After you do it, just queue for a Wild Ranked Game. Instead of entering real matchmaking, you will be placed in the puzzle.

Investigation Puzzle

The puzzle consists of 10 Location cards and 10 Minions (Suspects). Your goal is to match Suspects to their Locations based on clues. You have 10 turns to do it.

Clues from Locations have their counterparts on Suspects. I’ll have a full list below, but here’s an example – a “Wax Drippings” clue from Location matches a “Carrying a Candle” clue from Suspect.

Locations start with 1 out of 2 clues visible, while Suspects start with 1 out of 4 clues visible.

What makes things a bit more difficult is that one Suspect can match a few different Locations based on clues (and vice versa), but ultimately they only fit into one of them. It’s a bit like Sudoku – the fact that something seemingly matches doesn’t make it correct, because all other pairings need to match too. To give you a quick example – if Suspect 1 matches into Location 1 and 2, while Suspect 2 matches only into Location 2, you obviously need to put Suspect 1 into Location 1 and Suspect 2 into Location 2. That’s what you need to do, but it’s  bit harder with 10 pairings and tons of clues. Luckily, you have two tools at your disposal to make it manageable.

The first one is a spell in your hand – Investigate. After using it, you uncover one hidden clue from either Location or Suspect (if you use it on a Location/Suspect with all clues already uncovered, it will do nothing so it’s wasted – don’t do it). You can use Investigation twice per turn (it costs 1 mana and you have 2 mana), so 20 times in total throughout the puzzle. With a total of 10 hidden Clues on Locations and 30 hidden clues on Suspects, you can’t uncover all of them throughout the game, so you will have to make some educated guesses in order to complete it.

As for the Hero Power – you can use Accuse once per turn. It “tests” the Location-Suspect pairing (you use it on either Suspect or Location, it doesn’t matter). If the pairing it’s correct – you will get a tiny star explosion. If it’s incorrect – you will get this kind of blue/black aura. It’s very important, because stars mean that it’s 100% the right pairing, you have it locked so you don’t have to worry about other Suspects matching that Location (or other Locations matching that Suspect).

After you hit end turn, your mana and Hero Power resets, but you also lose 1 HP. Since you start at 10 HP, it means that you have 10 turns to work with. Then there’s one more mechanic. After you end your turn, fireworks will start shooting one by one. You want to count them, as they tell you the total number of correct pairings on your board. Unlike Hero Power, it doesn’t tell you which pairings are correct, but it can still be useful for your investigation.

As for how to approach solving the puzzle – that’s the hard part. Clues are randomized every time you start the puzzle, so I can’t give you a step-by-step guide. You have to do it yourself. I’ll post the way I solved it below, but I’m not sure how helpful will it be.

My BIG advice would be to write everything down. Location/Suspect pairings you’re sure of (e.g. 1 = Rafaam, 2 = Ara’lon etc.), but also the ones you suspect might be correct but aren’t 100% sure (e.g. 5 = Xy’mox?). While I didn’t do it, you could also write down pairings that are 100% incorrect (if you test something with HP and it doesn’t match) The reason to do it is that moving minions (Suspects) left and right causes others to shift around. So if you end up moving a few Suspects during your turn, things WILL get messy and it’s hard to remember everything.

And here’s a full list of clues – on the left side you have Location clues and on the right side you have Suspect clues:

• Anima Residue = Cut on Hand
• Candy Wrapper = Chocolate on Fingers
• Claw Marks = Sharp Claws
• Crumbs = Eating a Cookie
• Drops of Hot Sauce = Loves Spicy Food
• Feather = Pet Bird
• Gaudy Earring = Missing Earring
• Grey Hairs = Greying Hair
• Ink Smudge = Inscription Hobby
• Lost Reading Glasses = Steamy Romance Novel
• Mud on the Ground = Muddy Boots
• Musky Scent = Strong Perfume
• Scorch Marks = Singed Clothing
• Scrap of Cloth = Torn Cloak
• Small Flower Petals = Flower in Hair
• Small Gloves = Petite Hands
• Used Hankerchief = Sniffly
• Wax Drippings = Carrying a Candle
• White Flakes = Dry Skin
• Wood Shavings = Whittling Knife

How I Solved It

The way I did it was by uncovering all Location clues to start with. Since, in theory, it takes 5 turns (in theory because if you lock a pairing before uncovering 2nd clue of a Location, you don’t have to do it anymore), I had enough time to try out some Location-Suspect pairings and test them with my Hero Power. At first, I did it based on the 1 clue available at the start. I looked at the Location clue, checked what’s the matching clue on a Suspect, then checked if any of my Suspects has it. If yes – I matched those two. I repeated the same thing for all of the locations. Then I tested one of the pairings with Hero Power. If I hit a match, I wrote it down. I know it’s obvious, but once you’re sure of a pairing, you should not waste your Investigations on that Location/Suspect anymore.

I also paid a lot of attention to the Fireworks, I feel like that’s a big part of it. For example, if I was 100% sure of 3 Suspects (thanks to the Hero Power), but there were 5 Fireworks at the end of turn, it means that 2 more were in the correct place, so I used that information. I started my turn with 2x Investigation and testing another Suspect with HP. If it matched – I took it into account and wrote it down. If it didn’t – I moved things exactly as they were the previous turn EXCEPT swapping 2 Suspects. Then I ended turn and observed Fireworks again. If I got 1-2 less fireworks than last time – it means that 1-2 of the Suspects were in the correct slots previously before I moved them. If I got 1-2 more fireworks – it means that I moved 1-2 Suspects to a correct slot.

After I already had 4-5 Suspects locked in, I focused on investigating the ones I had left. What I did was uncover one clue on a Suspect and then check whether it matches one of the Locations. If it matched into one that wasn’t taken yet – I put it there. If it didn’t match any free locations – I uncovered another clue and did the same thing. If a Suspect matched two different, non-taken locations, then I tested it with HP in one of them. If HP confirmed it – great, I wrote it down. If not, then I put it in the other location. I did it basically until the end, with some help of the fireworks to aid my suspicions.

However, I can’t say if it’s the best way to solve it – I managed to do it on my first try, but only on my final turn. I also know that it sounds a bit tough, but it gets easier once you try it in practice and know what you’re doing. Ultimately, whether you solve it or not also depends on luck, so don’t give up if you fail a few times. In your case, the initial clues might not match very well between Suspect/Locations – or vice versa, they might match multiple suspects, so it might be hard locking down some early pairings. Sometimes you might also move your last few Suspects around and it turns out that you guessed them all correctly, making the whole investigation a lot easier. Luckily, the puzzle doesn’t take that long and you can restart it at any time.

Finish

And that’s it! After you completed the puzzle, you can now open Achievements, go into “Gameplay” -> “Murder at Castle Nathria” tab and then claim your “???” achievement with a shiny, new Deviate Delight card back. Good job!

Once again, massive shoutout to the WoW Secret Finding Discord server. It’s a huge effort and there’s no way a single person could do all of that so quickly. Also, thanks to Celestalon for creating those puzzles in the first place – they make for a fun distraction from the main game, with some cool rewards!