Have You Tried...

the carnival guidebook

… reading the first letters of each sentence or clue?
… rearranging the letters (aka “anagramming”)?
… diagonalizing (taking the first letter of the first answer, the second letter of the second…)?
… looking for references to a song/poem/book/movie/TV show?
… changing the base of numbers (including hex)?
… interpreting words as cryptic crossword clues? As puns?
… looking for unusual letter frequencies?
… looking for double letters?
… adding a letter to everything?
… removing a letter from everything?
… looking for compass directions (N, E, S, W) or relative directions (L, R, U, D)?
… looking at a computer keyboard?
… ”doing it again” (repeating the puzzle mechanic on the output)?
… doing it in reverse (e.g. re-ciphering after deciphering)?
… counting different things in the puzzle and checking if the counts match up?
… chaining answers together into a sequence or cycle?
… looking up sets of things? (courtesy of phenomist)

… asking for fresh eyes?
… explaining the puzzle to a teammate?
… writing up a hint request with everything you tried? (even if hints aren’t available)
… asking people if it looks like anything they recognize?
… rereading the instructions?
… saying everything out loud?
… thinking like the puzzle authors: what was obviously an intentional decision vs a possible coincidence? If a clue seems particularly odd or bad, why might they have been forced to use it?
… asking “what’s the pattern”?
… thinking about what’s missing?
… asking yourself whether you’ve used all the information?
… going outside and coming back to it later?
… writing it down on a piece of paper?
… changing a file to a different file extension?

… tracking the lengths of answers?
- … are they all the same length?
- … can you form a shape, such as a square or interlocking grid?
- … are they consecutive lengths that you can order by?
… prefacing or following your answers by another word or letter to make a common word or phrase?
… looking for semantically related words or phrases with something in common?
… looking for a thematic transformation that could be applied to all the answers?
… checking if your answers collectively have all the letters of the alphabet?
… counting the total number of letters in the answers? Does it correspond to something else in the puzzle?
… breaking up the answers into two parts and extracting each half separately (e.g. if each answer is two words, sort using the lengths of the firsts and find something in common with the seconds)?
… dividing your answers into two sets, and pairing them up?

… using the South Atlantic Treaty Organization?
… looking for substrings a crossword boundaries?
… looking at bus or train maps, like the Boston T, London Tube, or San Francisco Muni?
… forming letters from a picture or symbols?
… taking a break from the hunt and taking another look in November?
… reading The Art of War by Sun Tzu?
… lucking out with random guesses?
… checking social media sites, like Facebook, Twitter, Tinder, or LinkedIn?
… diagonalizing, but harder this time?
… figuring out how to flip a palindrome?
… looking for references to famous people, mythology, fictional characters, Greek gods, or Satan?
… going to Nutrimatic?
… reading words as a different part of speech, or in a different accent?
… looking for a specific country, state, or capital?
… fact-checking your work?
… folding 1000 origami keepsakes for good luck?
… taking a break and going to the spa?
… paying attention to what your teammate is saying?
… searching for clues in dialogues, scripts, and song lyrics?
… reading some Charlie Brown?
… singing along to Taylor Swift's newest album?
… watching some cute cat videos on YouTube?
… using extract.me to extract the answer, especially if you’re on a Mac?
… just solving the part of the puzzle which looks really hard but you know how to do?
… looking around the hunt website?
… opening your Playmate and counting some tateroids?
… turning it off and on again?
… submitting the right answer?