The Return of Spaghetti!
It’s been two years since we last played Spaghetti here on the blog — I completely forgot about running a round or two last year, much to my eventual embarrassment when the game was name-checked in a Mystery Hunt puzzle.
Let’s review, shall we?
In the Mystery Hunt and other such events, players accrue answers by solving puzzles. Those answers generally form a “metapuzzle” — which is to say, those answers form one further puzzle, which when solved usually brings great rewards.
Many years ago I first ran an experiment where I challenged puzzle lovers to solve a metapuzzle that wasn’t a puzzle at all — it was, in fact, a bunch of randomly chosen words. This should have been impossible. It wasn’t. Puzzlers are incredibly adept at spotting patterns that others are likely to miss, and they found all kinds of “answers” in those random words. And they have done so every single time I have run the game. As a group, they have never been stumped. Go read the comments from the last time I did this to see some examples.
So with the new Mystery Hunt coming up this weekend, let’s play at least one round of Spaghetti and see what these crazy puzzleheads come up with this time.
Even if you can’t “solve” the puzzle I am about to present, come back often and read the comments, and press Like for your favorite solutions. (You can vote for as many solutions as you want.) The submission with the most Likes will be the winner.
Here are five randomly chosen words. What’s the answer, and why?
ADJOINING
GOOD
PASTORAL
RUDDY
SMASH
When crafting your answer, you have the option of adding a sixth word to this list — any word you like. Or you can stick with these five.
Good luck and bon appétit!
11 Replies to “The Return of Spaghetti!”
ADJOINING
ERR
GOOD
PASTORAL
RUDDY
SMASH
Each answer has one or more letters that is repeated twice. Put the answers in alphabetical order, then read the doubled letters to get IN-ROADS.
As Jen McTeague pointed out, each word has one or more double letters. I’m using the original five words posted by Eric. In the order he posted them, we have:
INOADS, which easily anagrams to ADONIS.
If I order the word list so that no anagramming is required (except for swapping IN to NI), we have this list:
PASTORAL
RUDDY
GOOD
ADJOINING
SMASH
Each answer is an adjective describing the start of one of the nine non-repeated lines in “Silent Night”:
ADJOINING: [Round] yon virgin mother and child! (2nd non-repeated line)
GOOD: [Heavenly] hosts sing Alleluia! (6th)
PASTORAL: [Shepherds] quake at the sight! (4th)
RUDDY: [With the dawn] of redeeming grace, (9th)
SMASH (an adjective meaning “triumphant”): [Glories stream] from heaven afar, (5th)
Use these numbers as indexes into those starts, and order them by the most infant-like word in the line — that is, the smallest, and in case of a tie the earliest:
at: SHE[P]HERDS
from: GLOR[I]ES STREAM
of: WITH THE D[A]WN
sing: HEAVE[N]LY
yon: R[O]UND
So the solution (appropriately for a piece of music about quietness) is PIANO.
Each word can have one letter changed to two to make a new word. Order these changes alphabetically by the alphabetically latest neighbor of the changed letter (in case of a tie, continue in the same direction until the tie is broken).
AR. PASTORA(L) -> PASTORA(LE)
AT. (E)AT -> (WH)AT
OJ. ADJO(I)NING -> ADJO(UR)NING
OO. GOO(D) -> GOO(SE)
S. S(M)ASH -> S(QU)ASH
Y. RUD(D)Y -> RUD(EL)Y
The new bigrams spell LEW “HUR” SEQUEL, instructing us to find the sequel to Lew Wallace’s book, namely: https://www.amazon.com/Esther-epistles-centuries-international-D/dp/B0006AEIW0. So the answer is ESTHER. (The old letters can be arranged to spell MIDDLE, which is relevant to the meta-meta.)
I’m not a puzzle superstar like you brainiacs, but the answer to this puzzle is clearly NOTRE DAME. If you remove one or two letters from each word you get a word related to Notre Dame. GOOD and PASTORAL become GOD and PASTOR. RUDDY becomes RUDY (best movie ever!). SMASH gives you MASH (Father Mulcahy was a vocal Notre Dame fan). And ADJOINING becomes JOINING (Notre Dame is JOINING the ACC conference this year). So there you have it: NOTRE DAME!
Along with the sixth answer BAKED PIKE, each answer has 1 or 2 letters repeated in the answer. Ordering those letters by their first appearance in the answer, breaking ties by the second appearance, we get S-O-A-KE-D-IN, for the answer SOAKED IN.
I wrote this up before reading other comments, and am surprised to only duplicate 2 other posts.
Since all words are 4 letters or longer, the correct ordering should obviously be alphabetical according to the 4th letter. (The 1st letter can be used in case of a tie.) So the words should be ordered as following:
GOOD
RUDDY
ADJOINING
SMASH
PASTORAL
When you see the resulting acrostic, the answer is in your GRASP.
Solving the 6th puzzle gives you SAGITTARIUS, and you’re ready to solve the meta. You find the opposites of each word:
ADJOINING – DETACHED
GOOD – BAD
PASTORAL – URBAN
RUDDY – PALE
SMASH – FAILURE
SAGITTARIUS – GEMINI
You notice that the words all have unique length, so you put them in length order:
BAD
PALE
URBAN
GEMINI
FAILURE
DETACHED
Reading the last letter of each word you get DENIED, and taking the opposite tells you your answer is APPROVED.
With the 6th word KEBAB:
For each word, find a non-contiguous sub-word which uses more than half the letters:
aDJoINiNg – DJINN
GOoD – GOD
PASTorAl – PASTA
RUdDy – RUD
SMaSh – SMS
kEBaB – EBB
The sub-words are odd. Taking the middle letters gives us IOSUMB, which anagrams to MOBIUS.
The six words of this meta are:
ADJOINING
GOOD
PASTORAL
RUDDY
UGLINESS
SMASH
With these, we can solve the clues the puzzle gave us by answering with strings within the words.
Break in a TV program : AD
Word for a parent: MA
Vocal: ORAL
Negative Prefix : IN
Musical instrument: RUD
Add to: JOIN
Slime: GOO
Queue: LINE
Type of tree: ASH
Taking the first letter of the words that have the strings gives ASPARAGUS.