Cryptex Hunt - Chapter One - In which I am Greatly Upstaged by my Puzzling Companion

The next adventure of my puzzling companion and I has us delving, belatedly, into the world of Cryptex Hunt. Organized by a maker of safes, Cryptex Security, the hunt itself launched in February and was over in early March. I'd registered, but then everything got OBE'd by COVID-19 and it slipped from my mind. Thankfully, we have plenty of time on our hands, and the puzzle remained open for people like us to play.

The Hunt is set up like a seven-chapter book, with a puzzle at the end of each chapter. The story itself centers on Paige, a teenager determined to join the very-cool ranks of superheros known as 'Vanguards' who go through portals and do super cool things. Paige's mother doesn't want her to join the vanguard, while her bff Jess is in training to become one. Some peoples' parents. Fortunately for Paige, she's also been dreaming of a Book* in which she accesses and then defeats the nearest portal. Enlisting Jess, she follows her dream clairvoyant path and, again using the Book, which we are in fact reading, she finds her way through the first portal.

And that is where we come in. Unlike the passwords she clairvoyantly knew breaking in to the portal, she, and thereby we, have to use our brains to break through. Making note of the epigraph, which says to focus on what lies beneath, we stumbled pretty rapidly onto the actual location of the puzzle - coded bars between paragraphs, which have a different number of boxes, and different ones shaded on each. And then we were stuck. I immediately decided it had to do with some sort of cipher and WOULD NOT listen to my cipher companion pointing out that it was probably a bit simpler. Nope. It had to be something that could be converted into ones and zeros. dCode got a workout. Or, as my more logical partner said, it had to do with counting the letters in the first word of the length of the boxes, either in the section above or below the line. Or the last word with the same length. Or the first letter of whichever paragraph was indicated by the open box. We both ran several permutations along that line.

Giving up on binary, hex, any sort of standard cipher, I then became convinced that the answer had something to do with turning the pages sideways, as seems to be indicated on the portal itself. I am working with the pdf, so was trying to figure out how to do it with MS paint or ipiccy, or maybe just turning my head sideways. Still nothing. I become further convinced that that had to be the solution, as each of them has the same black box as page 2. Nope. I went back to trying to do strange things with the words themselves.

We were still stuck. We read the hints. They said we were on the right track, and just had to look below the bars. I almost lost my temper, and may have growled. Unhintful hints. And then, I have to give credit to my puzzling partner, they spotted the obvious when I was still trying to do stupid things with counting.

DIRECTLY beneath each of the bars is a word with the same word length as the number of boxes as the bar. Directly. Maybe an inch apart on my screen where I have it blown up to 300% so my squinty little eyes can see through my glasses any extraneous detail that I could follow down a rabbit hole. Directly beneath. So, using the same logic we'd been plying earlier, we took the whatever-th letter the empty box represented, and followed the pattern down. It was that simple. Or hard. I think we made it harder on ourselves, and I will definitely say that the picture of the front of the door convinced me to go down several rabbit holes. Or, let me convince myself. Rabbit holes are fun. I don't know why Alice left.

Digressing, as usual. That was our first experience with the 2020 Cryptex Hunt. As frustrating as it was to get hints telling us we were doing the right thing the wrong way, it was actually very fun, and really felt like a meaty, well thought out puzzle and solution. And the best thing was that the solution felt right - not cheaty or anything. Plus, the story is cute, and I want Paige to succeed in becoming a vanguard. Too many years reading YA novels as an adult, I suppose. (I may or may not still use references to Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar in my D&D characters...) I tried to convince my puzzling partner to go for another chapter, but was informed that I had to pace myself. Bah. Humbug. So, tomorrow night, Chapter Two!

If you enjoyed following along, you can check out the 2020 Cryptex Hunt for free on the website. It does require registration, a holdover from when it was a competition, but it also allows for tracking your right and wrong answers, and reassuring you that you've completed a chapter correctly. In addition to the seven puzzle chapters, there are also a couple of extras, and a meta puzzle to consider. Looking forward to it!

*Book must be capitalized due to its role, much as house must always be written in blue if you've read House of Leaves. 

Maze of Games - Jack of Diamonds - Dead Men Tell No Tales

From the Knights of the Round Table, Robin Hood and his Merry Men, Werewolves, and now Pirates, Maze of Games knows how to hit its tropes. Fleeing an ale-soaked battle, our illustrious duo stumble upon no less than the treasure hoard of Blackbeard (Edward Teach). Cue thoughts of the Goonies, and One-Eyed Willie.

