Spaghetti Time
It’s National Spaghetti Day! As I’m sure the originators of this annual celebration intended, let’s celebrate by playing a nutty word game!
In many puzzle events, solvers face a wide assortment of puzzles, with each puzzle leading to a final answer word or phrase. These answers are then re-used in what we like to call the metapuzzle, or just plain meta. The answer to the metapuzzle is often a satisfying punch line that puts a bow on the entire event. That meta-answer can frequently be found by noticing an important pattern in your collection of answers. It might be that all of the answers are words in the titles of James Bond movies, or can all be turned into new words if you change a letter to X.
People who love puzzles and puzzle hunts have gotten insanely good at spotting patterns in a series of answer words — so good, in fact, that years ago I invented Spaghetti, a game in which I challenge solvers to find the answer to a meta puzzle even though no answer exists.
You heard me. I am about to give you a puzzle that has NO ACTUAL ANSWER. The words have NO PATTERN WHATSOEVER — at least not on purpose. I chose them entirely at random. It should be completely impossible to transform these words into a satisfying solution.
And yet, it can be done. I know that because people have found “answers” for these random collections of words every time we’ve done this. And frequently the explanation for how the puzzler arrived at their answer has such a degree of elegance that you’ll swear it must have been the intended answer all along.
So here we go with Spaghetti 2022! Here are five words. In the comments, tell us what your answer is, and why. You may add an optional sixth word to this list — whatever word you wish. Or you can stick with these five.
CAUSE
NECESSARY
WOOZY
CONSTITUTE
QUAINT
Can’t figure out an answer? No worries. Come back often and read the comments, and vote for your favorite responses. You can vote for as many as you like. The solver who gains the most votes will be declared the winner.
One last note: Some of you know that I am helping to put together the 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt, one of the year’s most anticipated puzzle events. As such, you might be wondering if this post is a Mystery Hunt puzzle in disguise. It is not.
15 Replies to “Spaghetti Time”
This meta uses an additional answer LEANDER.
This is a meta about phonetics. Sort the answers by increasing syllable count, with ties broken by letter count. Then, each answer can be prefaced by an initial syllable to form a different word:
1 syllable, 5 letters CAUSE -> BECAUSE (add “be”)
1 syllable, 6 letters QUAINT -> ACQUAINT (add a schwa)
2 syllables WOOZY -> QUOOZY* (add a “k”)
3 syllables, 7 letters LEANDER -> OLEANDER (add a “o”)
3 syllables, 9 letters CONSTITUTE -> RECONSTITUTE (add a “re”)
4 syllables NECESSARY -> UNNECESSARY (add an “un”)
Then pronounce what you’ve got and you have BE A KOREAN, which could help with pronouncing these unfamiliar symbols.
*apparently it’s a portmanteau of woozy and queasy
The extra word is obviously BLUFFED.
This is a game of Wordle. The answer is CAUSE, and the other words are the guesses. Order the other words by length, and then drop off all the letters after the fifth. You get the following board:
WOOZY
QUAIN
BLUFF
NECES
CONST
CAUSE
Now, convert this to what the Wordle board would look like:
*****
*YY**
**G**
*YY*Y
G**Y*
GGGGG
The rows other than the bottom are zero-indexed five digit binary, with G and Y both counting as 1.
00000 – 0 – A
01100 – 12 – M
00100 – 4 – E
01101 – 13 – N
10010 – 18 – S
This gives the answer AMENS, which are things that I say when I manage to get the Wordle on the last guess.
4 of the answers have very common bigram prefixes:
BE CAUSE
UN NECESSARY
RE CONSTITUTE
AC QUAINT
Both of these pairs have a letter that be added to make another word:
BE + G + UN
RE + AC + T
(The alternate word REACH can be ignored since the H stands for herring.)
With G&T plus WOOZY, the answer is clearly DRUNK.
This was very tough to solve until I solved the sixth puzzle and got the answer IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICES, and then it was pretty straightforward given my encyclopedic knowledge of previous Mystery Hunts.
