Events
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RESULTS PUZZLES and ANSWERS
Emails Through Time - 100 Points This puzzle involved a scientist bouncing through time. He had sent 18 emails describing what he was seeing. Each description corresponded to a LEGO display in the Fun Town Market and each display had a LEGO with a date on it. Teams had to figure out the year that each email represented.
One all the years were known teams had to put the emails in year order and read the first word from each Subject line. Basic teams were told to do this, Challenge teams had to figure that out based on looking for places in each email where help was being requested. For example:
About that help, are you surprised that the subject has come up in every email?
To help me everything will need to be in order before it makes sense.
I could go on, but first things first in regards to that subject I call help.
and so on.
When the first word of each subject was read it said:
Add last two numbers in year and count that many words into body put words in year order
When you did that it read:
Counting both partial and complete how many white dots are on the blue sock in the launderette sign?
Answer: 11

Fun Notes: I thought this would be the hardest puzzle, but it wasn't. Orignally the help in the emails was not nearly as obvious and there was no indication in the puzzle instructions that you needed to even look for that help, but that proved to be too difficult during testing. The scenes in the glass cases changed several times on me during the process of making the puzzle and testing and one day during cleaning the cleaning folks turned around one of the LEGOs with the date on it so you had to go to the opposite side of the case to see it. I liked that and I think it fooled a number of teams momentarily.

The Symbol - 100 Points This puzzle involved a complicated series of instructions on how to translate hieroglyphics found on the front of the Lost Kingdom ride building. There were 8 multiple choice questions to answer while riding the ride, each with a hieroglyph next to it.
But as soon as you got inside the ride there was text in invisible ink that showed up on the question sheet that said Look at the other page
If you looked at the main page there was a previously invisible message written all around the edges of the page that said:
This puzzle is a decoy. There is an explorer out front with something hanging by his chest pocket. Text that object to mummy to get the real puzzle.
The invisible ink was black-light activated so only visible inside the ride.
The explorer had a compass around his neck and when you texted that you got back:
The 8 symbols on the instructions decode to LEGOLAND. Use that to decode the message on the back of the beetle bounce tower for your final answer.
You then had to walk over to the Beetle Bounce tower and decode the 5 symbols there and unscramble them. Answer: LODGE

Fun Notes: This was one of my favorite puzzles. I had been dying to do an invisible ink puzzle for a while. During testing teams were so concentrating on finding the answers to the questions they wouldn't see the invisible text until half-way through the ride. During the actual race, at least one team didn't see it until the very end and they had to re-ride just to read the text. Some teams never saw it at all, and yes we even verified for those that didn't that it was actually on the page(I had a black light flashlight).
Originally the explorer out front was holding a map in one hand and teams were told to text the name of the Sea on that map. But a few weeks before the race the map mysteriously disappeared. The folks at LEGOLAND didn't even know it was gone until I had told them.

A Map, You Will Need - 100 Points [Puzzle] This puzzle involved a large map of Star Wars Miniland with characters around the outside edge. Teams were presented with a string of letters and told that it somehow contained the starting location on the map. Basic teams were told that only 1 of those letters corresponded to a letter on the map and that that was the starting location. Challenge teams had to figure this out on their own.
Once at the starting location the key to this challenge was figuring out that the figures around the edge of the map were not haphazzardly put there. There were sets of three characters contained in a colored box. The color of the box, and the letter in the corner of the box, corresponded to the same color letter and color on the map. Teams would have to find the location marked on the map, let's say location Z, and then find the corresponding colored box marked Z and figure out which of the 3 characters in the box was actually located at the location they marked on the map.
For example one location on the map pointed to a back corner of the Mos Eisley Cantina. If you went there you would find R2D2 and C3PO. Of the three characters on the map for that particular location ONLY R2D2 was represented, therefore that was your answer.
Once you had your answer you would use the letter next to it as your new starting location on the map, and so on.
Once you had a string of 7 letters you would text that to starwars and get back the following message:
Yodi can be found in one scene in Star Wars miniland. Where does he ask to be taken?
To find the answer you had to find Yoda and listen as his spacecraft took off.
There were 3 variations of this puzzle with letter combinations of:
  • RKHMCZP
  • ZPSDXRK
  • XRKHMCZ
Answer: The Forward Command Center

Fun Notes: The map is the actual architectural guide that LEGOLAND used to build the Starwars miniland section. The text used on the instructions part of this puzzle is Princess Leia's actual speech when she is recording the message to send to Obi Wan. The words were changed slightly to fit the Newspaper theme and a few other tweaks. On final testing of this puzzle, two weeks before the event, C3P0 mysteriously vanished from his spot in the volcano. We waited until Labor Day before printing that puzzle and fortunately he appeared again a day or two before that.