Within the cache, however, lies not gems and gold bullion, but a journal, missing some key information. The puzzle is a variation of an acrostic and a cryptogram. Each missing square is two letters, except for certain ones which are circled, and contain only one letter. The squares are numbered, and numbered squares repeat.

What is difficult is that a series of numbered squares may contain more than one word. You have to go a lot from context. Thankfully, there is one phrase in there that makes sense - TREASURE MAP. That comes in in the first couple of lines. From there, it's knowing your pirate memes, and a lot of trial and error. It took me 43 minutes to solve, according to the in-game timer, though I will plead distraction for a bit of it. The word you get with the letters is PIECES OF EIGHT.

The puzzle tells us to change the first letter of the last word, EIGHT into LIGHT, and add house, LIGHTHOUSE. That then slots right into the Jack slot, and we get a circled L.

Lighthouse makes me thinking of the song Birdhouse In Your Soul by They Might Be Giants.

There's a picture opposite me

Of my primitive ancestry

Who stood on rocky shores

And Kept the Beaches Shipwreck Free

Though I respect them a lot,

I'd be fired if that were my job,

After killing Jason off, 

And countless screaming Argonauts....

Also, for those interested may I suggest the entire compilation of sea shanties from AC Black Flag? I have been known to leave the game playing while I do other things just to listen. This is easier. Avast, me hearties, yo ho! 

Maze of Games - Nine of Diamonds

Continuing on the Maze of Game, using the Puzzazz app (it's apparently also available as a hardcover on Amazon, but it's a bit pricey for me), our path goes rather directly to the Nine of Diamonds, where we are greeted by a werewolf, and I'm unable to stop myself thinking of Young Frankenstein.

Ah, signs of a glorious, well-spent youth. In the werewolf's puzzle, we are presented with five sets of cryptograms, each of which are lists of what you might, or might not, find in certain spooky locations. Each set has its own cryptic alphabet, so A=E in one does not mean A=E in all of them. Solving them requires the same set of tools that any cryptogram does - knowledge of letter frequency in the English language, patience, and the willingness to stretch your pattern recognition to the widest extent possible. A love of horror movies, humorous or otherwise, is a definite advantage for this one. Without spoiling the fun, the letters used to solve X=? in each of the puzzles are rearranged to form another word, GRIMMER. When you plop that keyword into the fourth couplet in the King's riddle, we are told that we are to change one letter in that to become 'quite a scintillation', and we get GLIMMER. Putting that into the line next to the Nine of Diamonds, we find that L is encircled, and we continue on our way to the next puzzle, provided by the Jack, or Knave, of Diamonds. 

Maze of Games - Continuing the Journey - Queen of Diamonds, Eight of Diamonds, Digressions...

First, I must update Maze of Game's original puzzle problem in the Puzzazz app, where the entire puzzle, a series of rotating wheels, was blank. An email to the Puzzazz company revealed that I was far from the only person with this issue, with a fairly straightforward solution. The issue, it seems, is one of device memory, so close all apps, then reopen only Puzzazz. It worked! I was able to solve the puzzle itself fairly easily. If anyone is stuck, rather than try to make the number of words on the right hand side, try instead to look at what letters commonly come after each other. The left wheel is fixed, the rest are not, so figure out what position on the second wheel makes plausible two letter combinations, and then move to the next wheel. For example, T is more often followed by H than by N. A closer look at the map reveals why she said to go south rather than north - the northern path dead ends quickly just past the 10 in two directions. So, back to the story.

Proceeding from the gluttonous Three of Diamonds, we come next across the Queen of Diamonds, inhabited by a cheerful, Italian weapons seller by the name of Giuseppe. His puzzle consists of seven pairs of words, each of which must be rearranged into intersecting, crossword-style, pairs of weapons. As an added challenge, there is one letter that must be added to each pair to make the whole thing work. It was a lot of fun to work on, especially during some rather longer meetings in which technical difficulties (hello, can you hear me now?!) made concentrating rather useless. I highly recommend them for the start, at least, of all new video conferences. I will not provide the answers to this, but I will give you one bit of a hint - no matter what your apophenic mind is trying to tell you, 'blowgun' is not an answer to the bottom right pair. It's just not. Took me forever to get that out of my brain. From there, you take the added letters to get your key word for the Queen of Diamonds. That word is then plugged into the solution on the King of Diamonds page as the second in a set of couplets, having been the second puzzle in our path. It is transformed, and placed into the 'Queen' slot of the letter set, the last line. So now we have a circled 'Y' to add to our path forward.

