May 2026 - Head of the Pints

Tap on any hint box to view it.

Location

  1. The invitation talks about errors. Maybe some of the spelling errors could help.
  2. Find misspellings. They, in the order they are in the paragraph, make a sentence.
  3. The misspellings say “second to last letter each line”.
  4. If you take the second to last letter of each line you get “every tenth word."
  5. Start with “Welcome” as the first word and go every tenth word.
  6. Every tenth word is “Puzzlers, the answer is at a bar of course stop…”
  7. AT A BAR OF COURSE

OAR HEIGHTS

  1. This looks like a crossword with all solutions going down.
  2. There is no numbering system to know where to put the answer so it looks like some answers could be placed according to word length.
  3. There are oars in the answer sheet. Oar sounds like “or” so maybe that indicates where the answers go.
  4. After you get all the solutions input, maybe there is help where the water marks the puzzle. At water level it says “LEFT OF OARS”. Look there.
  5. Don't forget than an oar to the left of an oar speels OR in the final answer!
  6. FOR A SWIM

PUDDLES

  1. “Jumbled” may hint at an anagram and “added” may hint that the connected words have an extra letter.
  2. Example of a connection, connect “lunch” and “launch”.
  3. If you make the 8 connections, each line should cross over 5 bubbles or vortex icons. The clues mention “on” and “off”. Is there a puzzle pint code that could work for this?

    ◦ lunch -> launch

    ◦ roots -> robots

    ◦ prism -> shrimp

    ◦ fool -> flood

    ◦ cape -> peace

    ◦ log -> golf

    ◦ pears -> grapes

    ◦ male -> camel

  4. The bubbles and vortexes stand for binary. The vortex is 1 and the bubbles are 0. The binary goes from the smaller word to the bigger word.
  5. The letter added could be the order of the letters. One adds an “A”, another adds a “B”, etc.
  6. PULL HARD

ROWING OAR BLADES

  1. The flavor text mention "patterns" and "add up". It could be that patterns represent numbers.
  2. Each of the first letters of the names in the examples can be converted into a number.
  3. The hint mentions “add up”. Maybe each of the patterns represent a number and those numbers could be added up to equal the letter converted to a number. Using the example, we could determine what numbers the four numbers represent.
  4. For the new flags, convert each section on the oar to a number, add them up and use the number to letter conversion to convert each oar to a letter.
  5. White = 1, Dotted = 5, Crosshatch = 8, Black = 10
  6. GEOMETRY

LAKE ROWING PRACTICE

  1. In the map with the dots, it looks like we have to draw a line going from the top arrow to the bottom arrow. The numbers could give us an indication as to how many dots the path passes through in that particular row or column.
  2. Each of the crossword solutions clues is 5 letters. There appears to be only one way to put them into the puzzle so that the words read the same across and down.
  3. Solutions to crossword - HEATS, EIGHT, AGREE, THESE, STEER
  4. Using the legend with the 5x5 grid of words, as the boat's path passes between pairs of symbols, what is the letter found in the 5x5 grid?
  5. STRAIGHT

Meta - Race Day

  1. The oars in the puzzle look familiar. Maybe we saw different oar styles on the previous puzzles.
  2. Place answers from the 4 puzzles into this puzzle, according to matching oars

    ◦ Line 1 - for a swim

    ◦ Line 2 - pull hard

    ◦ Line 4 - geometry

    ◦ Line 5 - straight
  3. The hint mentions a circle representing correct rowing. That could represent a correct letter in the right place.
  4. This looks like a wordle / mastermind like puzzle. Those kinds of puzzles have three types of indicators: 1) Wrong letter, 2) Right letter in the wrong place, 3) Right letter in the right place. Circle is #3. Square is #1 and the half square, half circle is #2.
  5. The solution, we are trying to find the right letter in the right place for all eight letters.
  6. GOOD TIME

Bonus - Lingo

  1. The italicized words indicate the words in the wordsearch don’t all go straight.
  2. Once all the words are found, is there something familiar about the shapes of the found words?
  3. Each found word makes up a semaphore symbol
  4. Ordering is top-to-bottom by the turning point of the semaphore symbol
  5. STILL NONSENSE