Bubble Up - 100 Points [Puzzle] This puzzle involved a series of gravestones along the bottom of the page with numbered blanks on each stone (2 or 3 stones were filled in). Above the stones were a bunch of bubbles with lines connecting them to each other and to the gravestones in all crazy directions. You were told to go to the graveyard of the castle. At the graveyard teams needed to fill in all the blanks on the gravestones using the graves of the Knights of the Round table. They were all silly names like "Sir Jun", "Sir Eos" and the one that gave teams the most trouble "Sir Cumference".
Once you had filled in all the graves you would take the letter marked number 1 and bubble it up the path connected to that gravestone to the first available bubble without a letter already inside it. Some paths were blocked for a given letter, indicated by a red line through the path and the letter that was not allowed to pass. If you did this properly every letter would bubble up and find a bubble to be written inside of. If you then read the bubbles as text on a page they said:
Email number of gravestones to merlin
The message you got back said:
Ride through castle and count number of green lego dragons. Don't count pictures, etc. only actual green lego dragons. That number is final answer.
Answer: 5

Fun Notes: The Basic and Challenge versions were the same for this puzzle. I tried for quite a while to make a Challenge version without giving instructions, or given less detailed instructions, but NOBODY testing was ever able to figure it out without the instructions. This was a puzzle I thought up while wandering through the Sea Life aquarium one day, watching the bubbles in the Atlantis tank. Everytime we tested this puzzle there was little or no line on the Dragon coaster. The day of the event the line was never less than 30 minutes long. Go figure. On the other hand the line for Lost Kingdom on race day looked to be about 10 minutes long where-as when we tested this puzzle it was always about 30 minutes long. So they cancelled each other out.

Fishus Obscurus - 100 Points [Page 1][Matrix Front] This puzzle involved a series of photos, each with a fish blocking something in the photo. Teams were sent to the Sea Life Aquarium and had to find each photo and identify the thing that the fish was obscuring. Once an item was identified it could be found on a large matrix of objects. Turning the matrix over there was another matrix, this time of words, and you were to use the word on the back side of each object found and it would ask a question. The easy way to do this was to use a pencil and stab a hole in the matrix for each object found. Then you could just flip the page over and take all the words that had a hole.
The question revealed was:
What takes 50 years to decompose in a landfill?
The answer could be found in the final room of Sea Life. On one wall was a timeline with little flip-up covers at various years along the line. Under the 50 year tab you would find your answer. Answer: Tin Can

Fun Notes: Basic and Challenge were the same for this puzzle. Originally there was a much more involved puzzle using many of the little signs identifying the type of fish and such. But the pathways in the aquarium are narrow and I finally decided it would be bad to have too many teams standing and reading a lot of stuff as it would clog up the paths.

Double Crossed - 90 Points [Puzzle] This puzzle involved a pathway with a number of busts of famous people made of LEGOS lining each side. The first page of the puzzle was just someone's account of a crazy costume party they attended and the various people they meet throughout the night. The second page showed the pathway with dots, and a bunch of words all over the page. Challenge level was given no instructions while the Basic level was given a general hint to follow the order of people and a hint about not wanting to "double-cross" you. The idea was to identify which bust was where on the path and then draw a line from one to the next in the order that the people were given in the story. E.G. a line was drawn from Lincoln (met first) to Shakespeare (met next) and so on.
Once completed, any word that was crossed twice (Double Crossed) could be taken and a question was asked:
How many secret service men are standing on the roof of the white house.
The answer could be found in the Washington D.C. section of Miniland, very near-by. Answer: 6

Fun Notes: During testing we found the Advanced version too easy so we removed all instructions from the Advanced and used those instructions for the Basic. I had a lot of problems trying to trace the pathway properly and finally used a satelite image of LEGOLand to get it right.

The 10 Contacts- 90 Points This puzzle involved teams going to the Model Shop near Miniland and finding a Daily Procrastinator newspaper made of Legos in the window. From the paper teams should have found a picture of the "contacts" they were looking for, as well as note that the paper was the "California" edition (it was in big letters at the top) which indicated they would find the contacts in the "California" portion of Miniland. Additionally there was a picture on the paper of "LegoWood" (Hollywood) which would also point to that portion of miniland.
There were 10 contacts (hence the name) scattered around Miniland, each with a word or two on a sandwich-board around their body. When put together they asked the question:
According to a hotel marquee in Las Vegas, who did the Chargers beat in game 10?
The answer could be found on the front of the New York New York hotel in the Las Vegas section of miniland. Answer: The Colts

Fun Notes: This puzzle was put into place the day before the event so up until then I didn't know exactly what any part of the models (the news paper and people) would look like. We had previously planned exactly where each of the little people would go.
On the day of the event one of the little people was on a moving boat and half-way through the day the boat actually broke free from it's track and floated behind a big Ferry where it was very difficult to see. The wind kept blowing it out and then back behind the Ferry. We caught this pretty quickly though and a model builder on-site came out and moved the man to be sitting on the Ferry while he put the boat back on it's track.

