CiSRA Puzzle Competition 2010 - Solutions
M. Metapuzzle
The key to solving this year's metapuzzle — besides collecting as many of the 20 pieces as possible by solving the other puzzles — was concealed rather sneakily on the puzzle PDF pages. If you were observant, you might have noticed we added something to the header this year:
In fact our company, CiSRA, celebrated its 20th anniversary the week before Puzzle Week! So we used the theme of "20" in the metapuzzle.
The metapuzzle consists of 20 pieces. Each piece contains a text clue that describes a category of people or objects, and a small portion of what looks like a crossword grid. To solve the puzzle, you need to find the canonical 20th person or object in each of the 20 categories. Here they are:
| Piece | Category | Number 20 in category |
|---|---|---|
| 1A | Best Picture | Gentleman's Agreement |
| 1B | Jovian satellite | Taygete |
| 1C | Prime number | Seventy-one |
| 1D | Element | Calcium |
| 2A | US State | Mississippi |
| 2B | Asteroid | Massalia |
| 2C | Pokémon | Raticate |
| 2D | Wedding anniversary | China |
| 3A | Country dialling code | Egypt |
| 3B | Australian National Route | Sturt Highway |
| 3C | Olympic host city | Munich |
| 3D | US President | James A. Garfield |
| 4A | Japanese prefecture | Nagano |
| 4B | James Bond film | Die Another Day |
| 4C | Tarot card | Judgement |
| 4D | Dewey Decimal class | Library and Information Science |
| 5A | Yokozuna | Ikazuchi |
| 5B | Egyptian Dynasty initiator | Setnakhte |
| 5C | TCP/IP port | File Transfer Protocol |
| 5D | Académie Française founding member | Paul Hay du Chastelet |
The crossword fragments also need to be assembled. As you do so, you'll notice that there are coloured squares, and next to each one is a number, from 1 to 20. This should help in finding how all the pieces go together. The assembled grid looks like this:
Placing the answers to the text clues into the grid produces:
The coloured letters can now be read in order of their adjacent numbers to produce the message "REDS AND ORIOLES PLAYER". Again, the key is the number 20. One player played in uniform number 20 for both the Cincinatti Reds and Baltimore Orioles baseball teams. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and both teams retired the number 20 in his honour. That player, and the answer to this year's metapuzzle, is FRANK ROBINSON.