I have been wanting to explain the puzzles of MNLA IV ever since we thought them up. Yes, there were multiple puzzles. First, though, a clue to players: When a game designer approaches you saying, "With every purchase of MNLA III game cards, you get a map of Pan-Tree (wink, wink)." Buy the @#%#@ cards, you will need the map to figure out the puzzles.

The first puzzle was the map. We took a map and divided into 36 squares, six by six (remember that clue), Then we walked the land (in the winter) and marked 36 trees with green fluorescent ribbon (hey, the green was easy to spot in the winter time, who was thinking about GREEN when you are tramping through snow--white. Finding those spots in the Spring and early Summer was a challenge.).

When you found one of the clues at the marked site, you found a container that held two pieces of paper. One piece was a portion of the map (1/36th) with a spot on it. The spot showed the location of the clue in that section. If you had a map, you could match the segment to the map and know where to go to find the next clue. The other piece had a word or phrase on it and a number, also the words were printed backwards and slanted.

This introduced the second puzzle. What did the words mean and how do you read them? We had a six line poem that was the next puzzle. First, one had to arrange the words in their numerical order. That would show that the words were centered around something and that there were six groups of them. On the table under the pergola was a gazing ball. If you put the gazing ball near the center of the line of words and looked at the gazing ball, the line became readable.

The six lines described a process to find the final clue. As part of solving the six line poem, one had to realize that the checker board points North, which was hard to do without the sun or a compass. (Yes, indeed, we had used a compass to frame the checker board.) The Unicorn was hidden in the Cat House in the tree.

We really didn't expect it to rain all day. We certainly didn't expect people to continue to play in the rain but they did. Mothers were not yelling at their children to get out of the rain, since they were running out in it, too