SOLUTION 1

If you don't recognize this as a Sudoku, you've been hiding under a rock for the past few years. This one is rated 'ridiculously easy'. If you've never done one before, it might take you a bit. The first hint, as always, is there for people who are hopeless stuck at the beginning. If you don't recognize this as a Sudoku, you've been hiding under a rock for the past few years. This one is rated 'ridiculously easy'. If you've never done one before, it might take you a bit. The first hint, as always, is there for people who are hopeless stuck at the beginning.

After you've taken the obvious first step of solving the sudoku, your attention should naturally move to the letters on the outside. Presumably they're somehow connected to the numbers on the inside. The trick here is that the number next to each letter tells you which box to move it to. This leads you to:

CALLSECRE TLABFORRE NTSIGNCOD EISBADGER

"Call 'Secret Lab For Rent' sign, code is 'badger'."

And this stumped a lot of teams, who were even more annoyed by the hint:

"Move C to slot 1. You will probably need to move to finish this puzzle."

A number of teams continued to stare at their paper for quite some time before deciding to take the hint seriously. But at least one team looked around and knew exactly what to do without a hint: go to the nearby kiosks, find a 'Secret Lab For Rent' sign, call the number on it, and give the code word.

Once you called in the code word, you were told to proceed to a given a number and letter which corresponds with place on the map. You were instructed to call that number for all future code words to receive your next location.