Next along our path, being careful to read the multiple paths of joining and checking for dead ends, is the Eight of Diamonds, where we are awaited by arrows, and a math puzzle. Our heroine loses her hat, but the hero grabs the puzzle from the embedded arrow, and proceeds. I will say here that I LOVE math. I love it. But there are again certain assumptions that my brain makes that made this far harder to solve. The first is that beloved Robin of Locksley will hit all his shots. The second was that this was another puzzle that could be solved while waiting for people to figure out their teleconference technology. Apparently I can do word puzzles in that sort of environment, but not math puzzles. As an aside, I'm currently reading a lovely twisty book by the title of Gnomon, by Nick Harkaway, which, among its many fascinating digressions, talks about the physicist Richard Feynman and how he looked at how some people counted in their heads, either by seeing numbers or hearing them. I "hear" them, and apparently that's associated with being far easier to distract with verbal cues when doing math. There's a whole clip on it from Feynman himself on YouTube, if you're curious. It may also be associated with Aphantasia: a condition where one does not possess a functioning mind's eye and cannot voluntarily visualize imagery. Thankfully not a condition I have, as it can be linked with schizophrenia. And, realizing that I digress down rabbit holes almost as much as Gnomon does, which could be why I enjoy it so much, I return to the puzzle.

In the Eight of Diamonds, we have five archers from Robin Hood, himself included, a total score, and a few bits of information, such as each archer took two shots, for a total of ten, that only two shots missed their mark entirely, and a few other points regarding the relationship of the scores. I have already given you one hint - that Robin is one of the ones that missed, which I couldn't accept and still have trouble with. In the end, I found it easier to make an excel sheet, similar to those logic puzzles that we did as kids, where you had to identify which student preferred which course or some such. Yes, I'm a nerd. I'm also going to show my full work on this one - SPOILERS - so be warned and skip past the pictures if you want to work through it yourself.

BEGIN SPOILERS

Here's the full detail: We have Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, Allan-A-Dale, Little John, and Will Scarlet, all shooting at a target with the options of 100 (bulls-eye), 67, 37, 17, and missing entirely at 0. We know two arrows missed their marks. Having coded in the basics - checks for total score (671), checks for some of the more easily programmable (X is greater than Y, X is greater than Y or Z but not both Y or Z, X is even or odd), I had to start on the logic itself. The first is that Little John's total score is exactly 70 more than Friar Tuck's single arrow. So, make a chart of all the possible outcomes, then identify where a total score is greater than one single shot. The only case in which this is possible is Little John with a score total of 137 (bulls-eye and 37) and one of Friar Tuck's shots hitting 67, first out from the bulls-eye. So, that gets plugged in. Our current tally is 204, far from our total score.

Next we see that Friar Tuck's score is either 100 more than Will Scarlet OR 100 more than Allan-A-Dale's. Not both. Given that we know that Friar Tuck's first arrow was a 67, when we look at the table of possible outcomes, the only way for him to be exactly 100 higher than anyone else, while maintaining his odd-numbered total, is to shoot 100 on his second arrow, for a total score of 167, not bad Friar Tuck! (Note that the knowledge of odd vs. even here is important, as he could have shot another 67, bringing him to 134, which is 100 more than someone who shot 17 both times, but we discard that as an even number). In addition, we know that this means that EITHER Will Scarlet or Allan-a-Dale missed an arrow and had a total score of 67. However, from the odd/even breakdown, we know that Allan-A-Dale has an even score, so it couldn't be him. That leaves us with Will Scarlet at a total of 67 points, missing one shot entirely. That gets plugged in. Our Total is now 371, and with 300 points left we haven't filled in anything for Allan or Robin. Plus, we know that between them they have one missed shot.

Start with Robin. From the clues, we know that his score is even, and he has to be within 50 points of Little John, whose score we now know is 137. So, that gives us a range from 187 to 87. Poor Robin did not shoot a perfect game after all - no 200 for him. Given that we have 300 points to deliver amongst three shots, we have to have someone with a perfect game at this point, which means that Allan-a-Dale, rather than Robin, must have shot 200, while Robin shot the bull's eye with one, and missed entirely with the other. Maybe Marian blew in Robin's ear?

