On May 2, 2020 we held our first play-at-home MouseAdventure. Round 2 took place on May 16. Finishing teams were ranked based on how quickly they finished, plus any added time for hints. A summary of the quests contained as well as the answers is below.

Box Quests

Seven Orders for Seven Dwarfs

Teams received a sheet of paper that they separated into seven strips with letters on them, one for each of the seven dwarfs. In order to decode the final question, teams arranged the strips in the order the dwarfs appear according to seven different scenarios. Each order used a different row of letters on the strips of paper, which may have seemed like gibberish at first. When read from top to bottom, left to right, the letters spelled out the final question.

• Final Question: The dwarfs dig dig dig in the mine for diamonds and what else
• Final Answer: Rubies

Guardians in the Lead

Given various locations from the two Guardians of the Galaxy films, teams entered the coordinates of those locations that were displayed on the screen into provided spaces. Once teams had the coordinates for the nine locations, they extracted numbers from those coordinates based on the letter and number combinations provided. A common mistake made by teams was failing to add 10 to the number when they crossed over the + sign for some of the numerals.

For the final decode step, teams used the numbers to count through letters on a pencil provided in the box. The final phrase, Peter’s alias, lead many to try Star-Lord as the answer. However, the instructions specified to use the Kyln prisoner bios for the final answer. During the film, Peter’s alias is listed as Space-Lord in his Kyln prisoner biography.

• Final Phrase: Peter's Alias
• Final Answer: Space-Lord

How Do You Feel About Trivia?

What may have seemed like a straightforward trivia portion quickly became less so as teams took in all the clues. Some questions had multiple answers, and some had no answers. The quest title, combined with the sentence, “We think you could do this trivia with your eyes closed,” in the instructions were meant to lead teams to realize that the patterns of the trivia answer bubbles formed Braille letters.

When the answer sheet was turned on its side, the bubbles spelled out “No of helicopters on carrier in Soarin Over CA.” The answer is 2 (we also accepted the number spelled out as two).

• Final Question: No of helicopters on carrier in Soarin Over CA
• Final Answer: 2

The amount of time that teams took for this quest in Round 1 caused us to make a couple of adjustments before Round 2. In Round 1, blank lines were placed between words in the question. However, this threw off some teams who felt they were decoding incorrectly. Those blank lines were removed for Round 2. In addition, Round 1 also had 97 unique questions. For Round 2, we reduced the number of unique questions to 22, then repeated them with variations in the answer options to provide the proper answers for decoding.

All Washed Up

Teams filled in the blanks on the provided quest page for a series of questions about water-related attractions at Disney Parks around the world. Highlighted letters from each answer spelled out a final clue of what to do to reveal the final answer. When read from bottom to top, the letters spelled out “Soak this quest page.” Brave teams took the plunge to wet the paper included in the box, revealing the words, Splash Mountain, which was the final answer.

• Final Phrase: Soak this quest page
• Final Answer: Splash Mountain

Wait a Minute

Sometimes the MouseAdventure team sees things at the parks that we squirrel away for possible future use. When deciding what to use for this impromptu play-at-home game, Joe remembered a set of postcards he was given when the Camp Minnie-Mickey area was shutting down to make way for the construction of Pandora. What better time to use them than in the game sent by mail?

Teams answered a series of mail-related questions to identify the correct answers on the postcard decoder. Correct answers were cut out of the decoder to create windows through which the words on the postcard were seen. Numbers on the decoder showed the orientation for the decoder that was used four times to spell out the full final question.

• Final Question: Having a great time at Camp Minnie-Mickey, all my friends are here! We have been exploring the whole area. I went to Africa to mail this postcard and had to search all over for a mailbox. Do you know what road the Harambe Post Office is on?
• Final Answer: Sokoni

Mickey Shorts? Sounds Dangerous

Audio quests are always a challenge in the parks since we restrict the use of technology. We have done a few over the years, but it’s rare. In this case, clips of attraction audio were interspersed with audio from a parade. Two attractions were heard for each “track,” one on the left audio channel and one on the right channel. The code on the associated quest card packed in the box referenced the left (L) or right (R), the track number, and the letter number from the attraction name associated with that audio.

