This was, in retrospect, one of the more confusing clues. If I had had more time and more help, play testing would have probably worked out some of the kinks. Towards the very end, a few of the straggling teams were actually skipped over this clue for a 90 minute time penalty.
The first thing to notice is that each tree has a missing branch of the right side, resulting in 26 rather than 27 branches. This is a strong indication that each tree codes to a letter. To find the letter, teams had to figure out how to travel up the tree to arrive at on branch.
The note from Mr. Boddy is supposed to explain, albeit cryptically, how to traverse the trees. In particular, given that X was next to play in each game and given best play by both players, a sure victory for X meant move left, a sure victory for O meant move right, and a sure tie meant move up the middle. This yielded:
| Bottom Winner | Middle Winner | Top Winner | Number | Letter |
| X | X | O | 3 | C |
| X | Tie | Tie | 5 | E |
| Tie | Tie | Tie | 14 | N |
| O | X | Tie | 20 | T |
| X | Tie | Tie | 5 | E |
| Tie | O | O | 18 | R |
| O | Tie | O | 24 | X |
| X | X | Tie | 2 | B |
| Tie | O | O | 18 | R |
| X | X | X | 1 | A |
| X | O | O | 9 | I |
| Tie | X | O | 12 | L |
| Tie | X | O | 12 | L |
| X | Tie | Tie | 5 | E |
or "center X Braille." Teams were then supposed to consider pairs of trees, each of which gave six tic-tac-toe boards organized 2x3 like Braille. An X in the center of a tic-tac-toe board corresponds to a Braille bump, an O corresponds to no bump. This gave:
| X | o |
| o | o |
| o | o |
| X | X |
| X | o |
| X | o |
| X | X |
| X | o |
| X | o |
| X | o |
| X | o |
| X | o |
| X | o |
| o | X |
| o | o |
| X | o |
| X | X |
| o | o |
| X | X |
| X | X |
| X | o |
This decodes to:
APPLEHQ
which means Apple's headquarters in Cupertino.
A lot of teams asked Game Control about Braille early on, inferring it from the comment about being blindfolded. The method of encoding Braille was too hard to figure out without the intermediate step, but it put Game Control in a tough position. On one hand, I couldn't deny that Braille was part of the puzzle, but confirming it would almost certainly send the team down a blind alley. I usually just responded cryptically with "you can't do anything with Braille, given what you know" or "you don't have a way to implement Braille." This, unfortunately, still confused some teams, but at least it got them thinking about the trees and the missing branch.