In order to get this part of the King's puzzle, we take the winner's name, and in the third couplet are told to take one of each unique letter, reshuffling to get something meaning burdened. Slotting that in this time to the Eight of Diamonds slot finds us an E to add to our overall key. 

Maze of Games - Two in One Day! - Three of Diamonds

Yes, two posts in one day, because I am stubborn, and the fact that I could not make hide nor hair of the solution to the ten of diamonds with the puzzle at the end under the King of Diamonds was bothering me. A lot.

So, back to square one of Maze of Games, the "Pathways of Your Mine", where a second re-reading has the heroine very specifically saying that she's not going to the north and the 10 of Diamonds first. Presumably that's something from the (broken) dial puzzle - le sigh. Going the other way leads to the 3 of Diamonds first, rather than the 10, and the narrative goes accordingly. Our dashing duo stumble across a glutton, who sentences them to death by beheading. Not a very nice glutton. I'm imagining 1980s version Baron Harkkonen at this point, but I digress. In order to escape beheading and/or deliver themselves onward to the headsman, the duo has another puzzle to solve.

This time, it's a different style of crossword, one that lacks any black blocks or blanks, sometimes called a barred crossword or a continuity crossword. The puzzle has a theme, and, as befits what should be the first puzzle in the maze, it has a lot of guidance, and tells you the number of words in the theme, and which of those words is your actual clue.

Without spoiling the fun of the puzzle itself, the word in question, once you solve it is ROUND. This, then, makes a whole lot more sense when you plug it into the cryptic crossword style clue: Add T to (the keyword) to gain a kindred meaning. Adding a T to ROUND gives ROTUND. Which actually makes sense! Hurray! Then, that gets plugged into the overall solution for the Three of Diamonds. One of the letters of ROTUND is circled, so presumably that will be part of the instructions on how to enter the second level of the maze, once we get there.

Having (happily) sorted that out, and solved the true first room of the maze, it's off to sleep, hopefully not to dream of House Harkkonen.

I hope you enjoy, and check out Maze of Games on Puzzazz or Lone Shark Games

Maze of Games - Am I Doing This Right?

I can't go long without puzzles. It's not healthy. So, when I needed a break from work today (not on company time! The up side of working from home is a little flexibility for my work hours!) I cracked open Maze of Games, a puzzle book on the Puzzazz app that I'd picked up ages ago, but, realizing that the first cipher was broken on the app, I gave up. With COVID-19 and the need to take a brain break, I went back to it.

The book follows the story of two English teenagers, sister and brother, of the 1880s, as they are sucked by the skeletal Gatekeeper into the eponymous maze. To survive, they must make it through the maze. The very first puzzle, "A Flame in the Darkness" which is STILL broken, might I add, is the one to open the portcullises out into the maze from the central chamber in which the children find themselves. It's a series of tumblers, apparently meant to have text on them, but as I said, still broken, at least on the iPhone version. Thankfully, this being a book, you can still proceed into the Maze proper, if you dare.

Each level of the maze has a different suit, taken from cards, and a series of 12 puzzles (Ace-Queen), which are to be solved in the manner needed to proceed through the maze. Each of the 12 puzzles is supposed to provide you one, or more, keywords to plug into a 13th puzzle for the King of each suit, presumably freeing you from that level of the maze, or chapter.

Chapter One, "Diamonds in the Rough," presents the first level as a clickable maze, very handy to keep you going in what is hopefully the right direction. Of course, there are two exits from the center, and no clue which is the correct one, at least at the start. I flipped a mental coin, which had me running into the Ten of Diamonds puzzle, "A Giant Among Men," first. In it, our brave hero and heroine face off with Goliath, and have to solve an acrostic puzzle to open the gate and get past him before he comes 'round from their lucky shot with a slung pebble.

The puzzle itself is straightforward, and a bit of fun. I hadn't done an acrostic in a while, and had forgotten the name of the puzzle type, though thankfully not how to do it. The acrostic style is a series of clues of various lengths. Each clue tells you how long the answer is. Each letter in the answer has a different number. When you solve a clue, place the letters in the corresponding numbered box in the more standard looking crossword above. Thankfully, Puzzazz does this automatically for you - one of my problems when doing pen and paper acrostics was accidentally writing the letter in the wrong-numbered box and then getting entirely too perplexed as to where I'd gone astray. 13 clues in this one, and you can solve back and forth, which is often the case with acrostics - if you're stumped on a clue you can look at what you've solved so far in the crossword box and realize which letters make sense - a letter alone is usually 'I' or 'A', TH is usually followed by 'E', etc.

