Rebuilding ANTR - The Lab Partners Telephone Puzzle

One of my favorite moments of the season was the Final 12 challenge, which I had the chance to design and host. It called back to the very first pre‑season challenge, a Rin’s Comet puzzle, but this time it centered on A Night To Remember and played out like a chaotic game of telephone. By this point in the season, the team structure had dissolved into what we call Mergatory, leaving twelve players split at random into four teams of three. Each player took on a specific role: reader, runner, or solver. The reader was stationed far from everyone else with a copy of Lab Partners, the prelude to A Night To Remember. Their job was to study the comic and communicate what they saw to the runner, who then had to travel across the property to relay that information to the solver. The solver had laminated, text‑less printouts of all twelve pages, shuffled out of order, and had to reconstruct the entire comic using only the visual cues described secondhand.

The challenge was intentionally difficult, and it played out exactly as I hoped, full of frantic back‑and‑forth, miscommunications, sudden breakthroughs, and constant rearranging. Watching the runners sprint between stations and the solvers debate tiny details in the artwork was hilarious and tense at the same time. I served as the judge, keeping an eye on accuracy and making sure the chaos stayed fair. When the first team finally pieced all twelve pages together correctly, they earned safety at the next convention. Afterward, several players told me how creative and fun the challenge was, even with the frustration baked in. It felt good to bring my own comics into the game in such a direct way, and even better to see the players fully embrace it.