We built a narrative layer on top of the entire expo. TinkerTron, the world's most brilliantly clumsy tech genius, was retiring. He needed a worthy successor and had set up three challenges to find one. Players who solved all three would be entered into the prize draw. His AI assistant, S.M.A.R.T.Y. (Super Machine Artificially Responding To You), ran the operation from the [eureka] stand: a chatbot that briefed players on each puzzle, validated solutions, and handed out the next mission.

The three puzzles each demanded something different. In the first, players hunted for URL fragments scattered across exhibitor stands and assembled them into a working web address that revealed the solution. In the second, they collected binary code segments and ran them through a decoder at the [eureka] stand to crack the message. In the third, they gathered mirrored and rotated letters from across the expo floor, unscrambled them, and fed the final answer back to S.M.A.R.T.Y.

The puzzle pieces were always visible at exhibitor stands from the start, but they only made sense once S.M.A.R.T.Y. had issued the relevant mission. This meant players had a reason to revisit stands they had already seen, and exhibitors had multiple waves of visitors across the day rather than a single glance-and-move-on.