# Marshmallow Stacks

Note: The story is fictional, this is my own puzzle.

### Marshmallow Stacks

My vegan girlfriend has gotten upset with me buying marshmallows again! Before leaving this morning, she stacked up all my marshmallows by the door with a threat.

Can you decipher what the note is telling me?

Bottom text transcription: A B D EB / E B B D / E EB / E B A

Hint 1

The bag of marshmallows contained 20 marshmallows in total

There are

8 separate towers arranged in an octagon.

There are actually

4 unique shapes, each reflected across the octagon symmetrically.

This implies there are

A few stacks of marshmallows, and the drawing is more of a 'shadow' cast by light sources in 8 directions.

In fact we can find

5 stacks, placed at "A", "B", "C", "D", and "E", and the shadows in the 8 directions give the height of each stack: A=4, B=5, C=3, D=6, E=2.

Taking our "code" of A B D EB / E B B D / E EB / E B A, we get

4 5 6 25 / 2 5 5 6 / 2 25 / 2 5 4.
Converting to A=1,Z=26, we get: DEFY BEEF BY BED
Which is either some very strange/cryptic threat or pun, or I made a misstep.

• You got it. I was actually intending it to be visualized as 5 towers viewed from 8 different angles and each of the sets on the outside are how many marshmallows you would see from each of the 8 angles. If the 3d view is flattened, the only marshmallows counted are those in the tallest towers. Regardless, you still got the final answer. Nov 16, 2022 at 5:47