The Missing Member - 80 Points [Puzzle] This puzzle involved walking through the Adventurer's club. Teams were given a number of sets of items. For each set exactly one of the items could not be found. For example the first set was: Telephone, Flower pot, Radio, Golden Idol
In the first room of the club all but the Telephone could be found so you were write the missing word, in thie case Telephone, in the grid at the top of the page. Once you had walked through the entire club and filled in all the missing members, certain boxes in the grid were colored. If you grouped the letters from each color, e.g. all the blue, all the red, etc. and unscrambled the letters into words it asked:
What do the keys help spell?
The answer could be found in the final room where all the keys were on the wall Answer: Imagine

Fun Notes: Various items in the club would come and go while we were testing. For example there used to be a typewriter on the table in the first room but it disappeared and never came back. Various of the animals in the first room disappeared a few weeks before the race but fortunately came back. Originally the question was going to ask What is the seventh key the key to?. If you stood in the final room a woman's voice said "It turns out the 7th key was the key to your imagination!" but during testing the sound kept getting quieter and quieter and eventually was turned off altogether so i decided to change the puzzle. I noticed on race day the sounds was back on and quite loud.

Hidden In Plain View - 80 Points [Puzzle] This turned out to be the most difficult puzzle, which was not my intention originally at all. More details in the Fun Notes below. Teams were given a page of classified ads and told to look for a message to help them. The note indicating this was from "Esrom" (Morse backwards) so you had first look for a classified from that same person, Esrom. That classified hinted at a second classified because the person was feeling DOWN and looking for a cake place ACROSS town
A second classified was looking for a cook for the Cheesecake factory at it's downtown location. The puncuation was all messed up in that classified (Basic teams were given a clue to look for poor puncuation). If you read the capitol letters in that classified, the left column reading DOWN and then ACROSS it said HERO FACTORY, inquire at downtown highrise.
If teams went to the Hero Factory there was a HUGE mural made entirely of Legos of a Gotham City sort of sky line. Hidden in the biggest building in the center of the mural was a single line of Morse Code (put into the mural the previous day by the model builders). It was in a different color and stood out enough to be found, but also blended in well enough to be difficult to find.
Observant teams may have noted that there were dots and dashes in the title of this puzzle which was simply another indication that you were looking for Morse Code.
Teams had to text what the Morse Code said and then received a question regarding the number of Giraffes outside. Texting that gave them yet another question about the number of Bison outside, and that finally led to the final question asking what the size of the tire on the Lego race car on the building was. Answer: 81.6x34 ZR

Fun Notes: The classifieds for this puzzle were the last puzzle made because originally I was just going to tell people to go to the Hero Factory. But then I decided since this race was all about a newspaper that I needed classifieds. Additionally I did not have a hidden puzzle anywhere yet and I decided that classifieds would be a good place to put one. As it turned out figuring out where to go was quite a difficult thing for this puzzle. On more than one occasion I watched someone looking at the puzzle from the top down solve it. That is team members where seated at a table across from one another. The puzzle was facing one member, and the other person was looking at it from the top (so upside-down). It turns out the capitol letters seemed to stick out more from that vantage point.
Did you notice the fun classified ads? One was asking about a TAND which was the device you created with the Legos for the very first puzzle of the race. The reference to Rex and Benito is a reference to my two dogs. There was an ad looking for reports for the newspaper. There were references to other puzzles as well, like the Dragon and the Pirate.

The Silver Globes of Ogel - 80 Points possible [Puzzle] This was a relatively simple puzzle and provided a quiet boat ride for teams to rest and relax. Teams were instructed to take a ride on the Fairy Tale Brook boats. The puzzle sheet had a single start circle with multiple lines going off in different directions to silver scratch-off circles. Each circle then had more lines going to more circles, etc. etc. Each line had an object name written on it. Bird, surfboard, apple, etc. The idea was to start at the start circle and as you rode along in the boat you would follow the path of the item that you passed first. You would then scratch off that circle and then follow the paths coming out of that circle until you passed an item and so on and so on. If you scratched off all the correct circles it would reveal a question, if you scratched off anything wrong you would see a wrong way icon and get -5 points off of the score of the puzzle. The question revealed was:
Which book sits atop the stack of books?
A hint was given on the puzzle that you would be wise to scratch off as you rode along because the answer to that question could be found at the very end of the ride. Answer: Aladdin

Fun Notes: During testing the entire Red Riding Hood scene was moved from the end of the ride to somewhere near the middle. It appeared some teams tried to do this puzzle without actually riding the ride and found that that would be impossible for a number of reasons. Ogel is Lego spelled backwards in case you missed that.

