Solution to Tunnels Back to Round
by Josh Alman, Jon Schneider, Jakob Weisblat, and Kat Fang
The layout of the Tunnels is the same as the graph presented on the round page for the Tunnels. Red crow statues and green gargoyle statues in the Tunnels are located at the red and green nodes of the graph. Each puzzle corresponds to a node on that graph, and there is a skeleton at that node in the Tunnels who we can talk to once the puzzle is available to unlock it.
Unfortunately, it is not so easy to get to the skeletons, because there are scary and dangerous ghosts in the way! Each edge of the graph has three lines of ghosts which float by, and we must pass through a ghost in each line to get to the other side. Each ghost has a word or string above it, and each edge has a rule for those strings which determines which ghosts will turn green and let us pass through them, and which will turn red and send us back to the beginning of the edge. Some trial and error is needed to determine the rule for each edge; the complete list of rules is below.
(click for a higher-resolution image)
| Tunnel edge label (from the image above) | Words or strings on ghosts which will let you pass |
| 1 | Irregular verbs |
| 2 | Words whose first and last letters are the same |
| 3 | HBO original programs (not Netflix original programs) |
| 4 | Can be broken into two English words by adding a space |
| 5 | Words whose letters are all in the first half of the alphabet |
| 6 | Words which are also a word when written in reverse |
| 7 | Correctly-spelled words |
| 8 | Words where each letter is the same as or comes alphabetically after the previous letter |
| 9 | Balanced strings of parentheses |
| 10 | Words whose first letter is a vowel |
| 11 | Words whose (capital) letters don’t have any holes (e.g., A, B, D have holes, but C, E, F don’t) |
| 12 | Initial-stress-derived nouns |
| 13 | Words which contain each of the five vowels A, E, I, O, U |
| 14 | Single-syllable words |
| 15 | Strings of parentheses which are palindromes |
| 16 | Words without the letter E |
| 17 | Words spelled in American English (not British English) |
| 18 | Words which contain the name of an animal with a 3-letter name as a substring |
| 19 | Words which become another word when you remove the first letter |
| 20 | Names of logic puzzles from https://puzz.link/list.html |
| 21 | Words which contain only letters on the top row of a QWERTY keyboard |
| 22 | Names of characters from Tolkein works (not names of prescription drugs) |
| 23 | Teams who won the NBA Finals, Super Bowl, or World Series (not the runner up) |
| 24 | Bash commands |
| 25 | Words whose first two letters are the same as their last two letters |
| 26 | Movies that won the Oscar for Best Picture |
| 27 | Words whose letters alternate vowels and consonants |
| 28 | Words which contain the name of an integer from ZERO to TEN as a substring |
| 29 | Words which contain only one of the vowels A, E, I, O, U |
| 30 | Words whose (capital) letters are drawn using only straight segments (e.g., A, E, F use only straight segments, but B, C, D don’t) |
| 31 | World capitals |
| 32 | Words containing two equal adjacent letters |
| 33 | Words of French origin (not Spanish origin) |
| 34 | Words which contain a four-letter palindrome as a substring |
| 35 | Words which contain all the letters of GHOST |
| 36 | Champions from League of Legends (not Dota 2) |