Three of the answers, when we remove their first sounds, become words that start with O and relate to the theme of previous Mystery Hunts. The number of years since these Hunts are 1, double 2, and 3, so ordering them thus:
CONSTITUTE => ONSTITUTE (short for “online institute,” 2021, 1 year ago)
CAUSE => OZ (2000, 22 years ago)
WOOZY => OOZY (2019, 3 years ago)
Since we used the first sounds already, we should match each of these with the answer with a matching last sound, and index using the number of years since the relevant Hunt:
CONSTITUTE => QUAINT (1) = Q
CAUSE => IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICES (22) = V
WOOZY => NECESSARY (3) = C
Thus the answer is QVC.
I haven’t cracked it yet, but if the 5th word is QUINT + A, that’s gotta be something (right??)
Each of these words has a synonym that’s also a singular noun, and from the flavor text snippet “Contain yourself!” solvers then must find an associated “container” for those new nouns. In the given order, they are:
CAUSE = SEED, which is usually contained in a FEEDER
NECESSARY = KEY, usually grouped together on a RING
WOOZY = WOBBLY, i.e., a member of the IWW, one of the world’s largest UNIONs
CONSTITUTE = MAKE UP, which can be found in a COMPACT
QUAINT = OLD-FASHIONED, often served in a TUMBLER.
The first letters of these words spell FRUCT, the Latin root for “fruit”, so the answer is a place that contains a lot of fruit, namely an ORCHARD.
This puzzle comes from a Mystery Hunt themed around the 1992 film Stay Tuned, where a family must survive a series of deadly TV shows. This particular round is:
SOLE SURVIVOR
This isn’t a game of physical challenges and social manipulation; it’s an all-out demolition derby! You see pairs of contestants eliminated in particularly grisly collisions, but you’re assured there is a prize waiting for the fittest who survive.
Along with the sixth answer, POP QUIZ, the shell presents us a series of “matchups” that pit answers against each other, such as NECESSARY vs. WOOZY or POP QUIZ vs. POP QUIZ. In each of these matchups, a pair of identical letters in the two answers is eliminated, like the Y in NECESSARY and WOOZ and the P’s in POP QUIZ. Once the smoke clears, all the letters have been eliminated, except for 6 that appeared an odd number of times in the answers and thus survived to the end, one per answer. In order of the puzzle titles from A to F, they give:
Constitute
cAuse
necessaRy
Woozy
pop quIz
quaiNt
The meta answer is thus CAR WIN, indicating the prize (which teams will later use to help outwit the devil in the endgame) and a nod to the “survival of the fittest” mechanic.
This post-apocalyptic hunt is super fun. Here’s how I solved the Radioactive Seas round:
It certainly helped to get that Aegean puzzle solved, to get SEASICK. Then, sort the answers by their locations clockwise around the Mediterranean with Rome (QUAINT) at 12 o’clock. Then, parse each answer into Periodic Table Symbols where possible:
q U a I N t
Se As I C K
Ca U Se
Ne Ce S S Ar Y
Co N S Ti t U Te
W O O z Y
Replace each symbol with its atomic number. Where a letter has no symbol, just use A1Z26. Sum these values for each word:
17 + 92+ 1 + 53 + 7 + 20 = 190
34 + 33 + 53 + 6 + 19 = 145
20 + 92 + 34 = 146
10 + 58 + 16 + 16 + 18 + 39 = 157
27 + 7 + 16 + 22 + 20 + 92 + 52 = 236
74 + 8 + 8 + 26 + 39 = 155
Now, it’s important to interpret the title of the round as “Radioactive CS”, or Cesium-137. Subtract 137 from each of these totals, then convert them back into chemical elements:
190 – 137 = 53 = I
145 – 137 = 8 = O
146 – 137 = 9 = F
157 – 137 = 20 = Ca
236 – 137 = 99 = Es
155 – 137 = 18 = Ar
Finally, we have I OF CAESAR, or, simply, ONE.
Thanks for providing the answers to the meta from the Set the Table round (setting it for the Spaghetti hunt, right?). As seen from the order given in the (unprovided) puzzle titles, the items are arranged as follows:
CONSTITUTE
QUAINT
NECESSARY
WOOZY
CAUSE
As indicated by setting the ‘table’, you can remove the first two letters from each of those answers and replace them with elements from the periodic table to make new words:
I NSTITUTE
S AINT
AC CESSARY
O OZY
P AUSE
(SAINT could also be PAINT, but the P is used elsewhere. And the alternate COZY for OOZY is to emphasize that the C in the element Ac above gets used.)
