Solution: Meta 3: On the Beach
Answer: POOL TEAM MEETING
Written by aki and Jonathan
There are 3 separate meta puzzles taken from the normal puzzle round. After solving the prepuzzle, we have found that Waldo went back to three scenes in his very first book. Subsequently, we visit 26 locations, each of which belongs to one of the three given scenes.
| Puzzle | Answer |
|---|---|
| Battleships | NAVAL COMMANDER |
| Dock | YACHT TRAINEE |
| Jetty Creatures | ZOOLOGISTS |
| Message in a Bottle | LETTER FROM HAWAII |
| Sea Cave | X AND Y ANNOUNCEMENT |
| Seashells | BAZAAR DILEMMA |
| Shallow Waters | FLIPPROOF |
| Swimming Area | JOHN COLLIER |
| Under the Shade | QUEEN OF THE GREEN |
| Watch Party | KINDER EGG SURPRISES |
As clued by the flavortext, we need to “split” out the letter pairs from each answer. We also notice that the answers are all of unique lengths, which gives us an ordering.
| Length | Answer | Letter pairs |
|---|---|---|
| 9 | FLIPPROOF | PO |
| 10 | ZOOLOGISTS | O |
| 11 | JOHN COLLIER | L |
| 12 | YACHT TRAINEE | TE |
| 13 | BAZAAR DILEMMA | AM |
| 14 | NAVAL COMMANDER | M |
| 15 | QUEEN OF THE GREEN | EE |
| 16 | LETTER FROM HAWAII | TI |
| 17 | X AND Y ANNOUNCEMENT | N |
| 18 | KINDER EGG SURPRISES | G |
Reading these letter pairs in order, we obtain the third location where Waldo can be found, the POOL TEAM MEETING.
Author's Notes
It was hilarious to us when cloning the GPH repo to find that their sample meta had precisely the same mechanic. Regardless, due to meta meta constraints, we needed a way to pull more letters into the meta answers, and so this meta was mostly forced in order to keep the “paired” letters idea at the same time.