Solution to Cafe Five
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by Nathan Pinsker, Josh Alman
In this puzzle, you just follow the instructions and answer the questions. The questions themselves range from very easy ("What is 3 + 4?") to complex logic puzzles.
With 25 minutes remaining, a special event occurs — L. Rafael Reif approaches the cafe for some lunch! Reif's puzzle is a huge double logic puzzle, requires two comps to dismiss, and has a 21-minute time limit.
Puzzles are bucketed into four difficulty levels: "easy", "medium", "hard", and "boss", and puzzles within each level are treated identically. Customers come in at a rate dependent on the amount of time left on the clock. This rate is gently accelerated as teams got closer to winning.
Once the clock runs out, you gets a token which can be used to get the answer to any one Cafe Five puzzle in the Infinite Corridor. You'll have to play again to get more tokens!
Some tips:
- If you're overwhelmed with puzzles, pull a team member or two in to help.
- Decide whether or not to comp a puzzle as early as possible, so you don't waste time on it.
- For Wheel-of-Fortunes: Use OneLook! It can often give you a great set of candidate answers which is quick to scan through.
- For logic puzzles: Use a solver! All the logic puzzles are "standard" enough that there are solvers online to handle them. Here's a good one.
- For trivia & crossword clues: Make copious use of Google! It can often immediately tell you the answer to these.
Here is a link to download the individual puzzles and their answers.