USE FAN CARD FOR DIGITMANIA. Using the letters/words from the fan card gave you: DIAL HOPS NUMBER – which had teams count the hops (giving them a ten-digit 215 number) and then dial the number, which gave them more clues about the final answer. Whew!

I also ran two fastest team wins Text Message contests – the first one used the letters & numbers already on each side of the block to spell TELL ED HI (hi right back!); while the other used the question numbers from the Trivia sheet to spell TUG BEADS FROM PHIL (which looked interesting when teams did it!) – I really thought somebody would see that one before I even texted it!

Finally, teams arrived at Dirty Franks, using Out & About 3 to get there. They then got the last sheet – The Solution. On the back was an outline which matched the three Out & Abouts (well the two fatter ones), that when stacked in the correct order gave you DELETELIDE. On the front, they got instructions to start with the six letters on the block (T, E, L, D, H, I) and add the six letters on Psychedelic Phil (L,D,M,G,W,T) to get the 12 initial letters. They would then follow the instructions from the back of The Solution to “delete l, i, d, e” which gave: T, H, M, G, W, T. I then sent out the Final Clue, which was to hold up the Gopher It sheet to a light and find the hidden clue, which was P=M (located right in the center, and made by combining the front & back images). This changed the letters to: T, H, P, G, W, T. Teams were then instructed to use the “motto” which was "turn it upside down," so spinning P=M gave W=d (spent a good deal of time playing with letters!), and produced the final transformation: T, H, P, G, D, T. These are the letters that are used in the final answer; however an earlier clue said that it had six different letters – since only five different letters were shown, the sixth one would come from the middle “O.” I then sent clues identifying the orange (not yellow) sun and leading teams to figure out it was the O. And there you have a HOT DOG POT!

I should say making puzzles that spell one intelligible answer with one set of input and another hidden message with a different set proved to take a lot of lunchtimes. Thanks to Joe for creating the graphics, and thanks to all who came out – even Nick, who was apparently auditing the course!