Hints

Hints were available by speaking to Game Control and asking for a hint, and there was no penalty for asking for a hint. (Doing so may just have slowed down a team's solving time compared to an uninterrupted solve.) Hints for each puzzle start general and vague and get more explicit. Click each puzzle title to reveal hints at whatever speed you'd prefer.

Charlestown Blackhawks

• Food Court (3 hints available)
  1. Each grid follows traditional sudoku rules. The grid with letters simply uses nine letters instead of nine digits. A sudoku must be filled in completely using the nine characters provided so that each 3x3 block, each row, and each column do not contain any duplicates.
  2. Apply the shaded digits to the shaded letters to extract a solution.
  3. Treat the numbers as a Caesar shift: how many letters to advance forward in the alphabet.
• Halftime Show (4 hints available)
  1. This is a traditional "marching bands" puzzle: each row of clues goes from left-to-right uninterrupted on the indicated row; and each band of clues starts in the top-left coner of the corresponding loop and goes clockwise uninterrupted.
  2. The new clues are coordinates in your solved grid. Transfer the indicated letters over to form new clues and solve them.
  3. The new clues can be entered into the grid left-to-right on the middle three rows by changing the letters in the center band.
  4. The changed letters in the center band will spell the puzzle's solution.
• Magic Spells (5 hints available)
  1. Each grid is a game of Boggle: each of the words listed can be found by a path of adjacent (orthoganally or diagonally) squares in the grid.
  2. No grid contains any duplicated letters.
  3. Transfer the numbered letters to the front page grid.
  4. A message can be read by following a path through the grid and using each letter once.
  5. For the intramural version, read left-to-right, line by line. For the varsity version, start in the middle and spiral out.
• Primary Concern (4 hints available)
  1. Each clue's answer contains a color, which goes into the corresponding square.
  2. Consider the primary components of the squares.
  3. Look in the flavor text for the colors' order.
  4. "Filter" (by drawing new grids) the grid into the three primary colors. For the intramural version, these grids have been provided.
• Dark Shadows (Meta) (3 hints available)
  1. Can you find the answers to the clues anywhere?
  2. Each clue's answer can be found in an athlete's name.
  3. Extract the corresponding letters from your puzzle answer.

Dorchester Cowboys

• Greenway Meander (5 hints available)
  1. This is somewhat of a location puzzle: examine the perimeter of the Armenian Heritage Monument for four of your entries.
  2. Place the answers to all entries into the diagram provided, each answer overlapping both its preceding and succeeded entries. Each provided number indicates the space where an entry begins.
  3. Each pair of answers overlaps by two letters.
  4. If you are stuck, you can count out where un-numbered entries begin, but the puzzle is probably less fun that way.
  5. Annie was a sharpshooter; try looking at the crosshairs of the diagram for an extraction message.
• Mason-Dixon Line (5 hints available)
  1. Identify each picture and then connect pairs of corresponding pictures.
  2. Some of the pictures' answers have numerical prefixes.
  3. Match pictures by adding a numerical prefix to how a picture's answer sounds aloud.
  4. Find where matching numbers' lines intersect.
  5. Order the letters on intersections by the number corresponding to the pair of intersecting lines.
• Platter Up (7 hints available)
  1. Each food in a meal has something in common with each other.
  2. Only some of the drinks in each meal will share the same thing in common that the foods do.
  3. In the intramural version of this puzzle, the meals are described follows: librarian's meal, Romeo's meal, neuropathist's meal, garfield's meal, actor's meal, diva's meal, Beyonce's meal, theist's meal, chocoholic's meal, and madman's meal.
  4. Meal 4 (Garfield's meal) cares about a property the foods themselves, not their names, have in common.
  5. Meal 1 (librarian's meal) cares about the pronunciation of the foods.
  6. Meal 2 (Romeo's meal), Meal 5 (actor's meal), Meal 10 (madman's meal) all care about a category that these foods' names are related to.
  7. Meal 3 (neuropathist's meal), Meal 6 (diva's meal), Meal 7 (beyonce's meal), Meal 8 (theist's meal), and Meal 9 (chocoholic's meal) all care about the spelling of the foods.
• Tortoise & Hare (5 hints available)
  1. Find the nearby carousel and look at the animals on the outer ring.
  2. There are twelve animals around the carousel, like the hours on a clock.
  3. This puzzle is encoded with flag semaphores, with the carousel viewed from above.
  4. Orient your clocks so that, for each round, the hinted animal matches the specified time.
  5. 12 is up, 3 is right, 6 is down, 9 is left, and the hours in between can each be the corresponding diagonal direction.
• Wild West (Meta) (4 hints available)
  1. Enter each puzzle answer into the blanks along a path between two perimeter towns.
  2. For each athlete, their starting town's beginning and ending letters match those of their first name, and their ending town's beginning and ending letters match those of their second name.
  3. Each internal town contains a word within it that bridges from its first word to its second word.
  4. Some of the hidden words are numbers: these indicate the letters to extract for a solution and their order.

