Operation: Ground Beef

Agents,

Well done finding The Guaca-mole’s secret hideout. We’ve been able to find some surveillance images of the interior, but the images are fragmented. Working together, you’ll need to piece together the interior so we know what it looks like before initiating our raid of the compound. When you are both finished, you should be looking at the same layout of The Guaca-Mole’s secret hideout. Once you have the ground plan assembled, send us the code phrase so we know we’re ready to go.

Answer Submission


Section Contents

Both the CIA and FBI should have 7 pieces and a business card with this website’s address on it.

Hints

The CIA and FBI have each received 7 pieces, which show parts of the same building interior. You’ll have to work together to figure out how to reconstruct the layout.

You should see some floor pieces with furniture, and some wall pieces, most with picture frames or doors. You can fold the walls to be upright. You will not need to fold the pieces anywhere else.

Ignore those for now. They are not the same between the two sets of pieces, but should not be considered until the very last step of the puzzle.

You’ll want to communicate what you see in your pieces to the other agency. Each agency has the same 16 floor pieces and the same 8 wall segments (which are double-sided). But, these segments have been cut apart differently.

Start with one of the large L-pieces that is entirely ground (no walls). Use that piece to communicate what floor pieces are adjacent to other floor pieces to the other agency. They, in turn, can tell you what other pieces should be adjacent to each other.

Note that, when complete, you’ll have a 4-by-4 square of floor tiles. None of the wall pieces will be on the outside of the 4-by-4 square – they all are positioned between two floor pieces. Also note that sme wall pieces will go across other tiles – because two floor pieces are adjacent on a tile doesn’t mean there isn’t a wall between them.

Make sure you’re communicating both what pieces are adjacent and in what orientation those pieces are in. It may help to decide between the two of you one piece that is pointing “up” or “north”, so you can reference relative directions on other pieces.

You may have a few chunks of pieces put together. You can use the walls to determine how things are assembled. In the end, the interior 4 squares will each have 3 wall pieces adjacent to them. The final wall shape looks like two capital letter H’s squished together.

The floor should be assembled like this. The bold lines are where the walls will go.

Now you should use the letters and numbers in the corners. Working together, you should be able to spell a two-word phrase that is 16 letters long.

QUESADILLA CLOSED