Puzzles

Over the past few years, I've discovered a love for creating puzzles for puzzle events. It's a lot of fun to think up these small pieces of twisted logic. My recent creation efforts started with Mike & Anne's letter boxing event, and kicked into higher gear for our Puzzle Safari exercise.

In the last two years, I've provided a large number of puzzles for our Puzzle Safari event - 28 puzzles this year. I am reputed to create harder than average puzzles for our event (though I am working on hitting a more average difficulty). Once the event has run, there is no further use for the puzzles, so I've decided to reproduce them here.

All puzzle safari puzzles lead to a destination on the Microsoft campus. These destinations may no longer exist, since campus is a changing place, but that won't matter for you. Sometimes these are described in english (fountain near building X), but mostly they are described as a numerical building location.

Locations on campus are written as a five or six digit number 12/3456 or 1/2345

We use buildings numbered <50 in most cases, and the puzzles may depend on this fact. Valid building numbers are different per event, but may include 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33

All buildings are 6 stories or less. Most are less than 3 stories.

Floor 1 is at ground level

There are no numbered basements

Puzzles may depend on facts from the internet

All the puzzles have a title. The title is sometimes a hint, but most often not

All the puzzles have a copyright message. It is never part of the puzzle

The puzzles are supposed to take 5-15 minutes to solved. Mine are at the harder end of the scale, on average. Novice puzzlers will take longer.

Some puzzles do depend on regional information (Seattle-area stuff), or Microsoft information, but most do not.

To give you a realistic experience, I've hidden the puzzle answers on this site. You enter the URL for the answer, and if you got it right, you'll see an explanation of the solution. If you got it wrong, you'll see a standard internet 404 error. For example:

If you think you've solved a Safari 2002 puzzle and it leads to "the fountain near building seven", enter

I guess I can come up with a forms based approach to this, but that'll have to wait for later.

These puzzles would not be as good as they are without the help and support of everyone who works to make Puzzle Safari great each year. Testing puzzles is hard work, and I'm very grateful to Karl Barrus, Karen Deinhard, Stacey Doerr, Anne Grier, Mike Grier, Colin Robertson, Samantha Robertson and our organiser-general Jill Zoeller. I'm especially grateful to Samantha, who did the work of coverting the 2002 puzzles to HTML, and to Anne, who got us all started on this quest with her Letterboxing event. You can find details of our puzzlehunt team here.

I've grouped the puzzles into easier, normal and harder. But to be honest, different people find different puzzles easy, so don't pay too much attention to the ratings.

When you think you know the answer to these puzzles, enter URLs based at http://www.seanet.com/~martynl/safari2002/