Dex

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Rabid Puzzling

Took a puzzle trip and didn't leave the vehicle for most puzzles.

21 September 2026 Puzzles Events 10 min

So I won the Rabies Rally recently. I won it with my two puzzliest friends1 who, frankly, pulled most of the weight when it came to solving the actual puzzles, but when we were up against the coalface we fell into accepted roles pretty smoothly and I think that was a major part in our success.

The rabies rally is a four day event taking place in Cornwall that aims to raise a bit of cash and a bit of awareness for mission rabies - a charity whose purpose is the eventual development of herd immunity in risky dog populations to batter the dog to human infection path. Pretty altruistic.

Their annual rally is just one feather in their fund and awareness raising cap, in something like it’s fourth year at this point and the format works really well from a fun standpoint. But progress marches on. To keep the event feeling fresh, and maybe to cater for a number of requests regarding adjusting the chaos2 of the event, they added puzzles. Loads of them. Across the two days of actual racing, the organisers brought in escape room and puzzle experience designers from a local escape rooms (Dreadlocked) to add a host of tasks and quandaries to the race. Now the time that you score at the end of the race is based on not just your ability to fly around the Cornish coast in a two-stroke death machine, but also how quickly you can reason. And boy did that bring an upset to the apple cart.

Normally, in the past, the contestants had been a group of vets or vet adjacent people from around the veterinary world to compete for a chance to vaccinate 100 dogs a day on the charity’s dollar. This time, however, we got in there. Snuck right in, thanks to their open application process and a wedge of cash for charity. We thought we were being very sneaky indeed, and that we would be able to swiss this event, hit that lower bracket like a storm and burst out the end to take on the presumed top seed. But without a tournament structure. You get the point, we didn’t think folks would notice us at the back just quietly enjoying puzzles. Somehow they found out about us and the ruse was up. Without any input (that I was made aware of), we were labelled team “Code Breakers”, and folks kept asking us if we were the “experts” they’d heard of 3, which put the kibosh on our stealth, and suddenly we were a high water marker to beat. Balls. We’re not even that good4.

We began the race with a speed puzzling round, keys locked to the vehicles, that involved a short set of fiveish puzzles. One of the choices we had to make was a binary interpretation, follow the red ends of a compass needle or the black ones. I hadn’t looked at the puzzle, but was asked for an opinion on which to follow. I obviously chose the wrong one, so our first answer was a wild misplay, but a bit of checking and realising that the choice was the slip-up and we made the answer fit the answer space. That delay cost us almost a minute. Which was a totally insignificant amount of time compared to the hours of play we were headed into, but at the time felt like a fumble early on. Turns out we were a good ten minutes ahead of the next few teams, which was lucky because we hadn’t really got used to navigating, driving, the answering system, what three words, and the myriad of other parts to working our way to the next destination. We hit the road and immediately stalled, which was just the first of a number of stalls5 we would experience in progressively more dangerous situations, proving progressively more of a nuisance to other road users.

That first day’s speed relied entirely on that first ten minute gap and we barely stayed ahead of the competition, gaining a total of five minutes. There were other game mechanics in play, like a flag football tag system, requiring you to acquire tags off of the back of other tuktuks whilst their team was fully touching the vehicle, but one mile and a half walk and a sneaky corner roundabout combo meant we didn’t have to worry about that, cashing in on the lead we had headed into lunch.

At the meal that evening we found out that we had fallen to fourth. Which caught us by surprise as we’d reached every checkpoint throughout the day in first place. Turns out there’d been an issue with the app and we hadn’t had our clock stopped at the last checkpoint of the day until someone noticed and brought the bar down on our clock. Fortunately one particularly particular member of our team had screenshotted the congratulations message we had received and we had the extra hour of time nixed from our total. Which put us in first. By fifteen minutes. Which felt really awkward, because we6 didn’t want to rock the boat at a charity event, but we7 were wildly autistic enough to find the incorrectness of it all terribly offensive7 to our sensibilities..

So we woke up in the morning with a nice target, getting steadily bigger, on our backs. The three teams we had leapfrogged overnight were not messing around, either. They were used to the running around and driving like the clappers, so had a nice experiential advantage for a lot of the hard racing parts of the day, but as the day went on we would prove that there was enough temporal space in the puzzle tasks to take a leisurely journey across Cornwall in search of first place.