Hingham Astros

• Dream Weaving (4 hints available)
  1. Each clue has two halves, each providing a diffferent answers. Both answers encode the same way when you put them onto the strips.
  2. Encode the answers into Morse code.
  3. Weave the strips simply alternatingly. The numbers at the top and left follow traditional crossword order.
  4. This puzzle uses a different encoding for both phases of the puzzle. The flavor text hints at both.
• Frozen Over (4 hints available)
  1. Decode each snowflake individually, and use those results to help you assemble six snowflakes around a middle one.
  2. These snowflakes sure are HEXagonal.
  3. Match edges by the shapes..
  4. Try marking the snowflakes to track which combinations you have tried.
• Glitched Connection (4 hints available)
  1. This is a location puzzle. Examine signs, plaques, and engravings in Portal Park for the answers to each clue.
  2. The clues are out of order; examine the clues for a way to re-order them.
  3. Each clue contains a character you might find while typing.
  4. Take the first letter from the first answer, the second from second, and so on.
• Phonic Boom (3 hints available)
  1. The entire phonetic alphabet used can be figured out from the clues provided. Looking anything up is unnecessary, and this alphabet intentionally does not exactly match IPA.
  2. Put entries into the grid using the same alphabet.
  3. Read down the shaded squares for your solution.
• Star Charts (Meta) (4 hints available)
  1. Determine which chart goes with which athlete and then place all letters used in their name and their puzzle answer into the connected stars. Within a single chart, there is a one-to-one correspondence between letters used and stars connected.
  2. To determine which chart goes with which athlete/answer pair, try counting the unique letters present and the letters which will have only one connection.
  3. The letters in the stars are the same across charts, so you can take letters determined from one chart and use them to help you fill out another chart (if the same star is used). However, each chart can be uniquely determined on its own and this is unnecessary (but can be helpful).
  4. Read the unshaded stars for your solution.

Marlborough Heat

• Bork Flips (5 hints available)
  1. This is a normal logic puzzle without any gimmicks in solving.
  2. This puzzle can be solved with the table and does not require a fully-expanded solving grid as in traditional logic puzzles.
  3. For each cell in the table, extract one letter and then read these letters in order from left-to-right, line-by-line for an extraction message.
  4. Gold is first place; silver is second place; and bronze is third place.
  5. The "place" of a medal is the index to extract from the countries and names.
• Cooking Breakfast (5 hints available)
  1. You can find some frequently-used letters across all the entries. They will help you constrain ambiguous clues.
  2. The frequently-used-letters refer to the extraction message you should be looking for.
  3. The first meal of the day is key.
  4. Look at the initial letters of your entries, in order, for an extraction message..
  5. The words in the extraction message are NATO letters.
• Hanover Fist (5 hints available)
  1. This is somewhat of a location puzzle: be sure to look at the statue nearby for the entries it provides before leaving.
  2. Each entry in the grid makes a 90-degree turn once along its path. Thus, the second letter is always in the direction specific, but after that, it will turn at some point.
  3. In a gridded word puzzle, knights are not the only thing that can be "unchecked."
  4. Look for squares that are used for only a single entry, and follow a knight's path through them.
  5. The knight's path begins in the square with the knight icon in it.
• Heavenly Bodies (7 hints available)
  1. This is a word search, but each entry has been interrupted by other letters in the grid.
  2. Each entry is interrupted by a roman numeral.
  3. The counterparts are a set of words you should know.
  4. Look for planets (and a former planet).
  5. Read your unused letters for an instruction message.
  6. Add each pair of numbers and use that sum as the letter of the alphabet to extract.
  7. Order your extracted letters by planet (and former planet) order.
• Catering Services (Meta) (2 hints available)
  1. Each location pairs with an athlete by matching in length and in onve of the letters at the same index.
  2. Each snack can be overlaid with the puzzle answer of the location's athlete to extract a letter matching at the same index.

Final Metas

• Double Header (Meta 1) (4 hints available)
  1. Look for doubles in the answers
  2. Order your answers by the double letters
  3. Put A-H on one grid and I-P on the second grid, in order.
  4. For each vertex, look for a single shared letter among the answers on its four neighboring faces.
• Big Game (Meta 2) (5 hints available)
  1. For the varsity version, to figure out the order of sets, compare a fowl ball's first letter to the equipment played by the possible pairs of athlete. Its letter will appear in only one piece of equipment or the other. In some cases, you may need to look at the second or third letters of a set of fowl balls.
  2. Trace the path of the MVP first.
  3. Go back and circle each athlete whose equipment matches the ball.
  4. Put each athlete's bases next to the indices.
  5. Write the indexed letters on the bases.