Once solved, the quote in the box turned out to be a biblical reference, in line with the David and Goliath story of the puzzle itself. However, there is no clear way at this point to know if I've gone the correct direction out of the maze. Skipping to the King puzzle reveals that the code word I have supposedly gleaned (I have?) from this quote or puzzle will then be put into a couplet, to produce ANOTHER code word. The couplet or second puzzle layer to apply depends on the order in which I encountered the puzzle. So, if 10 of diamonds really was the first one that I should encounter, I would look at one couplet/puzzle/transformation. If that doesn't make any sense, then I need to go the other way and see what I encounter there, and if there is a code word or phrase there that makes more sense with respect to the transform which is 'add T to (codeword) to gain a kindred meaning'.

I have no clue if I'm on the right track, yet. I love it. Now back to work! 

Wish You Were Here - Final Card (5)

It was a nice, lazy Saturday, and after last night's frustration, the thought of waiting until tonight for the last puzzle was not acceptable. Thankfully, my puzzling friend was happy to oblige, so we cracked the last pdf of Enigma Emporium's currently-free-to-play-digitally puzzle series "Wish You Were Here" open after lunch.

Caveat lector - Spoilers abound



The card opens with what appears to be an old oil painting, with a title under it (and apparent subject) of the Death of Caesar (underlining is on the card - a Caesar cipher?) by --Vinccienzo Campucchienir--, with XV on either side of the title. On the top, right, and left of the artwork appear at first glace to be decorative lines, but a second glance reveals they are stretched letters.

On the back, we find that the card was sent on July 27, 2018, another Friday, again from somewhere in the US. to the right of the postmark are a series of 5 stamps, each showing the globe, with a 2-3 digit number, broken by a period (dates?). Of note, on July 27th, 2018 there was a total lunar eclipse. In the space normally reserved for the address, there is a QR code. In the left, 'message' portion, there is a string of enciphered text, as well as a barcode (9-19, 13-25, 14-1-13-5).

The first thing we did was to read the side stretched text: SEOUL. The final location is, presumably, Seoul, South Korea. It appears to be the same text in each section.

A quick google search confirms that the painting is as it claims. Per wikipedia: "Death of Julius Caesar is an 1806 painting by Vincenzo Camuccini, originally commissioned in 1793 by Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol, for whom he had already produced a copy of Raphael's Deposition." First stumble - the names differ. Taking the 'extra' letters, we get CIPHER. Combined with the underlined Caesar, a Caesar Cipher. Thanks! Guessing that with the roman 15 on either side, this will be a rot15 code, or a -11 to decode. Presumably this applies to the message on the back side. Let's see!

As I was about to start the Caesar, my swift eyed friend realized that the 'barcode' was in fact Morse Code (.--- .- ... --- -. / -.-. .-.. .- .-. -.-), spelling out: JASON CLARK. The numbers under it, with an A=01, gives you "IS MY NAME". So, our mysterious correspondent has a name!

A quick hop back to the Caesar, rot 15, and many thanks to dCode for a faster solution, we get the following message (spaces added):

IF YOU KNOW WHERE I HAVE BEEN THEN YOU KNOW WHERE I WILL BE NEXT.

PLEASE FOR THE SAKE OF MY FAMILY TURN ME IN TO THE FBI.

IT IS THE ONLY WAY I CAN SAVE THEM.

PLEASE TELL THEM THE TRUTH ABOUT ME.

I AM NOT THE MAD CRIMINAL I APPEAR TO BE.

PLEASE TELL THEM.

On the first line, my brilliant friend assumed the next place would be the first letter of all the prior places, which gives us: RAPIS. Hopefully he's not a rapist ;) Instead, we shuffle, and get PARIS. 

Two puzzles left: the stamps, and the QR code. Scanning the code is a hot link to an email address  - presumably of an FBI agent. 

My first suspicion is that the stamps are dates: March 9th, February 24th, January 13th, June 29th, and July 27th. As my perceptive puzzling buddy pointed out, these are the dates of the other postcards. And then we realized it was supposed to be a hint for the order of the location anagram, which we already had. So, it seems our puzzling adventure has come to an end, except for a final message to the FBI on where to find our penpal, who may or may not be the mad criminal he appears to be. 

