Big Walk peg puzzle: which pegboard are you actually at?

Peg puzzle is not one puzzle

Big Walk uses the same visual idea — a rack of pieces and a board with empty slots — in several different places, and the community calls all of them the peg puzzle or the pegboard. That is why a guide can look like it is describing your puzzle right up until the step where it stops matching.

Every site that covers this ends up writing a warning about a different pair of them being mixed up, which is a decent sign the naming is the actual problem rather than the puzzles being hard. Sort yourself by what is physically in front of you.

• A small blue house, nine pieces on a rack outside, five slots, someone can get sealed inside — the blue room pegboard, solved below. This is the early one, near the start.
• The same nine-pieces-and-five-slots idea but a different building, over near the Blue Tower — that is the turnstile house, a separate puzzle on a separate reward chain.
• A house with two doors or two rooms, one showing poses and gestures rather than symbols — that is a charades puzzle, where you act the pose out rather than describe a shape.
• A board where the pieces are coloured and scattered around the landscape outside rather than sitting on a rack — that is a different puzzle again, and the accounts of it disagree enough that we are not publishing steps for it yet.

Where the blue room pegboard is

A small blue house on the left side of the starting valley. Leave the tutorial grounds, keep to the left edge of the path and continue climbing the mountain on that side. The house sits just left of the green platform on the mountainside. If you have reached green scaffolding you have gone a little too far.

This is most groups’ first genuine communication test, and it teaches the describing skill that everything later in the game leans on.

The solution, step by step

Outside the house there is a rack of nine wooden symbol pieces and a panel with five empty slots. Inside there are five blank screens. The screens only light up once the door is shut, and only the person inside can see them.

• Agree on names for the shapes before anyone goes in. Point at each piece on the rack and name it out loud. This is the step that saves the most time and the one most groups skip.
• One player steps inside. The player outside presses the button by the door, and the door slides down and seals them in.
• The screens light up with five symbols in a row. The player inside reads them out one slot at a time, left to right — not all five at once, because the description fades from memory faster than you expect.
• The player outside finds the matching piece and places it. A correctly placed piece glows, so you get confirmation immediately rather than at the end.
• When all five slots are filled correctly, press the button beside the board. The red gourd is released from the clamp above.

Name the shapes before you shut the door

The symbols are abstract, so the puzzle is really a vocabulary problem. Groups lose far more time to "the weird one, no, the other weird one" than to anything mechanical. Names that groups actually settle on include the asterisk, the S, the spiral, the snowman for three stacked circles, and three dots in a vertical line.

It does not matter whether your names are good. It matters that both of you agreed on them while you could still see the rack together.

What goes wrong

• Opening the door mid-round. The symbols vanish and the pattern is reported to reroll, so you have to describe everything again. Keep it shut until all five are in.
• Describing all five symbols in one go. Go slot by slot and confirm each before moving on.
• Relaying through a third player. With a bigger group it turns into a telephone game — keep it strictly between the person reading and the person placing.
• Not agreeing names first. Every unnamed shape costs about a minute of "the one with the thing".