The title of the quest, along with text in the instructions, were clues that the attraction audio on the left and right were related; attractions from the left channel were replaced by those on the right (not on the same track). The full attraction list is:

• Final Question: From the mid Nineties to oh five the soundtrack to Space Mountain was based upon which movement?
• Final Answer: Aquarium

Between Round 1 and Round 2, some of the audio clips that seemed to be the most difficult for teams to identify were adjusted to make them clearer due to the long solving times from Round 1.

For Round 3, the sound clips were adjusted so that they matched each other:

Blinded by the Light

Blacklight has been used in past MouseAdventure games, taking advantage of its use in certain park attractions. For the at-home game, Third Gate Games provided the blacklight as a tiny flashlight inside the box. A map with many paths and an alphabetic grid was marked with blacklight-sensitive ink to provide the text for the final phrase. However, more dots were marked than were needed, so teams answered a series of clues to determine what two-letter coordinate locations to mark as false paths or false markings.

Once all clues were answered, a single path, starting at NA (for NA’vi) traced through the five remaining ink marks to spell out “Last Shadow.” In the film Avatar, Neytiri tells Jake that the Na’vi word Toruk means last shadow.

• Final Phrase: Last shadow
• Final Answer: Toruk

48 Frames

Background animation is an under appreciated art. This quest tested teams’ observation skills for 48 separate animated films from Disney and Pixar using stills that didn’t contain any major characters from those films.

Once all 48 stills were identified, teams matched a square picturing a character from the film to the order number that film was in the video. Following the path of letters and arrows on the tiles spelled out the final question.

• Final Question: What Disney animated film is the shortest
• Final Answer: Dumbo

Goal Oriented

Sports are on hiatus for the moment, but there are plenty of scoreboards lighting up in the film world. Teams identified the source of ten images, then counted in to the title to get the key letter for decoding the Xs and Os from the soccer field. For Round 1, teams assembled the decoder from a provided jigsaw puzzle. For Round 2, teams were provided with an image and told to cut out the four windows for the letters.

When the decoder was placed facedown on the pattern located on the back of the soccer field with the correct alignment, Xs and Os appeared in the spaces, with an arrow going from one to another indicating how to translate the key letter. The decoder was used twice for each key letter. Read left to right, top to bottom, the final phrase spelled out, “Brazil short announcer.” The final image shown on the quest was from the short O Futebol Classico, which is set in Brazil, and the announcer for the soccer game is character Jose Carioca.

• Final Question: Brazil short announcer
• Final Answer: Jose Carioca

Avengers Disassembled

For the final quest, teams had to disassemble and then reassemble the Avengers. Dates provided on the webpage provided clues to the Marvel film titles for each letter row on the pages provided in the box. For each row where there were numbers in the boxes, teams counted into the appropriate movie title the number of letters, and wrote the letters in the space. Empty boxes or boxes with arrows did not get letters.

The second step was cutting apart the pages to form the pieces for reassembly. On the opposite side from that used in the first step, pieces had the names of characters from the Marvel universe. To reassemble the pieces into a single rectangle, pieces were aligned so that a character’s name as well as their alias were touching, either side by side or above and below. Four pieces also contained brackets to indicate the four corners of the final shape.

Once correctly assembled, the whole shape was flipped to reveal the path to decode the final question: “Aside from Stan Lee, who has been seen in the most MCU films?” The final sentence of the instructions stated that if an appearance isn’t listed in the credits, it doesn’t count. Therefore, although Chris Evans has appeared more times, some of those are in the credit “add-on” sequences, so the final answer is Robert Downey Jr.

• Final Question: Aside from Stan Lee, who has been seen in the most MCU films?
• Final Answer: Robert Downey Jr

Results

You can access the leaderboards for Round 1 and Round 2 on their respective pages.

The fastest three teams for each round were: