2018: The Year of the Spider
(Check out some photos!)
Welcome to Hogwarts, where the creatures (especially the spiders) of the Forbidden Forest have had enough of all the Quiddach Practices keeping them up at all hours, and have stolen all the brooms. Only puzzle-solving can possibly get the brooms back!
Sixteen Houses of Puzzlers took up the challenge of solving a set of fifteen puzzles, each puzzle yielded an answer phrase. On the final day, the teams discovered a strange web of words that the answer phrases fit into, which lead to the secret codes that could unlock where the brooms were secreted.
Which lead to this year's winner! Congratulations go out to Ostrander's Army, lead by Prefect...er, team captain...Elliot Kienzle, and joined by teammates Avik Barua, Perry Beamer, Ryan Cho, Sushanth Gupta, Avery Liou, Riccardo Morri, Benjamin Mourad, Catherine Rodriguez, Anish Senapati, Eric Shen, Wendy Shi, Rebecca Wessel, Kevin Zhou, and Oreet Zimand.
As with other years, the Puzzle Lords would like to share with you a puzzle from the contest. Want to know the answer? Sure...here it is.
The specifics? Here they are:
[click to enlarge]
Of course, winning is nice, but there is nothing quite like winning Puzzlepalooza's Coveted Spirit Award. This year the battle for the Coveted Spirit Award was particularly hard-fought, but in the end it went to House Weaveryn:
Once again, the Curse of the First Day struck...no team who has lead Puzzlepalooza on the first day has gone on to win it. This year's victum of the Curse was The House Elf Liberation Front. However, they were able to at least molify their disappointment by winning both the First Losers Prize and the Iron Puzzler award.
Finally, the Puzzle Lords would like to acknowledge all the alumni and parental volunteers who came out to help use keep things working smoothly and efficently...we couldn't have done it without you!
And remember, Puzzlepalooza 2019 is only seconds away!