Introduction

Part of Goose Games this year for Hack the North 2026 was "A badge's best friend" challenge where you needed to find the favourite animal of the badge.

Examining the Badge

I got close up images of the badge from the official website.

The badge itself had a goose on the bottom right of the back, but it wasn't that simple. I tried examining the overall badge itself to look for an animal that might've used up all the different shapes on the badge. During the badge workshop, the organizers mention that it was on the badge itself.

After further inspection, I noticed a barcode on the bottom right of the back of the badge. I took a screenshot of the barcode and inputted it into an online barcode reader. The result, 9492778327839, seemed like a random number. I tried converting it to Base16, but didn't notice anything obvious. I threw it into Perplexity and it suggested that it might be an EAN (European Article Number).

After inputting it into an EAN lookup, I got the result of "YZ Ikea Blahaj Shark Pluche, Groot, 100 cm" and it turned out the answer was shark.

Conclusion

It was a quick little puzzle, but felt very reminiscent of capture the flag challenges and had a lot of fun solving it.