Now, in order, you’re left with the clue phrase “IS A COP”. Any student of the Periodic Table will note that all of the one letter elements above are in the group of Reactive nonmetals on the right side of the table. And it’s pretty simple from there to figure out what kind of cop we want — set some reactive nonmetals on your table and you get C O N S TABLE. CONSTABLE. He’s the first person invited to your Spaghetti dinner for the meta-meta.
In this musical puzzle, we start by noticing that QUAINT NECESSARY would become “It Ain’t Necessarily So” (a song from Porgy and Bess), with (1) an expansion of the final letter (Y) to a five-letter sequence (ILYSO), and (2) an initial kw/it sound replacement. Note that the protagonists in “It Aint Necessarily So” (DAVID, JONAH, MOSES, METHU-SELAH, which the song orders by length and then alphabetically) and the remaining words (CAUSE, WOOZY, CONST-ITUTE when ordered in the same way) consist entirely of 5-letter sequences. The former sequences start with four distinct sounds (d, j, m, s); you can replace the kw/it sounds that start the latter sequences with those four to get words:
JAWS
SUSIE
DONN’ST
MUTE
and then taking the diagonals from both left-hand corners gives the two words JUNE and MOSS. The answer is thus the singer consisting entirely of five-letter sequences whose blog is titled “June Moss”: BECCA TOBIN.
The answer is BARREL.
I’ll admit – I didn’t use the words at all. But I did reorder everyone else’s answers:
QVC
DRUNK
CARWIN
AMENS
ORCHARD
BEAKOREAN
CONSTABLE
BECCATOBIN
ONE
If you also have the answer BARREL, the third column reads down what this round of spaghetti is meant to do: CURE CANCER. Therefore BARREL must be an answer.
Each answer word can have one letter replaced and then be anagrammed. The flavor text refers to “Peering at the forested path climbing to the mountaintops”, motivating the words (in the order given):
ACMES
INCREASES
WOODY
SETTING OUT
a sixth word I haven’t backsolved for yet.
SQUINT
The added letters spell out MIDGES, which are the “things you won’t see on today’s hike.”
Thanks to John Beck’s comment, I think I’ve figured it out, and I bet the missing answer word is ALASKA.
The general idea is that each word contains a number with a missing letter, but as the number gets higher, the hidden number gets trickier to find.
NECESSARY is easy. The first two letters, NE, becomes “ONE” when you add the letter O.
WOOZY is a bit trickier, but not so bad. You still take the first two letters WO and add a letter T to make “TWO”, but since you lose the “W” sound it’s harder to see.
We’re missing the third word, ALASKA. This one’s sneakier because it uses the Hebrew number for three, “SALAS”, and takes the first four letters instead of the first two. Also note at this point we start going to different languages, which will get more and more obscure. (I had to backsolve this after I figured out the meta.)
CAUSE is fourth, and this was a lot more devious because the two letters are from the end of the word, not the start — it’s “SEI”, which is Cantonese for four.
QUAINT is the one John Beck noticed. QUINT is a Latin prefix meaning five. This one’s tricky in that it’s a prefix and not the number (that would be “QUINQUE”), and accordingly we have to remove a letter instead of adding a letter. Also, not to mention that unlike the first four, Latin is a dead language and nobody speaks it.
CONSTITUTE took me the hardest time to figure out, because the string is hidden in the middle and the language is quite obscure. Turns out the Ugaritic word for six is “TITTU”, and “TITU” is right there inside the answer word. Very sneaky, because this language is really really dead, and older than Latin.
Anyway, in comparison, the extraction isn’t too bad. The extra letters you need to add (or remove in the case of QUAINT) spell out OTSIAT, which is nonsense until you realize it can be reversed to TAISTO, a Finnish boy’s name meaning “battle”, and the final answer.
Oh, small mistake, it’s Akkadian, not Hebrew. SALAS vs. SALOS, I always get those two confused because they’re so similar.
This metapuzzle involves identifying bigrams corresponding to Australia / Australian locations. Order by the position of the bigrams are diagonalize. Finally, since Australia is the land down under, the first and last letters are swapped to obtain the answer CONIS -> SONIC:
[C](AU)SE
W[O](OZ)Y
CO[N](ST)ITUTE
QUA[I](NT)
NECE[S](SA)RY
Our team couldn’t figure out what ST referred to, but our best guess was that it was some obscure reference, perhaps a historic name for SA = South Australia.