Known Knowns

Survive! board game

Dad opened the Survive! game to find a different toy, Magnatab, with a sticker on it that read “# 40 B7 DA”. Three coins, a penny, nickel, and quarter, were taped to the back of the game in specific positions.

Colors

On Dec 7, the background color to game.hanukkah.lol changed from a dark blue to something else, depending on who you are. Players used the hex color they saw when they logged in to fill in a pixel of a 26px by 26px image. The position of the pixel was indicated by the player’s first initial (x axis) and last initial (y axis). This was clued by the coins on the back of the Magnatab — the penny was taped where the AL (for Abe Lincoln) pixel would go, the nickel where TJ (Tommy Jeffs) would go, and the quarter where GW (G-Dubs) would go.

The picture resolved to The Kool-Aid Man breaking through a wall made up of yellow bricks, a clue for Dad to break through the wall behind the Wizard of Oz poster.

Lolaroid cards

After breaking down the black wall, Dad found a pack of business cards of employees from a company called Lolaroid Photo. All the cards had a name, a title, a phone number, an email address. Except one card’s email address was scrubbed out. The cards (with final segment redacted so no one actually calls):

Nicholas Bluhm, Resource Specialist, nbluhm@lolaroid.photo, 1-707-345-XXXX

Ophelia Charbonneau, Excecutive VP of States, ocharbonneau@lolaroid.photo, 1-707-269-XXXX

Tasha Currier, Empowerment Evangelist, tcurrier@lolaroid.photo, 1-707-262-XXXX

Ida Furlough, Plate Painter, ifurlough@lolaroid.photo, 1-707-790-XXXX

Chuck Hostetler, Senior Proactivist, chostetler@lolaroid.photo, 1-707-454-XXXX

Eliza Howser, Experimental Scientist, —————-, 1-707-413-XXXX

Prudence Judge, Paradigm Consultant, pjudge@lolaroid.photo, 1-707-576-XXXX

Harry Koelling, B2B Architect, hkoelling@lolaroid.photo, 1-707-242-XXXX

Otto McClean, Synergy Supervisor, omcclean@lolaroid.photo, 1-707-797-XXXX

Nancy Pavlik, Intelligence Enabler, npavlik@lolaroid.photo, 1-707-357-XXXX

Earl Selfridge, Therapeutic Minister, eselfridge@lolaroid.photo, 1-707-641-XXXX

Nerissa Simons, Interactional Ombudsman, nsimons@lolaroid.photo, 1-707-351-XXXX

Una Swaint, Deployment Guru, uswaint@lolaroid.photo, 1-707-962-XXXX

Madelyn Zak, Scalability Coordinator, mzak@lolaroid.photo, 1-707-818-XXXX

When alphabetized by last name, the initials of the first names spell NOTICE PHONE NUM.

China album

Dad flipped through a photo album from their trip to China. It had four pages, two pictures on each. The four pages each had titles and dates. In order:

We saw a soccer game — just for kicks! — April 9

Mountain climbing! Our guide was snow great. — February 14

We were running late to the library, so we booked it. — January 2

Dancing! We saw it everywhere. Quite a feet. — February 1

Red bag

Dad inspected a big red piece of luggage. Inside one pocket was the checked bag tag with PEK on it, from when he used the bag on the China trip. Other pockets were empty. The large compartment was locked with a 4-letter combination lock.

China week off

In the night 6 gift were pictures and letters from employees of the CAH’s factory in China. On the back of each picture was a phone number: 1-707-790-1231. This number corresponds with Ida Furlough’s Lolaroid business card. Her title is:

Plate Painter

Plateware

Dad found four plates — some of the china from his China trip — wrapped in newspaper, each with a red shape or line painted on it.

Vacation stories

Among the material in the night 6 gift were pictures and stories from some of the Chinese factory works. Each page of the album corresponded with one of the stories. By using the number of the month as a line number (e.g. February = 2nd line) and the day of month as the character number, you could pull one Chinese character from each of the four vacation stories. Using the order of the photo album, those characters were:

儿中叫工

By removing from each character the red shape/line that was found on the plates, that left four English letters:

LOOT

Dad entered L-O-O-T into the lock on the red bag, and it opened.

Torso & sweaters

Inside the red bag was a mannequin’s torso wearing one of Dad’s sweaters. The sweater had five holes on it, each revealing a number on the torso itself. Inside the bag were three more sweaters.

The mannequin ended up being covered with words. Dad tried all the sweaters on the mannequin and each sweater had holes revealing some of the words.

Eight Sensible Gifts videos

In each of four of the videos posted to eightsensiblegifts.com, someone in the background is wearing one of the red bag sweaters, with a pin on it. By lining up the location of the pin in the video with one of the holes, it resolved into the following four words:

SUM FIVE PHONE PREFIXES

Memories podcast

Dad found pieces of a torn up piece of paper tapes to the inside of a cabinet. When reconstructed, the pieces formed a pixelated version of logo for The Cryptex podcast, from last year’s hunt. Going to the podcast’s website didn’t work, but by looking up the old feed for the podcast, you could access a new podcast using the same feed: Memories, starring Tom & Karlee.

From Episode 1:

The title, Half-Blind Einstein Edition, relates to the Backpack thread. (See below.)

Tom & Karlee tell the story of a corn maze Dad put up when they were younger, which was a clue to look at the back of the Corn Hole cereal box. (See below.)

Tom refers to six of the women listed in the chorus of Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5”: Monica, Erica, Rita, Tina, Sandra, and Jessica. Mary was left out, but only because she doesn’t sound very Jewish. Karlee mentions another line from that song.

