Balls - Solution

Puzzle Location: San Jose Tech Museum
Next Puzzle: Voting Booth


The solution to this puzzle involves watching the balls move around the kinetic sculpture, and recognizing the letters on balls.

 Ball   Letters 
LA
KE
SI
DE
SC
HO
OL
"black"
RO
AD
LO
SG
AT
OS
CA


Note that the 8-ball has been blacked in to represent the word "black".

This puzzle was a great idea, but didn't work out. By the time teams got to the sculpture, the letters on the balls had worn off. This was a surprise, as the ink lasted nearly a week when we put a testball in the machine during playtesting. We put our set of balls in the day before the game, and they looked fine in the afternoon of the game (see image below). How the ink disappeared in the few hours between the time the picture below was taken and the time teams arrived at the puzzle remains a mystery.