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Location: Rest Area
At the Father Serra statue, there was a plastic box full of puzzles. We took our puzzle, a box of 26 crayons. In terms of form factor, of mechanic, this was perhaps my favorite puzzle ever. The Burninators had created a counterfeit box of Crayola crayons. Most of the crayons were black, but some were colored. There were custom labels; the box was custom.
Each crayon was labelled with a word. Each of the 26 label words started with a different letter. Some of the words seemed strange. The phones called up with a clue, hinting about a dictionary. A pre-game puzzle had told us to pack the OxFord Pocket American Dictionary, so we'd brought two copies. It seemed significant that some of the crayon-label words appeared in this dictionary, but some did not. Alas, this was a red herring.
The box art hinted that we should pair up the crayons. It was not so clear how to do so. In the end, we let the automated hints lead us through this puzzle. We had some ideas, but never the right ideas. I remember that at one point I bit through the end of a black crayon to see if some other color was concealed inside. There wasn't.
How did that puzzle work? Ah, we could pair up words to form color names:
doorknob + lackadaisical = black (d, l)
eyebrow + nystagmic = brown (e, n)
freqency + andantino = cyan (f, a)
geomancer + isentropic = cerise (g, i)
hummus + tardiness = mustard (h, t)
jodhpur + pleonasm = purple (j, p)
universal + monkeyshine = salmon (u, m)
Some words that didn't pair up to make colors. Uhm, and then I think there was another stage of pairing up, based on the meanings of words? Like, "geomancer" and "warlock" might have gone together because they both do magic? And doorknob and knocker might have gone together? Alas, I forget the details. Except that we used these pairs of letters to decode an encoded message that was printed on the back of our crayon dullener, a tribute to the never-effective crayola box crayon sharpener.