Can You Hear Me Now - 70 Points [Puzzle] [Number Sheet] This puzzle involved a series of photos of lego bricks in random piles. You had to use it in conjunction with the sheet of Lego numbers (0-9) that you received at the start of the race. Each photo contained a unique set of bricks (2 - 6x2, 1 - 2x2, etc.) that matched the bricks that made up a completed number on the sheet. Once you had all the numbers you needed to realize it was a phone number (the title of the puzzle was a big hint). Calling this number you would hear the following message.
Well done! You may want to get out a pencil and paper though, as you have one more thing to do. Ready? To find your final answer you will need 3 things: your park map, and two sets of numbers. The first set is 21 and 38. The second set is 34 and 45. With that information you should find yourself near some people having a drink. For your final answer write down what is depicted on the mugs they are drinking from. If you’re having trouble hearing or understanding any part of this message you can get a transcript of this call by going to the Puzzle Pursuit help location and showing the phone number you just called. Be sure and not let anyone else see what you are doing if you choose this option.
From that you had to take your park map and draw a line from 21 to 38 and then another from 34 to 45. Where the lines crossed you could go and find an answer to the question posed. Answer: A skull

Fun Notes: Orignally I created piles of Legos for the photos that made it quite a challenge to figure out the proper number. Ultimately I decided I didn't want people calling a lot of wrong phone numbers so I made it easier.

Bonus Puzzle - 70 Points [Puzzle] For this puzzle you had to find me or Nick and show us you put your Legos together such that it was symetrical with regards to color. That was pretty easy. The puzzle itself involved walking through the Lego Factory Tour and answering a bunch of questions all of which ended up being numbers. Those numbers could then be plugged into a small grid which resulted in a bunch of 2 digit numbers. These numbers were, in fact, Octal code which could be found on your Common Codes sheet that teams were given at the start of the race. The question decoded to:
Who is the leader of the paradox faction?
The answer could be found at the exit to the factory tour. Answer: Vander Darkflame

Fun Notes: We were doing a final walkthrough before printing up the puzzles just one week before the event and I noticed the Lego Factory Tour sign. I had thought the building was a gift shop all this time. We walked in and I knew I had to do a puzzle there. I put the entire puzzle together that night and we sent everything off to print the next day.

Hidden Puzzle - 50 Points [Puzzle] To complete this puzzle you needed to notice the odd P.O. Boxes amongst all the classified ads. If you wrote down the box numbers it became obvious these were not random:
  • 7-4
  • 5-4
  • 1-1
  • 2-1
  • 4-10
  • 3-9
  • 6-3
Obvious how, you ask? Notice the first numbers can be put in numerical order from 1 to 10. That's always a good sign that they are not random. Basically 2-1 could be read as The second (2) WORD of the question is the first (1) word of this ad. 4-10 would be the fourth word of the question is the 10th word of the ad, and so on. Putting them together you would get:
Who is standing at number forty-eight?
The answer could be found if you went to number 48 on the Lego Park map. Answer: A witch (there was also a bear nearby and we ultimately accepted that as well)

Fun Notes: This puzzle was one of the last things completed. There was actually a clue as to how to get a clue to figure out this puzzle in the classifieds. One team figured out the hidden puzzle thinking it was the actual puzzle. One team figured out the hidden puzzle while riding through the Lost Kingdom, after they discovered they didn't have to look for anything in that ride because the puzzle was out front.

Where Am I? 100 Points Possible [Page 1] [Page 2] Teams had to find where random images were taken around the park.
  • 1 - Back pocket of the Royal Blacksmith near the castle.
  • 2 - Fisherman's tackle box on the bridge near Dino Island.
  • 3 - Exit of Sea Life in the cafe
  • 4 - Wild woods Mini-golf course
  • 5 - Near studio store in a pond
  • 6 - The Cargo Ace ride sign in Land of Adventure
  • 7 - Window on front of Adventurer's Club
  • 8 - Island in Splash Battle ride
  • 9 - Window ledge of Brick Brothers Trading Co.
  • 10 - Near the restrooms behind the Hero Factory


Fun Notes: Many of the items I originally photographed moved, disappeared and returned later, or just disappeared.