The Masquerade Ball

Welcome to the 2022 Boxes and Booze Holiday Puzzle Hunt. This year’s theme takes inspiration from the mystery and mystique of the masked ball.

Use the clues provided to solve the riddle and claim the prize! There is no need to spend your time rereading endless accounts of the day this year – this is a party, after all! Don’t delay or your desire’s dance ticket might be full. If there are no correct answers the person who comes closest may be awarded the prize, so send detailed answer explanations. Hints will begin to appear under the hint tab starting after a week has gone by. The solution will be announced sometime in the new year.

Puzzle master Robert Yarger’s Golem Heart is a challenging interlocking conundrum which has been brought to life magnificently by professional resin cast artist Lewis Evans.

Six panels surround a jewel-like “heart” at the puzzle’s core. Assembling the panels is challenge enough, but the multi-faceted heart adds new layers of complexity.

This beautiful B&B Holiday Puzzle Hunt Special Edition is cast with gold flake running throughout the panels and a purple heart which has been “opalized” to shimmer like a radiant jewel, using Lewis Evans’ proprietary Fossilite ® technique. It is “one of a kind”.

No hints needed this year, as the master of Boxter Hall oversaw inquiries when asked

If you were game enough to seek out the solution here up until now, you would have been guided to the solutions page – that is, the Cocktails page of the blog. Many fine solutions are to be found there and I’m tempted to make an actual cocktail book one day. But I digress.

This year’s puzzle took what I imagined was fairly obvious inspiration from the famous treasure hunt picture book Masquerade by Kit Williams published in 1979. It was a favorite book of mine when I was very young, and although I never solved it on my own I was determined to solve his follow up book, which had no name. The book’s name was the challenge, and I did indeed solve it correctly. Hmmm … next year …

In the original Masquerade book, gorgeous illustrations of people, animals and objects in the countryside or other settings were presented on each page, and told the story of a lost treasure, a necklace of a gold and jeweled hare. Around each painting was a border with a cryptic saying running all around the edge. Hidden clues provided throughout the book (an additional clue was provided in a Sunday Times ad run over a year later, after no one had solved the mystery yet) led to the solution. Find each character (person and animal) on every illustration, then draw a line from each eye, through the longest digit on the same side hand and same side foot (right eye to right longest fingertip, etc), and continue the line onto the border frame where it will hit a single letter from the cryptic sentence there. Collect all the letters in this fashion for each page, and rearrange them to spell a word. Putting all the words together from all the illustrations made a new riddle, which led to an actual treasure buried in the English countryside, the jewel encrusted golden hare.

As insanely brilliant and impossibly difficult as that mystery was, knowing how it works already ought to be a big help. So I created an homage puzzle hunt, which required the same element of tracing a line from the eye to a letter on a border frame, and then I left some not so subtle clues to let you know it was based on the Masquerade book. For example, it was a masquerade ball! I gave all the puzzles masquerade masks with two eyes! The picture collage was a dance full of characters with eyes, surrounded by a frame with a cryptic sentence running around the border! Ok, ok, not everyone is familiar with the Masquerade book from 1979, and a masquerade ball does not necessarily mean anything other than what it is. The book was from a long time ago, I grant you. But what of that cryptic sentence around the frame: I AM THE KEEPER OF THE JEWEL OF MASQUERADE WHICH LIES WAITING SAFE INSIDE ME FOR YOU OR ETERNITY …? As much as I’d like to take credit for that awesome sentence, it was written by Kit Williams, and was inscribed on the ceramic vase which held the golden hare buried in the ground. A quick Google search of the phrase would bring you right to the source material. Then there was the photo of the grand prize, wearing a masquerade mask of – a hare! ICYMI, the caption under the photo asked who would inherit the prize – “who will be the golden heir?” Like I said, not so subtle. A more subtle clue was hidden in the sentence around the frame itself. In the original book, each sentence had certain letters which were “barbed” with little diamonds. All the barbed letters would spell out various words, which were often a clue, or a confirmation of something. Look carefully and you will also see barbed letter in the sentence around the frame here, which when rearranged, spell “WILLIAMS”.

Very well, you deduced that this hunt references the original Masquerade. Now what? Let’s see, there are two eyes in these masks, and a handle … the handle proved to be quite tempting and many people drew a line straight down the handle to the frame. This works almost all the time, but will always lead you to the wrong letter. The fact that it doesn’t lead to a letter in every case might have suggested there was something wrong with this approach. And it doesn’t account for the eyes, which was a critical aspect of the Masquerade solution, after all. Perhaps we should step back and read the instructions.

