Solvers will use the provided pentagons and hexagons to construct a truncated icosahedron (soccer ball), using the text and notches to uniquely determine the position of each tile.
Each pentagon has a crossword clue, whose corresponding answers are:
| Crossword Clue | Solution |
|---|---|
| 2004 German national baseball manager | FRADY |
| A habitual complainer, in Yiddish | KVETCH |
| Canceling | NIXING |
| Famous elephant born in 1962 | PACKY |
| Like something that a function leaves unchanged | FIXED |
| Mom2Mom Meals | CHUPS |
| Réfrigérateur, en bref | FRIGO |
| Rejecting a bill | VETOING |
| Target to destroy on Summoner's Rift | NEXUS |
| The ideal alloy for glass sealing | KOVAR |
| The soul that ____, it shall die | SINNETH |
| World's oldest orthopaedics company | DEPUY |
Each hexagon has a letter or bigram. Each word from a pentagon can be constructed using the letters from exactly five hexagons; these five hexagons should border that pentagon (though the hexagons need not be placed in order of the word’s spelling about the pentagon). This, in combination with the few “notches” (black lines that must be connected across the borders of tiles), uniquely determines the construction of the ball. While the orientation of some tiles is not uniquely determined, note that the orientation of the tile with faces on the back are all determined by these notches.
As instructed by the flavortext, the ball should be constructed with the text on the inside (and thus the dots and faces on the outside). Then, for each color, look at the face of that color, and use the positions of the two matching dots to extract letters via semaphore. This extracts:
| Color | Letter |
|---|---|
| Red | K |
| Orange | I |
| Yellow | C |
| Green | K |
| Blue | M |
| Purple | E |
Entering KICK ME prompts the team to submit a video of them kicking the ball. Upon doing so, they receive the solution to the puzzle, HELLO BEETIFUL.