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Thank you to all of the students who wrote and submitted puzzles for the Mission Street Puzzles scholarship! We were absolutely blown away by the quantity and quality of the applications. As our judging team test-solved each puzzle, every single submission put a smile on our face, and it was extremely difficult to narrow down the pool to just one winner.

…so we decided to choose two winners! Huge congratulations to both of our scholarship prizewinners:

Odin McDermott (Whitman College), whose puzzle was entitled “The Inflight Magazine”

Ben Coukos-Wiley (Rochester Institute of Technology), whose puzzle was entitled “Bridges”

Starting in two weeks (July 15th) we will begin posting some of our favorite puzzles for the Scholarship Edition ten-week series. You’ll have the opportunity to solve Odin’s and Ben’s puzzles as part of this series. See you all then!

Thank you to all the students who applied to the Mission Street Puzzles scholarship program! We received so many amazing submissions that we’ve decided to release the top finalists’ puzzles in a “Special Edition” MSP Season Five running July 15th.-Sept. 16th Unlike typical Mission Street Puzzles seasons, this one will be non-competitive – that is, there will be no answer submission box and no leaderboard. The first puzzles will be released Wednesday, July 15th at 8pm ET / 5pm PT. 

Winners and finalists for the scholarship will be notified by end of June, and names will be announced in early July. Stay tuned!

Willa (founder of Mission Street Puzzles) is excited to announce that she’s written a book of challenging puzzles, Only the Hardest Puzzles – and it’s publicly available now! The puzzle genres in the book include crossword puzzles (cryptic and non-cryptic), sudokus, kakuros, and more – not quite MSP-style puzzles, though you’ll see some interesting twists on traditional puzzle genres. The book is available on various channels such as Amazon and Target:

Buy on Amazon

Long time, no see! We’re back, with a couple of updates for you.

Bad news first: Season Five will be cancelled, due to organizer unavailability. We truly appreciate your patience and loyalty, especially from those of you who came back week after week, season after season. Unfortunately, real life has gotten in the way, and we haven’t been able to dedicate the time we need to put together another full season of high-quality puzzles.

But don’t go away! We’ve been busy putting together some fresh initiatives, starting with this one: a Mission Street Puzzles scholarship! We are really excited to have this opportunity to give back to the community. Click through below to find out more. And please share this with any students you know!

We also have another project that we’ve been working on, so keep an eye out for another announcement from us in the next couple of months!

Much love,
MSP

The deadline for puzzle draft submissions for Season Five is Monday, July 15th, 2019 at 11:59pm. If you have a great idea, please email a draft and solution walkthrough to help@missionstreetpuzzles.com! The theme of Season Five will be the beautiful city of Barcelona, Spain. There is no guarantee that submitted puzzles will be used, and some may be modified heavily to fit the season’s needs.

Looking forward to seeing your ideas!

From a candy store to a museum to a “wild” cafe, Season Four has taken us all across Seoul. Congrats to all of the teams that solved puzzles! In particular, our big winners were…

Cardinality in first place,
Plugh in second place, and
terrapin iterated in third place!

All of these teams kept up a perfect streak of 12 puzzles solved–amazing! Great work!

This season would not have been possible without our awesome team of volunteers working behind the scenes! A million thanks to:

Arturo, Editor-in-Chief
Advith, Tech Lead
Carly, Puzzle Author
Lily, Puzzle Author
Shuyi, Puzzle Author
Kevin, Test Solver
Jeff, Test Solver
Ling, Swag Manager
Willa, MSP Founder
Sean, MSP Founder

We are now soliciting puzzle draft submissions for Season Five. If you have a great idea, please email a draft and solution walkthrough to help@missionstreetpuzzles.com! The theme of Season Five will be the beautiful city of Barcelona, Spain. There is no guarantee that submitted puzzles will be used, and some may be modified heavily to fit the season’s needs.

Stay tuned via social media (or this site) to find out when the season will be starting. Thanks so much to all the loyal fans that make Mission Street Puzzles what it is. See you later!

And the correct answer to the final puzzle of the season, “Seoul Scavenger Hunt,” was…

MAENGKUN RACCOON CAFE! Maengkun Raccoon Cafe is a cafe that offers the opportunity to hang out with raccoons (and dogs) while sipping your coffee. The cafe provides lockers for you to protect your belongings from overzealous furry friends–be sure to empty your pockets before entering the play zone. MSP staff notes that reviews are mixed for this cafe, due to concerns about the care and stimulation level for the animals. We don’t have firsthand knowledge about this facility, but emphasize that we do not condone mistreatment of animals.

The 11 activities of the scavenger hunt correspond to previous puzzles of this Mission Street Puzzles season. For example, the activity “Raise caterpillars” corresponds to the “Metamorphosis” puzzle.

