#1 received 2:13 AM

The East Dorm Puzzle Solving Team of Harvey Mudd College

Wands beware the blade
Swords beware the coin
Cups beware the staff
Pentacles beware the chalice.

We respectfully submit our solution, the East Dorm Puzzle Solving Team of Harvey Mudd College of Ariel, Avani, Benj, Clay, Dan, Jeff, Lori, Micah, Robin, Tristan. We thank you respectfully for your time and effort in creating these awesome games and send our regards.

Benj adds “I’m very glad that Cliff Johnson didn’t go the way of the floppy disk and our old Mac Classic. I think I can speak for the entire team when I say that we’re anxiously awaiting The Fool and His Money, and that the treasure hunt was a whole lot better than studying for my Physics midterm.

“We weren’t actually able to decipher “Take only from those who steal,” either. We solved by a combination of John Nash-ing it and Robin telling us what might make sense. We were easily able to get the “beware the“s and then guessed that the suits were before them and other words were after them. What did that clue actually mean? We were also going to ask about the eyeball, but now that you’ve posted the answer to that part, it’s not important anymore.”

#2 received 2:40 AM

Steven Bellotti AKA Lord Craxton

WANDS BEWARE THE BLADE; SWORDS BEWARE THE COIN; PENTACLES BEWARE THE CHALICE; CUPS BEWARE THE STAFF

Now I need sleep. I have to get up in three hours for jury duty, you know. I should have been in bed hours ago. I HATE YOU!

Where *WAS* the pic of 3 getting eyeballed? I looked all over the site and couldn’t find it, wound up deducing the last group of letters.

#3 received 2:59 AM

David “The Eggman” Egyud

WANDS BEWARE THE BLADE
SWORDS BEWARE THE COIN
PENTACLES BEWARE THE CHALICE
CUPS BEWARE THE STAFF

Fun stuff! The Internet needs MORE of these kinds of games and contests! Thanks for one the most thoroughly satisfying 3 hours of my life! I printed the pages out — beautiful job on those, BTW.

The hardest part for me was finding all of the pictures on your site. 1, 3, and 6 came no problem; 2, 5, and 7 took a lot longer;and I didn’t find number 4 until almost 45 minutes into it (turns out I had actually been on the right page at least once before, but didn’t give the image time to load — curse you, dial-up connection!). After that, probably the most time consuming was figuring out how the pieces were arranged. Then after putting the words on a couple pieces that were easy to figure out where they started (looking for 7 and 15 letter words or combinations that add up to them), I noticed how to figure out where the words started — that was a nice touch. And then figuring out which letters to use — THAT was ingenius! All in all, a satisfying puzzle and solution.

#4 received 8:47 AM

David Brain

WANDS — BEWARE THE BLADE
SWORDS — BEWARE THE COIN
PENTACLES — BEWARE THE CHALICE
CUPS — BEWARE THE STAFF

At least I hope it is! I couldn’t find the seventh set of six letters but I inferred it from the other answers. I then got the two Queens the wrong way around in the map (but I imagine that was intentional.)

What a terrific puzzle. Thanks (especially for giving me something to do instead of working this morning!)

From a solver’s point of view, everything that was needed was provided to avoid some dead-ends, whilst encouraging some other dead-ends. Given that this was meant to be a relatively (!) painless exercise, that was great. The most annoying bit was the hunting for the letters on the website at the beginning (as I said, I had to infer one set of letters because I just couldn’t find the image anywhere. Maybe I’ll have another look.)

The “Print” button worked just fine for me, except that I had to keep referring to the colour images on screen to check that I’d got the correct marked boxes (I’ve only got a mono-laser printer here.)

Now, get back to work on The Fool and His Money!

#5 received 9:08 AM

Robin Lionheart

Wands beware the blade
Swords beware the coin
Pentacles beware the chalice
Cups beware the staff

I got off to a slow start. The lag time for downloading the images and Flash movies was awful. After a while I used Opera with images toggled off and plugins enabled. That helped me to find the Flash-standins for images without waiting on image downloads, but it was still very slow going even with my cable modem connection. I waited a half hour for one of the Flash-standin images to download. After gathering 5 images, I put together all 7 words guessing at the pieces I didn’t have and started on to phase 2.

Well, I started to. Then I waited another looooong time downloading and printing the story pages and map pieces. But look at these pieces, this is so cool!

I solved the puzzle without noticing that the starting point for the words on each card was the same as the start of the sentence on the inner sentence. Some cards, like the page of cups, had as many as four ways their words could fit on them, so I stuffed them all into the boxes on the card until I solved the puzzle by focusing on cards with only a couple possibilites.

