Events: Supporting Character Breakfast
by Charlie Graham
Answer: ALFRED PENNYWORTH
Here are the characters that teams had to identify in Pancake Pictionary:
| Number | Character Name |
|---|---|
| 1 | Hermione Granger |
| 2 | Violet Beauregarde |
| 3 | Bullseye (Toy Story) |
| 4 | Chief Wiggum |
| 5 | Inigo Montoya |
| 6 | Thumper |
| 7 | JarJar Binks |
| 8 | Gollum |
The frame for the photo has the letters AZ SORT capitalized at the top. If you sort the characters in alphabetical order, number them A-H and then extract out the nth letter from the bottom part of the frame you get the answer ALFRED PENNYWORTH, who is the butler and supporting character of Batman.
The Coupon Puzzle
As part of The Storykeeper Bookshop, teams were asked to bring to Hunt HQ a drawing of one of the following subjects:
- Snow White gets rescued by 1 STRIPPER in the woods
- Cinderella leaves 3 BASEBALL BATs on the steps
- The Pied Piper is asked to chase out 3 WOLVERINES in the town
- Jack and the Beanstalk trades his cow for 1 bottle of RUM
- Hansel and Gretel leave 5 CHOPSTICKS to mark their trail
- The third little pig builds his house out of 2 CHAIRS
- Goldilocks finds the house in the woods occupied by 1 Klingon Security Officer Lt. WORF
As such, each storybook drawing had 2 components: 1) A fairy tale (like Cinderella, Snow White, etc…) and 2) one or more objects that were out of place (1 Worf, 3 bats, stripper, etc…). Each of the out of place objects rhyme with a canonical object in another story, forming a chain. To extract an answer, follow the chain between the objects and index into the story by the number of objects to get the answer STACKED.
| Story | Extra Item(s) | Rhyming Item | Indexed Letter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Snow White | 1 Stripper | Slipper | S |
| Cinderella | 3 Bats | Rats | T |
| The Pied Piper | 3 Wolverines | Beans | A |
| Jack & the Beanstalk | 1 Rum | Crumb | C |
| Hansel & Gretel | 5 Chopsticks | Bricks | K |
| The Three Little Pigs | 2 Chairs | Bears | E |
| Goldilocks | 1 Worf | Dwarf | D |
Some fun notes about character breakfast:
We came up with the idea of having a character breakfast when we first came up with the amusement park idea as it felt like such an iconic, immersive experience. We did our best to have it mimic the character breakfasts from a well-known amusement park (including photos with a character, dancing to cheesy music shaking white napkins, having characters walk around the table and great guests and having a photographer trying to get you to buy photos of you with characters.)
The idea for Pancake Pictionary was inspired by a trip to Slappy Cakes in Maui, Hawaii. Slappy Cakes is kind of like hotpot for pancakes. Tables have griddles in the middle and instead of buying pancakes, customers buy squeeze bottles of batter and lots of fixings and create their own pancakes. And in the front a pancake artist created absolutely beautiful characters out of pancakes. A great breakfast spot if you ever happen to be in Maui with kids.
Our original rules required a lot of eating (if a waiter found a letter or number on a panacke the chefs would have to “eat their words”, the table could send back a picture if they did not like it and the chefs would have to “eat it”, etc…). We took those out of the final version due to health and safety concerns.
We tested this at two Big Test Solves - once with both characters and other concepts and once again with characters. It also served as breakfast.
Our family now plays Pancake Pictionary around once a month. If you did not play pancake pictionary at the event, get a griddle and a squeeze bottle and play sometime. It is a lot of fun.
Thanks!
A huge thanks to Jessen Yu for helping to mix 40lbs of batter at 6 in the morning.
One of the biggest challenges of putting on this event (besides mixing 40lbs of batter mix the morning of) was making sure the electrical circuits at Lobdell could handle the load of 10 simultaneous griddles as well as making sure we could do this in a safe way. A big thanks to Mike Springer for helping to figure this out and for Connor Anderson and the MIT Puzzle Club for working with the administration to make sure we were able to do this safely.
A huge thanks also to Evan Davis for planning, Evan, Ylaine, Jessen and Jeff Stribling for photography, Kevin Schraith and Matt Hartman for supplying character talent and everyone who participated as a waiter/cleanup crew!