I opened a new email, and sent what we had found. 

Wish You Were Here - Card Four - Attempt Two

This is the record of our second night of staring at the fourth piece of Wish You Were Here by Enigma Emporium. My puzzling companion and I burned our brains out last night, trying to figure out the connection between some stamps made out of book covers (we had one answer but we didn't trust it), and figuring out where we were going wrong with what LOOKED like a straightforward enough book cipher (apparently also called an Arnold cipher). But, being stubborn, we came back at it for a second night.

Spoilers ahead -  caveat lector.

A recap. Last night, we started the fourth postcard of Wish You Were Here, which is related to books. The front of the card is eight quotes from different books, the back of the card has a code from ISBN on the left, three stamps from bookcovers, and a series of what look to be book ciphers in the address bar. We were able to identify the books from the quotes, and read the ISBN code, which told us that their name (presumably of the cult) was The Ourobouros. And then we hit a wall.

On the book titles, a normal book cipher would be chapter-sentence-word or chapter-paragraph word. Finding those, in the order of the quotes on the first page, did not yield a message, even when we double checked our counting with the help of a book cipher decoder at Boxentriq (which turns out ot have its own puzzle games, so I'll add those to the list. Towards the end of the evening we realized we had made a mistake on the last book on the quotes, that it was Tolstoy's War and Peace, not Bethink Yourselves. Still, one word difference (either "about" or "prince") doesn't help that we were feeling hopelessly stuck.

• "In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate." - Isaac Asimov, Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain (1987).
• "The greatest victory is that which requires no battle." - Sun Tzu, The Art of War
• "You don't run out on people; you run out on yourself." - Truman Capote, Summer Crossing
• "Where there is no imagination there is no horror." - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
• "I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else." - Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
• "Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so." - Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity
• "They use everything about the hog except the squeal." - Upton Sinclair, The Jungle 
• "The two most powerful warriors are patience and time." - Leo Tolstoy,War And Peace 

The stamps, while we identified the books from which they came, didn't seem to have a link, unless you wanted to only read the first words, which would be 'Protect My Mother,' but it didn't have the same feel as other solved puzzles so we discarded it. That the images chosen were all alternate covers also didn't seem to be relevant. They took place in different locations. The books in the stamps are as follows:

• Protect &/And Defend by Vince Flynn (2007)
• My Gun is Quick by Mickey Spillane (1950)
• Mother Land by Paul Theroux (2017)

We took another good whack at them tonight - different publishers, different years, different genres. Nothing obvious in the ISBN. Protagonists: Mitch Rapp, Mike Hammer, and Jay Justus. We gave up, and looked at the hint page. The hint seemed to suggest that actually, our first, discarded solution, Protect My Mother, was in fact correct. We still don't think it feels right. So far our pen pal has been more... something. He's stolen gold bars, great works of art, and assassinated rogue agents. Now he's asking us to protect his mother? Or he's doing it to protect his mother, because they also have his wife? Hmf. For some mastermind, criminal-of-all-arts, he does seem to be misplacing family members while gallivanting around the globe. And where is he even going!? We returned to the book titles...

And then my wonderful wonderful friend went back and looked at last night's scribblings, and realized what we missed. And showed me. And then I had to apologize for the volume of my howl. Seriously. F***. See what we missed last night? Do you know how much this drove me NUTS for the past 24+ hours?!! We apparently love rabbit holes because we dive straight into them.

• Isaac Asimov, Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain  (1987)
• Sun Tzu, The Art of War (5th C BCE)
• Truman Capote, Summer Crossing (2005)
• (Sir) Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887)
• Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. (2013)
• Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity (1925)
• Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1905)
• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1865)

So, we now have a location. Istanbul (not Constantinople). We don't have a crime, and that doesn't solve my problems with not being able to count appropriately in the book cipher. Seriously though, very glad my friend's eyes work better than mine.

Still, the final cipher needs addressing. We had tried every version of direct pairing. In a last gasp attempt before seeking another clue, my very patient puzzling partner let me try arranging them in time order. We tried both Chapter-sentence-word and Chapter-Paragraph-Word.

Book	Cipher	Chapter-Sentence-Word	Chapter-Paragraph-Word
Sun Tzu, The Art of War (5th C BCE)	II-7-22	Carrying	Carrying
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1865)	I-12-10	Grandfathers	In
(Sir) Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887)	IX-37-19
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1905)	XII-14-9
Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity (1925)	II-6-10
Isaac Asimov, Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain (1987)	XI-7-10
Truman Capote, Summer Crossing (2005)	X-15-24
Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. (2013)	I-11-9

We gave up, and looked for the last hint. And I started cursing again. The FONT was the bloody key. I started yelling. MF. I may need a new keyboard I'm typing angry.