I think the event cumulated for me with the charging around St. Michaels mount taking quick stabs at rebuses whilst being hotly chased by other teams who were more capable runners and climbers. I was breathing from every orifice, desperately trying to fend off the shaking of my vision. Plus side, I discovered a lot about my heart health that left me quietly confident that I’m not quite over the hill yet.

We’d quietly passed everyone by in the morning because of a devilish taste of the rebuses to come that had left most teams screaming into their answer sheets and resorting to just preying on tuktuk tags to catch them up. We were preyed upon hard as we flew out of the checkpoint ahead of all but a couple of tuktuks, as far as we could tell. By the time we hit the mount we were first to the carpark, and first to the top of the mount. Running across the causeway gave me new ways to appreciate how tired out my ankles are getting after hauling my fat arse around for years. I was so paranoid of us losing our advantage that I spent a lot of my resting time scouring the car park across the beach to see if we still had time to lollygag or if the lack of the benefits of looking after ones-self was about to cost us.

The message regarding our timer stopping after that last rebus failed to reach us, so we sacked off lunch in favour of taking part in a race that everybody else was taking a well deserved rest from. I’m glad we did it that way though, because when we returned to the vehicle it had been dismantled. Rendered useless without a change of wheel (hanging off the side), a reengagement of the clutch (ziptied open), a destrangulation of the steering column (now wrapped in our radio’s cable), and finally putting it back into drive (it having been set into reverse). I loved that bit. The creative destruction that had gone on whilst we were powering on with the puzzles had been just the right level of non-permanent and inconveniencing. Unbeknownst to us, we had all the time in the world to fix things and refuel, as the timer only started when we sent a selfie of our now fully working and passenger filled tuktuk to race command for our next stop.

Then what followed was a chase. Two teams had made the same lunch based mistake that we had and had headed off back to Falmouth at the giddying pace of 28 miles per hour, the top speed of our vehicle. They had had a considerable less number of sabotages to deal with, and because of the uncertainty about what your individual time meant wrt the leaderboards, we couldn’t reason about where we were unless we were first to a post. We reached them in Pendennis castle, working furiously on their puzzles. Despite their headstart, we had caught up (which was an incredibly unlikely event) and came to a screaming stop in the space of another tuktuk as it reversed, politely, in. There was a bunch of laughing and fist-shaking as we sorted out the valeting, whilst puzzle-solvers one and two leapt from the slow moving vehicle to start on the puzzle as I parked up. It was a nice, quick, solve to get the final puzzle open, apply all our collectibles to it, and then finally present our winning answer to the final checkpoint wardens. Then they gave us another final puzzle8 to complete to finish the race. Once the race was over for us, we got to watch the other teams we had puzzled past finally get their codes and answers in. Over the span of the next couple of hours teams came in to finalise their table positions. It turns out that the teams we thought we were racing at the castle were at least 45mins behind us, but the secret leaderboard had kept the entire thing feeling like a panicked race for the whole duration.

I’d love to see the statistics for which puzzles were answered quickest, or what peoples average times were between stops. There’s a backend app that the organisers have access to that may contain that data and I think it would be really interesting to see if anything they’ve logged in their db can be turned into information.

I think the organisers did a shuffle of the prizes so that we wouldn’t be sent away to jab dogs, which I appreciate9 as it felt like not just winning a ticket for next year, but being invited back to take part. I hope we made a good impression and didn’t rock the boat too much by taking part, but the access to a unique event like this was a seriously appreciated privilege and one I look forward to having next year as well!

  1. They are the world number one when it comes to escape rooms played, which is an odd metric, but shows a breadth of experience that you would hope boded well for this puzzle race. ↩

  2. And risks. ↩

  3. Sorry, this is getting a bit quote heavy, but these were not my words. ↩

  4. He lied, modestly. ↩

  5. That number being in the dozens. ↩

  6. I. ↩

  7. My teammates. ↩ ↩2

  8. Puzzle.final.final ↩

  9. I was fully prepared to learn and practice phlebotomy if called upon. ↩