Tom makes two references to the Jessica Simpson song “I Wanna Love You Forever.”

Karlee says “I was 5 and you were 6,” which sounds a lot like a line from the Cher song “Bang Bang”, but we swear, it’s just a weird coincidence.

Tom says that players trying to solve the Night 2 barcode should spend more time at the library.

From Episode 2:

Tom makes two references to the Puddle of Mudd song, “She Hates Me”.

Karlee makes two references to the Avril Lavigne song, “Sk8er Boi”.

The title, Oh yeah!, is a hint about the Kool-Aid man resolution to the Colors puzzle.

From Episode 3:

Tom and Karlee make references to Gavin DeGraw’s “I Don’t Want To Be” and Switchfoot’s “Dare You To Move.”

Tom and Karlee discussed yellow brick walls, a reference to the wall of yellow bricks behind Kool-Aid Man in the Colors puzzle.

Tom said “This is my earliest memory. Asking Grandpa AKA Zayde if naughty Elves abducted dad. Seriously.” which, if you read the first letters, spelled TIME MAGAZINE ADS, a hint about the TIME puzzle.

The title, Somehow Form A Family, is a clue about the title screen of the Brady Bunch, where Marcia is in the upper left and Greg the upper right. That clues you to which cards are relevant in the baseball binder.

From Episode 4:

Tom and Karlee make references to “Show Me What You Got” by Jay-Z and “My Love” by Justin Timberlake.

The title, What Will You Fall For?, is a line from the broadway show Hamilton, which Tom & Karlee sing a line from in the episode. It’s also a gentle ribbing about listening to non-entities who may be trying to troll the game.

Tom mentions a sign by the side of the road, which is a clue to look up all these songs on the Billboard Top 100 list for the week the story takes place.

From Episode 5:

Tom and Karlee make references to “Single Ladies,” by Beyonce, and “Can’t Believe It,” by T-Pain

Tom mentions Jessica’s habit of drinking Iced Tea Screwdrivers and reading pulp fiction, which is a hint about importance of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels.

The title, A Singular Character, is a hint about needing to extract one letter from each comic book to form the final clue.

From Episode 6:

Tom and Karlee make references to “Try,” by Pink and “I Cry,” by Flo Rida.

The title, A Safe Investment, refers to the need to look back at the investment certificate from day 4 for a hint about how to decode the day 7 barcode.

Billboard

The 2 songs from each podcast were listed on the Billboard Top 100 during the week of the story being told. The positions of each pair of songs were:

4 & 5

19 & 20

18 & 15

25 & 5

1 & 18

20 & 8

By mapping the positions of those songs against the alphabet, the 12 positions turned into an instruction:

DESTROY EARTH

Globe

Dad took a brick to the globe in the room and found three AAA batteries inside.

Night 7 barcode

The envelope for the seventh gift had five barcodes printed on the back. Each one resolved to a 12-digit number:

002089442056

902114321297

701026371253

102099230757

102017040321

Investment certificate

The investment certificate from the fourth gift showed twelve dots, some of which were colored in and some were hollow. The pattern was:

—oo—oo–

By using this pattern on the five 12-digit numbers, and treating the dashes as one sequence and the circles as another, the numbers broke down to

002-944-56 / 08 / 20

902-432-97 / 11 / 12

701-637-53 / 02 / 12

102-923-57 / 09 / 07

102-704-21 / 01 / 03

IKEA

Each line above is a combination of one IKEA product number and two English letters. The 10 letters combine to form:

BLACKLIGHT

The IKEA numbers are for items that are in the basement:

SPRUTT

LACK

KULLEN

KNAGGLIG

BITRADE

Blacklight

Dad put the AAA batteries in the flashlight that he found in the briefcase, and it turned out to be a blacklight. He shone the blacklight on three IKEA products, and found something on each:

KULLEN: an arrow, pointing up.

LACK: a face with a tongue sticking out

SPRUTT: four eyes

KNAGGLIG: a box with an arrow going in

BITRADE: a painter’s palette

Each of the blacklight symbols corresponded with a Garbage Pail Kids card that uses one of the names of a Lolaroid employee. Specifically:

4-eyed Ida (Furlough)

Inside Otto (McClean)

Nick Lick (Bluhm)

Earl Painting (Selfridge)

Up Chuck (Hostetler)

Summing the five prefixes of those employees resulted in 3027. Dad punched 3027 into the safe, and it opened.

Safe

Inside the safe were LOTS AND LOTS of Garbage Pail Kids, a burner, and a note from the kids. It read (with Hebrew words transliterated in [brackets]):

Dad, your [yeladim] have one more trick for you

A little test of everyone’s [Ivreet] kung-fu

Find eight [chavurat hazevel]

Order their numbers well

Punch them into the phone and it’s through.

Under the note was a pile of Hebrew Garbage Pail Kids (aka Chavurat Hazevel).

King phone number

In the night 8 gift was a certificate for being King of Sensible Castle for 3 minutes. The vine pattern at the top and bottom could be interpreted as binary and then converted to a 10 digit number:

(747) 322-4565

Texting this number with your eight-character code returned a crossword puzzle-type clue. Each clue solved to a word that included the two-letter state abbreviation for the state you live in. When those two letters were extracted, the remaining letters got slotted into an 11x11 grid. The outer perimeter of the grid read:

POINT BLANK EXIT WOUNDS

Torso, again

By treating the four important words (SUM FIVE PHONE PREFIXES) on the torso as entry holes, and considering where an exit wound would appear by way of a gun pointed at each of them at point blank range, we found four new words: