Solution to The Gallop Pole

ROUND ROBIN

You’re presented with 6 animals and a list of ingredients, and not much else. The intro text (aka “flavor text) has a few hints about what to do next:

At The Gallop Pole, we have animal upon animal to choose from. We've picked ingredients that align with each animal's personality. Move around; you might find some familiar characters.

“Move around” is a clue to slide the words back and forth. “Familiar characters” is a clue to look for names of fictional representations of those animals. We intentionally put a hedgehog in there, since there’s one name that comes to mind when you think about fictional hedgehogs: SONIC. We also intentionally put the letters in TONY at the end of the Tiger’s ingredients, so it’d be easy to spot. The six names, in order of presenation are:

• CHESTER the Cheetah

• SAM the Eagle

• SONIC the Hedgehog

• MICKEY Mouse

• SHAUN the Sheep

• TONY the Tiger

Some of these are less famous than others, but in all cases, the name appears before the animal word in their title. (In retrospect, we should have had all of them match the pattern X the Y, too.)

Now what? At this point you might notice some other words, or word fragments, in your stacks of slid-over words. But they won’t easily resolve to an answer phrase. To finish, you need to follow the clue in the flavor text to put “animal upon animal”.

There are only 6 animals, so you could brute force the stacking order, but there is an explicit clue about how to stack them: how high each animal appears on their respective poles. Once you stack the six sets of words, you notice three words on the left of the animal names, and two words on the right:

CAMELOT TABLE SHAPE = ROUND
BATMAN PARTNER = ROBIN

Together, that gets you ROUND ROBIN, a nod to the circular nature of a carousel, and an animal that might appear on it.

Notes

• We had 5,145 emails by the deadline, which was 48 hours after release.

• The Gallop Pole was the second puzzle we came up with but the fourth puzzle we released. We thought the difficulty level was too much of a step up from Space Bar, so we held it. Which gave lots of time for Sarah, our illustrator, to make these beautiful drawings.

• It was at this point that the meta started to lock into place. We had CMD AND CTRL and ROUND ROBIN, and Matthew noticed they were both 10-letter phrases, and the first letters were both in PILCROWBAR. From there we made sure that all other answers fit into this format.

• We couldn’t call this puzzle Carousel because it turns out Chicago actually already has a restaurant with that name, built around a rotating bar. I’m pretty pleased with the name we landed on.

• Once again, this list of Food Related Words was a life-saver. In addition to having to find words that had the correct two letters one space apart, we also needed to make sure the letter in the name wasn’t repeated in the word (or else there’d be ambiguity in which letter to use).

Notes from solvers

• From Dan: “Just curious: we were pursuing a Gallup-related red herring for a while where several "demographic groups" also appear in the ingredients list: age (sam), race (tony), income (mickey), party (sonic), and state (shaun). We had to abandon it when the cheetah/chester image didn't produce anything.” 😳

• From Anonymous: “The word ‘tipsy’ can be formed out of the hedgehog words in Gallup pole, and tipsy hedgehog is an actual cake. I spent a lot of time getting nowhere thinking that was a thing.”

• From Maddie: “During The Gallop Pole, my mom and I broke out the sidewalk chalk and covered our driveway in nonsense much to the neighbors confusion.”

• From Katelyn: “Gah! I work at Gallup (ie the Gallup Poll) so got an extra kick outta this one!”