Press enter to skip to main content.

⚠️  Note

This is an archived version of the 2026 Key Clues Challenge website. For information on the upcoming event, visit keyclueschallenge.uwaterloo.ca.

Back to the puzzle

Solution: Concentric Crop Circles
Answer: BIO3FSTUFFEDCRITTERS

There are twenty circles and twenty puzzles. Looking at the lengths of each circle (or more accurately the circumference) and the punctuation that is already given to you in the puzzle suggests putting the titles of the puzzles into the concentric circles. Every pair of adjacent circles shares a cell, and assuming that those shared cells contain the same letter allows you to unambiguously enter the titles in a clockwise direction (as indicated by the arrow in the middle) as follows:

Reading the letters which are in shared cells from the outside in gives ROTATEBYRINGSRADIUS, or as it's usually written, ROTATE BY RING'S RADIUS. This is an instruction, and as all good puzzle solvers must do upon receiving an instruction, we must follow the instruction. We rotate the inner-most ring by one notch clockwise. The next ring by two notches, and so on, all the way to rotating the outer-most ring by twenty notches clockwise. This moves the yellow cells, while keeping the letters where they are. Where the yellow cells end up is shown here in green:

Reading the green letters from the outside in gives BIO3FSTUFFEDCRITTERS, which is another instruction. This instruction tells you to go the the third floor of the biology building and find some stuffed critters.

You go there, and sure enough, there are some stuffed critters! Forty of them, and they're all listed on a poster titled "Biodiversity, Critters of the World".

After searching a little, you find a small sign:

Entering BIO3FSTUFFEDCRITTERS into the answer checker finishes the first part of the meta, and unlocks the next part.

Author’s Notes

This Meta was inspired by the taxidermy animals found in the biology building. I have been a part of the campus community for over 25 years, and I never knew these displays existed until this past summer. I wondered what other interesting places were hiding on campus and that is how the EIT Museum and the Bio Wall entered the Meta as well.

Intersecting Crop Circles was written first, and when the idea for the puzzle just being an empty Venn diagram came up, the crop circle aesthetic was born. Could I possibly make the Meta just a bunch of empty circles??

Concentric Crop Circles was written next, and it relied heavily on constraining the puzzle titles. Not only did they need to share letters with puzzle titles both before and after them, but they all needed to be distinct lengths. This caused some stress and hair-pulling amongst puzzle writers, and is why some of the puzzles ended up with really long titles. Those of you who solved Concentric Crop Circles will be happy to know that we scrapped our first draft in which we did not provide any of the non-alphanumeric characters. Although I really longed for a Meta that was nothing but circles, without those anchoring characters the puzzle was a tedious, brute-forcing, mess.

Pedley’s Cascading Crop Circles was the last one to be finalized and it underwent the most changes. In earlier drafts the chains were spirals, and in one version the box code was ABDUCTIONS instead of COSMIC GLYPH. In the end, I wanted to have a piece of the Meta that was actually about crop circles (not just in design). I did a bit of research and came upon the phrase SAUCER NESTS which I thought was the perfect tie-in. When I saw that George Pedley and the petrified wood were both from Queensland, Australia, I felt like the connection was meant to be.