Party Time - Solution

This is the metapuzzle for Pixel Paradise, the island inhabited by characters relating to video games. There are several relevant clues in the puzzle's presentation that will lead us in the right direction: the use of the words "super party" and "partner" in the flavor text, as well as the green circles that Matt and Emma happen to be standing on in the picture given. With some Googling, we should be able to determine that the video game being referenced here is the Super Mario Party, a game released for the Nintendo Switch in 2018.

There are exactly 4 distinct grids in Super Mario Party, and their grid sizes match the grids given in the puzzle. Note that we want to use the Partner Party grids as clued by the flavor text.

Highlighting all the green letters in the grids reveals the next clue phrase: in the first grid, they spell out TRY NOW EVERY ANSWER PAIRED TO RELATED WORD. (In each of the other grids, the first 9 green letters spell OTHER GRID, suggesting that the only message we care about is in the first grid.)

Following this instruction, we notice that each feeder answer can uniquely be matched to a word found one of the 4 grids. If we overlay the answers onto the grid, we realise that each word has exactly 2 letters coincide on green squares. We read the letters from left to right, top to bottom across 4 grids to obtain the answer SHOOT FOR THE STARS.

Author's Notes

The main goal for this metapuzzle was to allow freedom in answer choices by puzzle authors. Before the first draft of this meta was written, both of the other metas (or the versions that existed at the time) had varying degrees of constraints on feeder answers. As most of the hunt staff were relatively new to puzzle writing, we wanted to provide a home for puzzles that could not be easily tweaked to accomodate answers from the other metapuzzles. This worked pretty well until late in the puzzle-writing process, when this freedom was slightly curtailed as constraints from the metameta and the availability of green squares meant that FLOW DIAGRAMS was pretty much forced as an answer. In addition to achieving its intended goal, I would consider this metapuzzle a logistical success as we learnt quite a bit about meta design and answer flexibility along the way!

In an earlier version of the puzzle, the intermediate clue phrases (TRY NOW EVERY ANSWER PAIRED TO RELATED WORD and OTHER GRID) did not exist. Our full-hunt testsolvers felt that this version of the puzzle had too low a signal-to-noise ratio for it to be fun. As this happened a week before the hunt began, we were afraid to make major changes to this puzzle. Fortunately for us, we were able to sneak the intermediate phrases into the grids without having to make huge changes to the puzzle. Specifically, the O and R from OTHER GRID lined up very nicely with the CONVEYOR BELT in the second grid.