First of all, the introduction to the hunt was mostly fluff and flattery, to set the stage and poke at my puzzling friends around the world. But there were a few nuggets in there. One was the phrase “recalls the merriment of past success” which was meant to remind people of the solution to last year’s challenge, which required the pairing of two letters to build an endgame phrase. This little tidbit would prove extremely elusive. “You will need your invitation to gain entry to the ball” was telling you to click on the invitation to find the main puzzle collage – I don’t know if anyone missed this, I doubt it. The suggestion to visit the “Cock-Tale” menu was pure vanity, in case you’ve never explored my site, but the suggestion to visit the Art Gallery in “Boxter Hall” should have led you to the “Boxes” page on my site, where you would find the Artist Guide. That would come in handy later. In the “Rules” section there was also mention of no need to spend time re-reading “endless accounts” this time – poking fun at myself for making you read through so many of my old blog posts for last year’s puzzle. Hopefully you did not this time, but if you did, you must be all the wiser.

Let’s break down the invitation riddle now:

Who will win the Heart of Stick?

Hopefully you realized that this is merely referencing the prize, the special edition Stickman Golem’s Heart. Some also interpreted the word stick as a guide for the line of sight from one eye through the handle “stick”, which was a fine idea.

Select your costume and don your mask

Come join the party – nothing hidden here!

You may yet wonder who’s dancing quick

An introduction should do the trick

Introduce yourself to the dancers – the first step in most puzzle hunts with pictures of puzzles is to identify the puzzles! The masks and angles make it a little tricky! Most of the puzzle dancers can be identified from my blog posts, but not all. To be extra fair, I made sure to include photos of all of these other puzzles in a fairly conspicuous place on my site – you can find them in the “Art Gallery” mentioned in the introduction. Furthermore, if you follow the links of those photos to the specific Artist’s pages, the descriptions there include the names of these puzzles. Except for one of them, which was simply an oversight, but actually led to a few false threads being chased – sorry … ?

But do not look sinister for the next task

Or none shall invite you to dance

Ah, we have identified all the puzzles, and must be moving on to the next step in the solution, the next task. Don’t look sinister, that seems clear enough. I know this must have been hard for some of you.

Rather be dexterous while playing this game

Now wait a minute, be dexterous, don’t look sinister … those are rather unusual words. Which many saw right away are the Latin for “right” and “left”. Ok, do something on the right, but don’t do it – specifically don’t look - left. So, look right?

And pair the first with a virtuous glance

The first part of this clue tripped up almost everyone who came close, so we will come back to it in a moment. The second part, a virtuous glance, seems to confirm we need to be looking at something. So yes, we must have to look, and look right, since we have been admonished not to look left. Why a “virtuous” glance? It confirms the righteous path.

That spies its mark at the end of a name

To reveal its aim

In the original Masquerade puzzle, as mentioned, you needed to trace a line from an eye over to a letter on the border frame. The trajectory of the line was set by the “longest digit” on each extremity – the longest finger or toe would guide the line from the eye to correct spot on the frame. In this case, there is really only one thing you can use to guide the line, which is the handle. Of course, there are always plenty of other ways to misinterpret a mysterious treasure hunt, and people tried to simply “look right”, or even left. In case you did not understand the point of the Masquerade reference, the invitation spelled things out for you. Sort of.

The “virtuous glance that spies its mark at the end of a name to reveal its aim” is telling you to look from the right eye (now don’t go confusing your right with the puzzle’s right, by the way) to “spy its mark” – in other words, the target to guide the line – “at the end of a name”. I don’t think anyone figured this part out exactly, but a few got to the correct destination anyway. The line from the right eye needs to go through the tip of the mask handle. Doing that and continuing the line will reveal the “aim” – both the directional aim and the point of the exercise, which is to find a letter on the frame. People got it correct, but no one understood what “the end of a name” was all about, and it sent people on wild tangents. The end of a name is a riddle here, and refers to the tip of a “handle”.

Tracing the lines from (the center of) each right eye through the handle tip over to the frame provides a specific letter for each puzzle, providing a set of 26 letters. But they are all out of order, there must be some better method to this madness.

From chaos to order, which guest shall hide?

Look to the Source and let Artistry Guide.

