Checkerboard (MIT Mystery Hunt 2020)

Checkerboard
MIT Mystery Hunt 2020
Wizard's Hollow
Author(s)	Ian Tullis and Yar Woo
Answer	Click to revealLEGAL BALANCE
Statistics
No. solves	34
No. total guesses	172
Links
Puzzle	Link
Solution	Link

Checkerboard is a puzzle from the Wizard's Hollow round of the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt. The puzzle is presented as a checkerboard with some text written on the board and the pieces.

Puzzle Elements

Flavortext - If you want to play some Wizard’s Checkers, there’s only one rule—don’t make any dick moves (or any moves at all, really).

 

Hint in Flavortext - If you want to play some Wizard’s Checkers, there’s only one rule—don’t make any dick moves (or any moves at all, really).

Knowledge Required (Politics) - Despite appearances, this is not a checkers puzzle—it's actually a Checkers puzzle. An excerpt from Richard Nixon's Checkers speech can be filled, one word at a time, into the checkerboard. (Potential ambiguity around the hyphenated word "six-year-old" is resolved by including it as a given.)

Indexing - The yellow numbers scattered around the board can then be used to index into the square's word, yielding...

Keep Going! - ...ENEMIES AND AIDES. This is, however, not the answer.

Identification (Politics) - Now knowing the puzzle centers around Richard Nixon, ENEMIES AND AIDES can be recontextualized around Nixon's political life to refer to two specific lists: ENEMIES being members of Nixon's Enemies List and AIDES the seven aides indicted in 1974 for their roles in the Watergate Scandal.

Alphanumeric Extraction - The Enemies List is conveniently numbered and has a size approximating 26. For each set of initials on a red checker, take that person's position on the list.

Enumerations - The enumerations on the black checkers uniquely identify one of the Watergate Seven...

Indexing - ...and the parenthesized numbers can be used as an index. Concatenating the two words obtained from these extractions yields the answer.