So on the Page of Pentacles for example, I would have PAINFUL, ITCH ARM, and UNKNOWN written in three corners of the 7 boxes partitioned off by the carpet, and so on around the card.

I had circled the letters S-T-E-A-L on the inner tracks of many of the border cards thinking “those who might steal” could mean only the cards whose inner track letters could spell STEAL. I abandoned that hypothesis for an embarrassingly long time before I realized how close I had been.

Thanks for a mindbending night!

#6 received 1:02 PM

Lance Nathan

Wands, beware the blade;
Swords, beware the coin;
Pentacles, beware the chalice;
Cups, beware the staff.

I hope this is the final answer; is there more to be found? I don’t have many illusions that I’m first, either...

The puzzle... was a lot of fun, and nicely constructed. I’m looking forward to Fool and his Money all the more!

#7 received 1:19 PM

Mark “Wolfy” Blattel

I believe it to be:

Wands beware the blade.
Swords beware the coin.
Pentacles beware the chalice.
Cups beware the staff.

Oh, and I don’t hate you. ;-)

I should have finished last night, but it’s amazing how one’s brain works much less efficiently when deprived of sleep. I gave up at two AM not understanding the “might steal” thing and not realizing that the “red words” started in the same place as the descriptive texts. It only took me 45 minutes this morning to finish after I got to work.

I never could find the “Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” logo (at least that’s what I think it is) on your site. I ended up having to guess at the last letter combo. (There aren’t too many six letter words that begin with “FLU,” fortunately).

Great fun, regardless, and thanks for putting it together. I’ve been a huge fan of your games since Fool’s Errand (which I bought direct from you at the MacWorld that year), and I’m looking forward to your next game.

I printed the map and story, although I must say I spent about half an hour fighting with the browsers on my Mac at home to get that to happen. I have rather old versions of Netscape and Explorer and one very new version of Netscape. I usually work with the old Netscape as it is most stable. At first it kept hanging when I tried using the print button, and since the “print” button itself was position over the middle of the images, I couldn’t do screen dumps, either. Then I tried the new Netscape, and was getting a bug in the text entry screen where it would double every letter I typed (AARRCCAADDEE, etc). Then I tried explorer and found that it didn’t have Flash 6 hooked up. Eventually I got the old version of Netscape to finally queue the print jobs and everything was great from there (other than it being 1:15 AM after a very long day) ;-)

Anyway, good luck with finishing the Fool and his Money.

#8 received 4:07 AM

C.J. DeSilvey

Here’s my answer:

Beware the blade swords
Beware the coin pentacles
Beware the chalice cups
Beware the staff wands

Whew....here’s hoping I’m correct...and hopefully first.....

received 1:44 PM

... I had no way back to my e-mail till now....

Beware the staff wands
Beware the blade swords
Beware the coin pentacles
Beware the chalice cups

received 2:09 PM

... just realized my problem...let’s try....(4:00 in the morning was just too early for this)

Wands, beware the blade
Swords, beware the coin
Pentacles, beware the chalice
Cups, beware the staff

If this is just a sample of what you have planned for us in the next game, may the powers above grant mercy on our grey matter. I really enjoyed the hunt portion/world puzzle in the beginning. The map portion was well written and conceived. I was very surprised to see how many clues to the map construction there were. My biggest problem (per se) was the word loading/phrase creation. It took me more than half of the four plus hours of my solving (not counting my later idiocy) to decipher the final clue. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole deal!

#9 received 3:37 PM

Steven Strell

WANDS BEWARE THE BLADE
SWORDS BEWARE THE COIN
PENTACLES BEWARE THE CHALICE
CUPS BEWARE THE STAFF

Awesome puzzle!! I hope I won...

I’d like to thank my fiancée, Rachel, for putting up with me all last night when I started obsessively working on the puzzle and almost completely ignoring her and other things around the the house like cleaning up the dishes and sleeping. I’d also like to thank you, Mr. Cliff Johnson, for making some of the best darn games and puzzles I have ever played anywhere. My brain really likes the workout. Please keep it up!

As for how I solved it, the web page said to print out the pages, so, dutifully following directions as I always do, I did. I printed out and cut apart the pieces. I finally placed them in the correct locations about an hour later once I went back and saw your little notes at the bottom of the page about the 4x4 grid, proper orientation, and not splitting words over the red carpet.

I filled in the words and stared. And I stared some more. And I stared a bit more. And I stared for 3 hours straight! I finally had to go to sleep. This morning, ignoring the fact that I might have some actual work to do, I used post-it notes to stick the map pieces up on my white board. I looked at that final sentence of the story again for the 100th time. I had thought that “those who are outside” referred to the map pieces on the outer square, not just the letters along the outside of the red carpet path. Once I realized that and noticed where letters on the outside lined up with the letters in the word “STEAL” in the sentences around each character, it was a simple matter to pick out the correct letters.

