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POST NAMER TBC-- work harder, meme!

Welcome back, anyway! Chat fandom, media, creative things, weirdness from around the net, funny stuff, anything! Meme awaits!

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From: (Anonymous)

https://2025.galacticpuzzlehunt.com/

Whoops, forgot to post this one. Galactic runs August 22 to September 8, and as usual, it's full of suspicious cartoon mascots, new mechanics that push the limits of what's considered a puzzle hunt, and hopefully, no more goddamn card games.

From: (Anonymous)

For some context, this was the hunt that did Definitely Not Genshin Impact™ last year, where you had to draw from the gacha machine to get new puzzles, and Definitely Not Hearthstone™ last last year, where every puzzle was actually just a really cursed card game. This year, we play as a nature spirit, Gaia, who's been recruited by Pan to oversee the terraforming of a new world.

https://2025.galacticpuzzlehunt.com/static/images/cutscenes/pan-2.png

Also, this is Pan. Personally I think it should've been named Pain, but Gaia is new to the job and doesn't get opinions.

The fancy mechanic in this hunt is that all the puzzles come in pieces. You have a shared board with all your teammates (which is probably why the first thing this hunt did was lag) and you have to identify which puzzle the piece belongs to and reassemble it yourself. So far, most of these have been pretty straightforward, but things are definitely going to get crazier...

From: (Anonymous)

The bread pun is fun!

From: (Anonymous)

It's all bread puns! We're following a trail of breadcrumbs, but it's gone stale and it looks like the puzzles are still in the oven...

From: (Anonymous)

Remember how I said things were going to get crazier? Well, now we have an island of crossword puzzles, where we have to assemble the crossword grid from individual pieces and the crossword clues from chunks of text. Also, there's three different crosswords that have all been mixed up together.

From: (Anonymous)

'Average crossword has 7.7 across clue headers' factoid actually just statistical error. Average crossword has one across clue header. Crosswords Georg, who lives on the Isle of Crosswords and has 21 across clue headers, is an outlier and should not have been counted.

From: (Anonymous)

Okay, this hunt sucks.

Issue is a combination of timezones and very narrow puzzle width. At any point in time, we probably have five or six puzzles open, which is a bit small but reasonable for a hunt of this size. However, each puzzle also requires assembly. A puzzle may be unlocked but not complete, and while those are often 'solvable,' in practice we've solved maybe one 'banana' puzzle (and zero 'spicy' puzzles). So in reality, there's maybe one, max two puzzles we're able to work on.

Other problem is that my teammates are most active during the night, and we get new hints in the evening. So a typical day, for me, involves spending the whole day stuck on one puzzle and then waking up to discover that my teammates have hinted that puzzle, solved it, and then done all the easy stuff on the new puzzle it unlocks, leaving me stuck on one puzzle again. :( Today I finally solved something, though!

From: (Anonymous)

> Today I finally solved something, though!

Congrats for that much, at least, dan!

From: (Anonymous)

Not a big fan of the recent trend to keep puzzle hunts open and playable for a whole month after they've ended. There's a bunch of weird puzzles here I'd love to do write-ups for (one of them is called Across the Pond!), but I'm going to have to wait until October before people can see them without having an account.

From: (Anonymous)

https://2025.galacticpuzzlehunt.com/round/aisle_of_crosswords

Only took a whole month, but I can finally share my ~~least~~ favorite round from this year's Galactic Puzzle Hunt. This year's gimmick is that you have to assemble all the puzzles yourself, and nowhere is that more obvious than when you open up the crossword round and are confronted with dozens of black and white squares and an entire array of unsorted and unnumbered clues.

Somehow, you're supposed to sort this out into three different crosswords, each with their own gimmick. Seems daunting, but the trick is that there's two distinct styles of crossword puzzles - British crosswords have cryptic-style clues and open lattice grids, while American crosswords have definition-style clues and fully checked grids.

With a little work, we might then identify that Debbie Downers is a British-style cryptic crossword where the wordplay for the clues are all missing -ER and Turtles All the Way Down is an American-style crossword that only has Across clues because the Downs are turtles, which leaves us with Across the Pond. As the name suggests, this crossword involves both British and American-style clues!

https://2025.galacticpuzzlehunt.com/solution/across_the_pond
^ contains spoilers (way more spoilers than I've already given!) but might be useful for visualization

The relevant pieces for this puzzle form an 18x12 grid, of which the left half is American-style and the right half is British-style. It's a bit of an oddly specific size, but the clues keep referencing a 'conflict' and the 'fray' and a 'leader' and it becomes clear that those dimensions were intentionally chosen because this puzzle is themed after the War of 1812. Final extraction involves catching 'spies' on either side of the war, which are cleverly-written clues that look like they could be of the right style, but are in fact solved in the other style.