For the last month and a half, Decode readers have gotten an inside look at the puzzles from the campaign for The Maze of Games, which was a Kickstarter campaign run as an alternate reality game. The puzzles, created by Gaby Weidling, Eric Harshbarger and me, were detailed in three separate posts: Here's part 1, part 2, and part 3. Each puzzle led to a different badge. Now that the campaign is over, we figured we'd better reveal the answers. Click the thumbnails of each badge, above, to view the individual puzzle solution.

The Puzzle Solver Badge Throughout the campaign page were eight hidden puzzles and a poem that united all of them. The hidden puzzle locations and answers were: In my campaign bio, I purport to have written a book called Cremation: Is It the Answer? I didn't, but CREMATION was the answer. In the video, the Magic: The Gathering card Feast or Famine was displayed with the word PRIEST crossed out. In a caption for a page with a maze on it, all the first letters of "Here's A Sample By Elisa Exhibiting Nostalgia" were capitalized, spelling HAS-BEEN. In the illustration of the Quaice children, the word GORE can be seen on the cabinet drawers. In the FAQ, the first letters of each question and answer spell NASTIEST. In the video, Gaby uses a giant pencil to indicate a word missing from the wall crossword, which can only be HARDY. In the reward "club" names, the numbers 1, 13, 21, 19, 5, and 4 can be converted to their alphabetical equivalents to spell AMUSED. In the video, Gaby displays a sign with the word "these" above some TRAYS.

Each of these answers can be scrambled to the name of a mythological monster: MANTICORE, SPRITE, BANSHEE, OGRE, TITANESS, HYDRA, MEDUSA, SATYR. Using the number on the video's cryptex key to count into those words, you can spell the word MINOTAUR.

The Maze Breaker Badge The answers to the hidden word puzzles in the updates were: 1 WAR, 2 RISK, 3 PONG, 4 RUMMY, 5 POKER, 6 BOGGLE, 7 SPADES, 8 ASTEROIDS, 9 HEARTS, 10 BINGO, 11 HALO, 12 PIT, 13 UNO, 14 SCRABBLE, 15 CHESS, 16 ROULETTE, 17 CHECKERS, 18 DOOM, 19 OPERATION, 20 OTHELLO, 21 CRIBBAGE, 22 BRIDGE, 23 CAREERS, 24 LIFE

Those answers led to a series of maze pieces which fit together thusly:



That folded into a cube upon which this message could be read: "ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE." (Note that the word "ENTER" appears in one square on the grid, and appears to be the starting space but is not.) The Gatekeeper asked for the source of this quote, which was INFERNO.

The Wired Hunter Badge In Matt Forbeck's interview, my answers' sentences' first letters spell out TIME FLIES LIKE AN ARROW FRUIT FLIES LIKE A. The word that ends that sentence is BANANA.

The Century Club Badge In our video for the Century Club, I show screens with dollar figures composed solely of 1s and 0s: $001,111, $010,111, $001,100, and $010,011. In binary, these translate to 15, 23, 12, and 19. Those can be converted to the letters in OWLS.

The Song Stylist Badge This three-part puzzle required going to three different media sites. On the Penny Arcade Report, clicking a link for the movie villain Jigsaw got you a jigsaw puzzle. Reassembling the jigsaw puzzle spelled out A JIGSAW FALLING INTO PLACE SO THERE IS NOTHING TO EXPLAIN, a lyric from the song "Jigsaw Falling into Place" by RADIOHEAD. On the Story Forward podcast, the hosts read three words: "Oolong, MacPherson, Sargasso." These can complete phrases with the words TEA, ELLE, and SEA. Pronounced, they're the trio TLC. In my Reddit Ask Me Anything post, I answer the familiar horse-sized duck question asked of many AMA respondents. In that response, I give some wonky physics that make these equations:

S=T*1, T E =(M+P+L) E , π=LO, T=S

That spells STONE TEMPLE PILOTS.

Radiohead, TLC, and Stone Temple Pilots each recorded a song called CREEP.

The Number Theorist Badge In some wallpaper we unlocked as a stretch goal, all the PDFs were of seemingly unrelated numbers. The trick was to treat the wallpaper dimensions as multiplications, and then divide each result by its corresponding PDF number: 480x640 = 307200 / 19200 = 16 = P

640x960 = 614400 / 614400 = 1 = A

640x1136 = 727040 / 181760 = 4 = D

768x1024 = 786432 / 196608 = 4 = D

1024x768 = 786432 / 65536 = 12 = L

1280x800 = 1024000 / 204800 = 5 = E

1366x768 = 1049088 / 524544 = 2 = B

1536x2048 = 3145728 / 3145728 = 1 = A

1600x1200 = 1920000 / 160000 = 12 = L

1920x1200 = 2304000 / 192000 = 12 = L The alphanumeric equivalents of the results spelled PADDLEBALL.

The Bandleader Badge In an MP3 timed to the announcement of our soundtrack, Gaby played nine notes and rests. The notes were BAB?G?A?D, with the ?s as rests. Replacing the rests with letters that cannot be represented by musical notes gave the answer BABY GRAND.