YABA4 - clue 7- solution

Hint

Beginners' division

The smallest red and blue pieces are corners. The square piece is in the middle. The smallest yellow and blue pieces form a cross at the center of the square. Smiley face is at bottom right.

Regular division

The smiley face is at the bottom right. Match the horizontal strip that has three left twos with the red zeroes on the vertical strips. The all-blue strip goes at the far left.

Masters' division

The horizontal strip reading two blank two one one blank is at the bottom. The message is in a clockwise spiral starting at the upper left corner with the smiley face at the end.

Solution

See the hints to create the red-and-blue checkerboard and the yellow-and-blue checkerboard, and then overlay the two to create the purple and green checkerboard.

Beginner

Regular

1		1	6	8
1	1	8	0		4
9	0	9	0	2	0
5			5	7	1
8	9	2		1	1
1	1	8		2	☺

 

9	1	4		1	1
4		1	2	9	1
1	2		2	1	2
	4	9			5
1		2	5	8
3	2	1	1	1

 

19	1	14	6	18	1
14	1	18	20	9	14
19	20	9	20	21	20
5	4	9	5	7	15
18	9	22	5	18	1
13	21	18	1	12	☺

 

Masters

The numbers are a simple substitution, where 1=A, 2=B, 3=C, … 26=Z.

Beginner

S	A	N	F	R	A
N	A	R	T	I	N
S	T	I	T	U	T
E	D	I	E	G	O
R	I	V	E	R	A
M	U	R	A	L	☺

 

Regular

S	A	N	F	R	A
N	A	R	T	I	N
S	T	I	T	U	T
E	D	I	E	G	O
R	I	V	E	R	A
M	U	R	A	L	☺

 

Masters

S	A	N	F	R	A
D	I	E	G	O	N
E	U	R	A	R	A
T	M	☺	L	I	R
U	A	R	E	V	T
T	I	T	S	N	I

 

The message reads: "SAN FRAN ART INSTITUTE DIEGO RIVERA MURAL". (We thought it would only be appropriate to have a clue whose key was color combinations go to a location related to art.) This location was inside the main gallery of the San Francisco Art Institute at 800 Chestnut Street.

The license plate, reading "Q", was attached to the wall at the end of the gallery directly across the room from the Diego Rivera mural. (The plate was a reference to MI6's gadget-man, Q, whom players would meet at the next clue hub.)

The mural is entitled, "The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City".

See http://www.sanfranciscoart.edu/dr.htm for more information.

Particularly observant teams noticed that the license plate at the previous site, "ARTIST," was a hint referencing the current clue site.

Thanks

The idea for this clue came from Derrick Schneider, a member (with Alexandra) of the National Puzzlers League, the world's oldest puzzle organization, established in 1883. Members of the NPL are known collectively as "the Krewe" and are dedicated to the art of creating and solving all kinds of word-based puzzles.

Derrick is also a mechanical puzzle designer. One of his designs won honorable mention at the International Puzzle Party in 2002 (click link to see that year's entries):

IPP22

At a recent Krewe gathering before YABA4, Mirepoix had just returned from the IPP22, for which he had manufactured and distributed, at his own expense, over 100 copies of a puzzle he had designed.  He showed this to Alexandra, who was intrigued by it and asked if she could modify it for the YABA game.

Mirepoix's original version consisted of 12 lucite strips, each one square wide by six squares long. Six of the strips contained blue and yellow squares, and six contained blue and red squares.

The goal of the puzzle was to assemble the strips into two 6x6 squares which, when overlaid and held up to the light, would produce a green and purple checkerboard.

In its original form this puzzle was extremely challenging. In fact, it took Mirepoix three months to solve his own puzzle!  Alexandra modified it to make the shapes irregular so that there were fewer possible configurations for the solution, and added numbers in the squares which greatly assisted in solving the clue. The numbers were also necessary in order to decode the clue into the next destination; a simple green and purple checkerboard, while very cool, would not have been very informative!