“From chaos to order” is simply acknowledging the question of, now what do I do with all this information? And suggesting there is, indeed, an order to be followed. “Which guest shall hide” tells you what answer to this riddle I am looking for, which of these puzzles is the one we are looking for? “Look to the Source” has a double meaning here. One is that, if you haven’t been quite sure just yet, yes, you need to use the solve method from the original Masquerade, the inspiration for this puzzle. The other is that you can find the way to order things in the Source of this puzzle – in this case, the creator and sponsor of this nonsense, the blog Boxes and Booze. The order of things is here. “Let Artistry Guide” is telling you where to find it – in the Artists Guide, which can be found on the “Boxes” page. It’s the “Art Gallery” you are encouraged to visit in the introduction. There, you will find a list of artists in a very specific order, at least for the first 26 of them. Use this to order the 26 puzzles (by artist) and letters you have identified.

There were a surprising number of people who deduced things up to this point in one way or another. Yet even when placed in what appeared to be the proper order, the letters did not spell anything meaningful. Let’s go back to the eighth line of the riddle – “And pair the first with a virtuous glance”. It was apparently not very apparent that this was telling you to pair what you had done first, which was to identify all the puzzles (if you were following instructions), with what you would do next, which was to find the letters around the frame. Ok, how do you pair the first thing, the puzzles? “Pairing” might imply, with something similar, so maybe, another letter? Maybe the first letter - pair the first – another double meaning. This final challenge stumped almost everyone until one clever fellow, who had been helped along the way up to this point, deduced the meaning. All’s fair in love and puzzling, I suppose, and be careful who you talk to if you might feel disappointed about the outcome.

Pairing the first letter of each puzzle with the frame letter spied by that puzzle, and putting those pairs in the order of the Artistry Guide, produces the following:

A box without hinges, key, or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid

You may recognize this as one of the riddles in the dark that Bilbo poses to Gollum in The Hobbit. Another favorite – I couldn’t resist. The answer to that riddle is an egg, and the official solution to this year’s holiday challenge is the Egg by Wil Strijbos, which is one of the guests here at the ball. I’m never one to shy away from adding one more layer to the meta puzzle, so of course the “first” here is also a reference to my very first blog post ever, which was about Strijbos’ Egg. In an earlier iteration of the invitation riddle, one of the lines actually read: “Who’s first to the festival, dancing quick?” – first to the festival had many meanings there too. Someone actually found that original riddle, buried in the source code (they “looked to the Source”). The original riddle was much harder to interpret, with fewer direct clues which were in no particular order. Lucky for you, Nick Baxter put in a lot of beta testing work on this with me, and convinced me to make it more linear and more explicit. He even rewrote much of the riddle for me to show me what he meant. So this one is much easier. Believe it or not! He also suggested many of the additional clues and embedded hints which really helped. Good Ol’ St. Nick - thank you for all your help this year. He also pointed out that Pair O’ Dice by Tye Stahley, which has golden treasure within, could be an alternate solution.

A few people guessed at Triple Yolk, which fits the bill perfectly, being an egg, after all, and could be another acceptable solution, although it was not actually a guest at the ball. It was rather meta of me to introduce you to the hunt via the blog post about that egg, though, don’t you think? I need to thank Lewis Evans for meeting with me last minute just so I could include that extra piece to the puzzle. He also deserves a huge thanks for creating such a gorgeous special edition prize for this hunt. If you want another chance at one of these special editions, keep an eye on Nick Baxter’s site, where a second special version will be up for grabs as part of the Eric Fuller memorial charity auction.

The winner of the grand prize, the gold flake and opal amethyst Stickman Golem Heart, is Blake Kleinman, who provided the correct answer complete with detailed notes on the solution before anyone else. There was a rapid succession of correct or correct-adjacent answers following the right process all at once after that, due to a network of shared hints and help among a few players. Which made sorting out winners very difficult, and I’ll need to think about that next year. Nonetheless, a brilliant team of hunters named “The Cheatahs” (their “handles” are “The Rammer”, “Shadyhollow”, “KaiserLucas” and “Cranir”) worked out most of the solve on their own and deserve honorable mention. They practically had it and likely would have won if they had not been so helpful to others. For their generosity of spirit they will be getting a regular version of the Golem Heart as a team prize, and each of the team members will get something extra as well. Finally Matt Hochberg and Mike Quigley deserve a shout out as they worked hard on this and had some great ideas throughout the process, and came closer than many. They will get something too!

Many other joined in and occasionally sent me a query or two, or a guess. Thank you all for playing, I hope you had some fun at the ball – I know I had a ball creating this one.