Solution: How Many Reps?

This is a meta-matching puzzle. The goal is to assign each feeder phrase in the phrase bank to one of the 6 workout-themed phrases.

I've been jacked since the day I was born

The keyword in this phrase is “jacked”. There are 9 clues that reference famous people named Jack. The rest of the clue phrase points you to their days of birth. You extract the answer by indexing their day of birth into the feeder phrase and then ordering by when they were born.

Can you spot me?

For this question, you are looking for feeder phrases with the substring “ME”. If you remove the “ME”, the remaining letters anagram to another one of the feeder phrases missing one additional letter. Order these letters by the position of the “ME” to get your answer.

Pumping iron

This puzzle is based on phrases ending in a metallic element, like “pumping iron”. There are 7 answers that are phrases ending in a metal with the metal replaced with another phrase. Those added words start with the letters from A to G which serve as an ordering. These added words also contain the letters of the metal’s elemental symbol with a letter in between (all the symbols are 2 letters). The final answer is spelled by these sandwiched letters.

This workout song is off the scale

This puzzle is referring to the solfege musical scale. There are 7 answers, each 10 letters long, that start with the letters of the solfege scale. If you put them in scale order, you will notice that each feeder phrase shares exactly one letter in the same position as the feeder phrase that follows it in the scale. Starting at DO-RE and wrapping back around to TI-DO, these letters spell the answer.

He is such a gym rat.

This puzzle uses feeder phrases that clue other idioms containing an animal, specifically, animals in the Chinese Zodiac. Ordering the answers in the order of zodiac, starting with RAT, you get the answer by diagonalizing (i.e. take the first letter from the first phrase, second letter from the second phrase, and so on).

Gotta get my protein.

For this puzzle, you are looking for the answers that contain the three-letter code of an amino acid, the things that make up proteins. Each of these answers has a unique length. Ordering by length and converting the three-letter code into the one-letter code reveals the answer.

How many reps?

Now that you have 6 new words, the only thing left in the puzzle is the title. Each of these answer words is the nickname of the US state. As the title clues, index the answer by the number of representatives in the US House to get your final answer, GO DOWN.

I’ve always wanted to incorporate physical challenges and obstacles into a puzzle hunt. Given the limitations of a virtual hunt, I had to settle for writing a puzzle themed around physical exercise. This puzzle idea was inspired by all of the different phrases that exist pertaining to fitness and working out.

The original answer assigned to the puzzle was GOING DOWN and I had planned to write 9 workout-themed mini-metas. However, not only was I have trouble coming up with an 8th or 9th mini, but the puzzle was also getting quite long. We ended up pruning down the answer phrase and I was able to stick with my six best ideas.

We had also planned on presenting this puzzle with an image of a bunch of fairytale characters working out at the gym with the clue phrases shown in speech bubbles, but we ran out of time. I think it would have been funny to have a picture with Jack of Jack and the Beanstalklifting twice what the giant was lifting, Jack of Jack and Jill clean and jerking pails of water, Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf talking about his protein requirements, and some dwarves working out with chunks of iron. I’m most disappointed that we didn’t get to include Gus from Cinderella doing a bench press using a mousetrap like the image below.

I also wrote 'Me, Myself, and I' for Huntinality 2.0. which also utilizes the substring 'ME' as a major puzzle component. I wonder what that says about me.