THE METAPUZZLE

This is another tradition in puzzle games: a puzzle that brings all the separate answers together.

This one looks vaguely like a Scrabble board, and it has a bunch of letters on the bottom followed by a question mark. The board also has a bunch of bolded squares that are also probably significant.

At this point, it's good to notice that each letter at the bottom is directly under a column and the columns themselves all seem to be symmetrical top to bottom and have duplicates. There's even a star in one of the rows. Hmm, a jumbled up Scrabble board paired up with jumbled up letters. Probably not a coincidence.

Now we take out our trusty scissors and start cutting the puzzle up into strips. Then we rearrange the board and try to unshuffle the letters at the bottom. The star strip goes in the middle, the question mark on the right, and the other column with triple word score spaces on the left.

Now the puzzle is clearly asking us a question. And what is the big question of this puzzle race? What is the MYSTERY of the MISSING SCHOOLGIRL suggested by the teaser puzzles? We know why Alice disappeared, now it's become a murder mystery. So the question becomes "WHOKILLEDALICE?" Line up the strips to spell out the question, while simultaneously making a nice symmetrical Scrabble board. (Note that there's enough symmetry in the board and enough information in the question that they can be solved together without knowing what either should look like: if they simultaneously unscramble into two sensible-looking results, then they're probably both right.) Then we've got to fit the words onto the board. Notice that the colors on the answer sheet probably match the colors on the board and the words have to pass through the bold squares. After a couple minutes you should have the board filled out. Which leaves you with the following letters:

TTREMDHAA

And by this point, you should be able to quickly get to: MAD HATTER.

In our play-test, this puzzle had a small dotted line at the bottom of the page between columns one and two and both teams immediately saw the path to the answer and finished it in about 5 minutes. So we took that little line out, which stumped just about everyone. Seeing their confusion, I wrote "use scissors" on the first hint, and watched some teams mangle their answer sheet rather than the puzzle. Very entertaining.

And some clever teams instead managed to reverse engineer the puzzle by guessing the question, guessing that it was nine letters, and plugging in likely suspects.

(This puzzle and the Scrabble answer->map system were both invented for this game)