The Fountain

Answer: CENTER WORD OF TEN SNAPPLE CAP FACTS

By Ben Coukos-Wiley

There are two extractions for this meta: double letters, and initials.

Each answer has exactly one pair of double letters. We use the same order of puzzles given on the soda fountain and on the challenges page.

#	Puzzle	Answer	Letter
1	Tidal	THICCEST	C
2	A Crossover	EISNERNOMINEE	E
3	Stars and Stripes	SEVENNATIONARMY	N
4	Transfiguration	PETERPETTIGREW	T
5	Playtime	LATEEVENING	E
6	One Small Step	CHROMATICABERRATION	R
7	Teepees	POWWOWING	W
8	Wheel of Fortune	FOOLAROUND	O
9	Truth Table	CHERRYTOMATO	R
10	Maze Runner	SKEDADDLE	D

This gives CENTER WORD.

For the second extraction, we take the initial letter of each word in each answer.

#	Puzzle	Answer	Letter(s)
1	Tidal	THICCEST	T
2	A Crossover	EISNER NOMINEE	EN
3	Stars and Stripes	SEVEN NATION ARMY	SNA
4	Transfiguration	PETER PETTIGREW	PP
5	Playtime	LATE EVENING	LE
6	One Small Step	CHROMATIC ABERRATION	CA
7	Teepees	POWWOWING	P
8	Wheel of Fortune	FOOL AROUND	FA
9	Truth Table	CHERRY TOMATO	CT
10	Maze Runner	SKEDADDLE	S

This gives TEN SNAPPLE CAP FACTS.

Knowing the enumeration is (10 letters) OF (18 letters), we submit CENTER WORD OF TEN SNAPPLE CAP FACTS.

Author's Notes

For this meta, I was inspired by the first MUMS 2019 metapuzzle, whose answer was an instruction for the next meta. Using a double extraction from the same set of words is something I hadn't seen done before and it seemed intriguing. I expected to be able to put two submission boxes on the meta page, but when we settled on CTFd we had to use "OF" and enumerations, which was less than ideal.

In terms of the ten answers, I'm very proud of our list. I think it has a good amount of variety, managing to including a scientific term, idioms, slang, and a fictional character. Some of the answers, especially the later ones, are quite backsolvable but we decided that worrying too much about backsolving is pretty silly as solvers will usually do all the puzzles they really want to.

Although we initially envisioned this as a hintless pure meta, we ended up having to add some flavortext hints after tests showed the mechanics weren't as obvious as we'd have liked. This is another display of how hard it was to gauge the difficulty of puzzles we wrote - the answer was leaping out at us, but of course we knew what to look for.