Based on the logic clues, you can deduce an ordering for those puzzles:

#1 Play Pokemon Go (“Critters In My Pants”)
#2 Build a fence (“Berrypicking”)
#3 Take a group photo (“Hey, Seoul Sister”)
#4 See a boy band (“Of Boys And Girls”)
#5 Read the newspaper (“Headlines”)
#6 Hide in a bush (“Hide and Seek”)
#7 Go on a date (“Matching Madness”)
#8 Fix a machine (“Robot Tug-of-War”)
#9 Perform a dance (“Just Dance”)
#10 Raise caterpillars (“Metamorphosis”)
#11 Compose a song (“K-Pop Hit”)

Each of these previous puzzles has a Seoul place as its answer, but how do they combine to lead to the final destination? Take a look at the mysterious snapshot images. Each of these images illustrates the name of a team on the Mission Street Puzzles leaderboard. For example, the repeated image of the turtle represents the team “terrapin iterated.”

Typing the correct team name for each snapshot into the corresponding text box leads you to another mini-puzzle to solve.
For example, the answer to the the Terrapin Iterated puzzle is the pair of numbers 4 and 1. The team names and mini-puzzle answers are:

• Terrapin Iterated: 4, 1
• Clot Stoppers: 9
• Cardinality: 5, 6
• Dare to Play: 7
• Black Fedora Group: 7
• Funky Town Monkey Pimps: 9, 6, 3
• Pizza Rat: 8, 12
• Mobius Strippers: 5
• [Redacted]: 4, 1
• Ducky Charms: 10, 11
• Please Clap: 2, 6

These numerical answers index into the previous season’s puzzle answers. For example, the 4th and 1st letters of “Critters In My Pants” are M and A; the 9th letter of “Berrypicking” is E; and so on. Putting these letters together spells out the final answer: MAENGKUN RACCOON CAFE!

The Faster Solver this week was team Cardinality! Closely following them were Matt Du in second and Plugh in third. Congrats everyone! To find out the winners of the whole season, check out the Season Four Recap…

Note: Maengkun Raccoon Cafe is not affiliated with Mission Street Puzzles in any way.

Over the past few months, we’ve been on an exciting scavenger hunt that took us all over Seoul. It was such a blur–I can’t even remember, in what order did we complete the activities on the checklist? And what were the other teams we glimpsed along the way? Maybe once we recap the hunt’s previous places, we can figure out the final destination.

Scavenger hunt checklist:
☑ Build a fence
☑ Compose a song
☑ Fix a machine
☑ Go on a date
☑ Hide in a bush
☑ Perform a dance
☑ Play Pokemon Go
☑ Raise caterpillars
☑ Read the newspaper
☑ See a boy band
☑ Take a group photo

Our snapshots, chronologically:

Our team’s notes:

• If building a fence was one of the first three activities that we did, then composing a song was one of the last three activities.
• If we performed a dance later than hiding in a bush, then we built a fence later than playing Pokemon Go.
• After fixing a machine but before composing a song, we did at least two other activities.
• If we saw a boy band earlier than building a fence, then we went on a date earlier than taking a group photo.
• After going on a date but before performing a dance, we did exactly one other activity.
• We read the newspaper earlier than raising caterpillars.
• Seeing a boy band was one of the first five activities we did.
• We went on a date immediately after hiding in a bush.
• If performing a dance was one of the last four activities that we did, then so was fixing a machine.
• If reading the newspaper was an odd-number activity, then so was taking a group photo.
• Taking a group photo was one of the first three activities we did.
• Playing Pokemon Go was either the first or the last activity we did.
• If seeing a boy band was the fifth activity that we did, then building a fence was the sixth activity.

Note: Mission Street Puzzles’ interactive puzzles are best viewed in the Chrome browser.

And the correct answer to the “Just Dance” puzzle was…

NEXON ARENA! The Nexon Arena is an eSports stadium in Seoul! It has hosted competitions for FIFA Online 3, StarCraft II, Dota 2, League of Legends, and Hearthstone. With your new dance moves, your avatars can perform there too!

The choreographer gives 14 notes, which each correspond to a word and which match up with the first seven dances:

Typing these words in brings you to a series of dance moves, each with five steps (letters). (Alum example). Noting that all seven words are of differing lengths, we put them in order to get the initials ANAGRAM — our grand finale.

We can fill out as much or as little of the dance moves as we need to to constrain the final grid.

Matching the dance moves to the grand finale grid, we ANAGRAM them to get the full grid:

The highlighted steps read XENON ANEAR. We similarly anagram this to get our answer NEXON ARENA.

The Faster Solver this week was team terrapin iterated! Following on their heels were teams Davidsteinandfriends in second and Plugh in third. Congrats everyone!

Note: Nexon Arena is not affiliated with Mission Street Puzzles in any way.

You are in South Korea’s premier dance crew. For your next performance, you’ll need to learn a number of new routines, and put them together into the grand finale. Can you figure out what the dances are called, based on the choreographer’s notes below?

Choreographer’s Notes:

Feed liquid, usually milk
Reddish-brown in color
The state of having written a book?
University in Alabama
Hydrated sulfate salt
Graduate of a university
Without compassion
Ovoviviparous shark
Moves at a slow pace
Missing a famous candy bar
Typical of Antarctica
The largest river in a watershed
Control over a situation
Dominant fashion trend

(The) Learn Dance!

Note: Mission Street Puzzles’ interactive puzzles are best viewed in the Chrome browser.