Thanks again for a great brain teaser. I am so looking forward to The Fool and His Money and anything else you might put up on your web site.

#10 received 4:16 PM

Chris Rickson

WANDS BEWARE THE BLADE
SWORDS BEWARE THE COIN
PENTICLES BEWARE THE CHALICE
CUPS BEWARE THE STAFF

I really enjoyed the puzzle. It was tricky, but not too hard. Too bad I had to work or I coulda been a contender.

I really did have fun. I printed the map and cut it out. I had the two similar queens mixed up for a while, but when the BEWARE’s started to show up I knew I had to flip them. I also had some of the words in the wrong place, but again, once the puzzle started to work itself out I quickly fixed the problem. Again, I think if I started last night I could have been close to winning. I started the puzzle around 11:30 this morning. Oh well, them’s the breaks.Thank you for the great April Fools Day Puzzle.

#11 received 4:23 PM

Jeff “Jep” Briden

wands beware the blade
swords beware the coin
pentacles beware the chalice
cups beware the staff

Excellent awesome, very entertaining. I loved every minute of it. Thanks CJ.

I hope you make this a regular event. The website format was superbly done. It was one helluvalota fun. I would not have been so literal with the button-word instructions however, this step seemed almost too easy after harvesting the letters.

The map was pure genius. As murphy would have it my first attempt found an order with correct speaker types, but the story didn’t quite fit (Page of Cups in particular was “off”), after re-ordering everything flowed nicely, if not easily.

WELL DONE! THANKS

#12 received 4:35 PM

Jason “Knight of Gemini” Benedicic

wands beware the blade
swords beware the coin
pentacles beware the chalice
cups beware the staff.

Good night at last (been up since 4 am, its now 11pm).

Firstly, thanks for creating such a great puzzle. After getting up at 4:00am GMT to be there for the start, I realised that we Brits had changed our clocks forward and that I didn’t need to be up until 6am. I quickly found the pictures on the site and had the words completed. I had to print and cut the map as my dad didn’t have photoshop on his computer. I then lost a lot of time because I had to go to work. You should have seen the shop, I had three copies of the map assembled in different orders, putting the words in each one till I knew which one was right. Once I had the right map I was lost. I had the right sort of idea, but was using the outer perimeter instead of the whole path. A few guiding words from a fellow puzzler and the answer was finished.

Many thanks.

#13 received 6:40 PM

Christopher Hailey

Wands beware the blade. Swords beware the coin. Pentacles beware the chalice. Cups beware the staff.

Thanks for an amusing diversion from the dull drudgery of everyday life!

I did print out the map and story. I am slightly curious about how long it took people to complete this (three hours for me, including the ‘distractions’ on your site -- and how long it took you to develop it. (4 days - CJ)

Looking forward to the Fool and his Money!

#14 received 8:16 PM

Erick Wong

Please let this be right :)

Wands beware the Blade,
Swords beware the Coin,
Pentacles beware the Chalice,
Cups beware the Staff.

Thanks for a good time :).

I printed the pages out. In fact, I’m sure somewhere around here I still have the xxx-page printout of the Fool’s Errand story on perforated ImageWriter paper.

#15 received 9:17 PM

Geoff Johns

the answer is:

wandsbewaretheblade
swordsbewarethecoin
pentaclesbewarethechalice
cupsbewarethestaff

or:

“Wands, beware the blade.
Swords, beware the coin.
Pentacles, beware the chalice.
Cups, beware the staff.”

I know I’m not the first to solve it, but I just wanted to know if i’m right...

#16 received 7:33 PM

John Rotenstein, Stephen Weissberger, Kate Skinner, Lance Nguyen

Beware the blades
Beware the pentacles
Beware the chalice cup
Beware the staff

received 7:39 PM

Or, to be more accurate...

Beware the blades
Beware the pentacles
Beware the cups
Beware the wands

Although it could be...

Beware the blades
Beware the pentacles
Beware the _chalice_ cups
Beware the _staff_ wands

received 7:46 PM

Beware the blade swords
Beware the coin pentacles
Beware the chalice cups
Beware the staff wands

That looks better!

received 9:22 PM

UMmm,

Just realised that the midnight thing might rotate the text...

Wands beware the blade
Swords beware the coin
Pentacles beware the chalice
Cups beware the staff

It was actually a team effort, from several of us at Insurance Australia Group in Sydney, Australia.

We began at 3pm Sydney time, so the time zones were an advantage over sleepy Americans. I started the hunt, looking for the pictures since I was the only one who was familiar with the Fool and the web site. After finding some of the pictures, I realised that it would be easiest to grab a copy of the entire web site (using Grab-a-site) and search for the text “treasure-hunt/cl-” on the pages. This took a bit of tweaking, but gave all the necessary results.

As a team we then printed out all 7 pages, cut up the map and tried to assemble. At this time we didn’t see the clues about assembling the map or putting the WO-RD around the edge. We realised that the story told the order of characters, and realised that 30 characters highlighted in each paragraph would fit around the outside of each map piece. However, we couldn’t put the map together in the right order.

After returning home and sending my wife and son to bed, I resumed the hunt at 10pm (7am US EST). The clues were now visible, and over the next 2 hours I managed to piece together the map together in the right order and put the text around each piece. All work was done with printouts on the floor (with a bit of spreadsheet tinkering that yielded no help). No further progress was made that night.

The next morning, after receiving an encouraging e-mail from CLiFF saying that others were similarly stuck, I studied the map on the train to work, tinkering with the STEAL concept. We had actually assumed that “outside” meant outside the path. Several of us looked at the map during the first few hours of work, and we noticed that BEWARE appeared several times. Filtering out the undesired letters then explained how to use STEAL. We got the result, but started in the wrong place (with “Beware...” instead of “Wands...”). This error was later detected and we had finished 19.5 hours after starting.

It was an excellent team exercise and we attracted attention at work with people asking what we were doing. We felt quite “buzzed” the next day, once we had finished. We didn’t know if anybody else had finished at that time, so it was exciting to hope that we were the winners (we weren’t).

In all, a fascinating mix of treasure hunting, puzzling and guesswork. I’ve thought about how hard it would have been to construct the puzzle (especially the 22-characters of text on each puzzle that matches with STEAL) and give you our thanks and respect for the work!

#17 received 10:29 PM

Andrés Santiago Pérez-Bergquist
Theresa Mecklenborg

WANDS BEWARE THE BLADE
SWORDS BEWARE THE COIN
PENTACLES BEWARE THE CHALICE
CUPS BEWARE THE STAFF

We got started on it right at midnight. We managed to find five of the images by looking, with the life jackets and the 3 in Three ones still left. From that, I was able to piece together 6 of the 7 words. (Decree can’t be figured out from those five.) Realizing that all the images already had to have been in place before the puzzle, I googled your site for “life,” “jacket,” and “preserver,” and found just what I needed.

We spent a long time trying to figure out who was who based on the story and the flavor text on the characters. Eventually, we realized that the path had only one possible shape even if you ignore the characters, and swapping around characters to get the right type of royalty in the right place was easy.

My first thought regarding “only those who steal” was the correct one, but we mistakenly looked only at the outer edge of the square, not the path, and got only gibberish on the characters with only one word-position. We then wasted time trying other possibilities, guessed that it was likely to be a code of some sort, and gave up around the 4 AM.

The next evening, I went back to the original idea and spotted a bit of ““BEWARE” in the top-right knight’s text, leading to the crucial Aha! moment. If there is a clear way to order words on the characters where the position is ambiguous just based on length, we didn’t find it, but it was easy enough to place words based on which letters made sense in the solution phrase.

Even though we didn’t win, it was still fun, and hey, it’s a free mini-game to tide us over until October!

#18 received 11:07 PM

Gilles Duchesne

WANDS BEWARE THE BLADE
SWORDS BEWARE THE COIN
PENTACLES BEWARE THE CHALICE
CUPS BEWARE THE STAFF

I printed and cut down everything on Monday night... and then brought the pieces to work in the morning, so I could work on it during breaks & lunch. Co-workers freaked a bit over all those puzzle pieces scattered around my desk, but hey, it was April 1st! :-)

Note that it went quite well at first — I had the whole pattern completed around 1PM EST, after about 3 hours of work (darn that “real life” for interfering!) The thing was that I simply couldn’t figure out the Moon’s clue.

I tried following the red carpet AND looking for the outside letters AND trying to only pick some, I tried the letters which were under the letters M,I,G,H,T! Can you believe that?

PS: Oh I can’t believe I almost forgot — I HATE YOU!!

#19 received 11:56 PM

Carl Muckenhoupt

Wands beware the blade
Swords beware the cup
Pentacles beware the chalice
Cups beware the staff

I loved the puzzle. It’s got a little of everything: pictures to find, words to fill into blanks, pieces to fit together, an ambiguous clue to interpret, and really appealing visuals. But I should have solved it a lot sooner. I actually had the map assembled and filled out well before the #5 winner, had even found all the pictures on the website, but somehow I failed to notice the moon’s instructions at the end of the story, and spent hours trying to make sense of the letters without them.

I’m a fan of The Fool’s Errand from way back, and I’m really looking forward to the sequel.
 

Sea Jay’s scribbly beta draft.