Cipher	Chapter-Paragraph-Word
II-7-22	Carrying
I-12-10	Military
IX-37-19	Intelligence.
XII-14-9	Intercepted
II-6-10	From
XI-7-10	A
X-15-24	Former
I-11-9	General

Wow, I feel like an idiot. We were WAY over-thinking that. By a lot. But also not ranking very high on our perception, not noticing the different fonts.

So, our penpal this time, is or was in Istanbul, working for a cult calling itself The Ourobouros, carrying military intelligence intercepted from a former general, either to protect his mother, or asking us to do so. Ta da.

Honestly, though, I found this particular card the least entertaining, as it relied less on ciphers, and more on perception. I felt mostly irritated by this, rather than challenged and engaged. All the other cards have been great, though. I'm hoping this is just a one-off for myself, or for Enigma Emporium. Still, I'm greatly looking forward to tomorrow night's card, and the next series hopefully winding their way through the world to me even now.

Wish You Were Here - Card Four - Attempt 1

I'm not saying we're compulsive, or that we have an addiction problem, but... this is the fourth night in a row my friend and I are working on the Wish You Were Here series by Enigma Emporium. I'm sure this is perfectly normal. If not, I blame COVID-19.

As always, spoilers ahead - caveat lector.

That's a big enough spoiler, don't you think?

The front of the fourth contains what look to be a series of quotes, overlaid on a a background of open, blurred books. First lines of novels? We shall see.

The back of the card shows us that the penpal sent this on June 29, 2018, which was a Friday. There are three stamps, each of which looks to be a book cover, from varying eras. On the left, we have a column of numbers, of varying lengths, some of which are highlighted in red. There are more lines of numbers than there are of quotes. On the right, where there would be an address, is a message in what looks to be a mix of Roman numerals and normal digits. First thought - roman numeral for the chapter, then normal for the paragraph and word - something that would be easy to keep track of across editions unlike pages and lines.

My charming compatriot opted to begin with the stamps. There are three, from left to right:

• Protect & Defend by Vince Flynn
• My Gun is Quick by Mickey Spillane
• Mother Land by Paul Theroux

Not much there, yet. So we moved on to the quotes, realizing that there are 8 quotes, and 8 chapter-para-word combinations in the 'address'. The quotes are:

• "In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate." - Isaac Asimov, Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain (1987). 
• "The greatest victory is that which requires no battle." - Sun Tzu, The Art of War
• "You don't run out on people; you run out on yourself." - Truman Capote, Summer Crossing
• "Where there is no imagination there is no horror." - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
• "I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else." - Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
• "Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so." - Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity
• "They use everything about the hog except the squeal." - Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
• "The two most powerful warriors are patience and time." - Leo Tolstoy, Bethink Yourselves

Then we started looking at the texts, combined with the digits in the 'address'. The first thing my friend noticed was that Tolstoy's Bethink Yourselves didn't have 11 paragraphs in the first chapter, so we went instead with chapter-sentence-word. However, when we tried that, we found that Chapter I, sentence 11, word 9 was "They" - an odd end to a sentence. We then tried Chapter - word - sentence.  Chapter I, word 11, sentence 9 gave us "It", which seemed far more reasonable. Our results followed:

• Isaac Asimov, Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain - Chapter II, sentence 7, word 22: After
• Sun Tzu, The Art of War - Chapter I, sentence 12, word 10:: Military
• Truman Capote, Summer Crossing - Chapter 4, sentence 37, word 19: Ship.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet - Chapter 12, sentence 14, word 9: The
• Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. - Chapter 2, sentence 6, word 10: Yellow
• Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity - Chapter 11, : Eternal
• Upton Sinclair, The Jungle - Chapter 10, line 15, word 24: Had
• Leo Tolstoy, Bethink Yourselves - Chapter I, sentence 11, word 9: They 

This wasn't making any sense, so I started looking at the numbers on the left, which I recognized as ISBN. Keeping in mind the pattern from the last card, I kept highlighted the same letters in the title.

• 9781607784555 - The Golden Bowl by Henry James
• 0140268863 - The Odyssey by Homer
• 9781101872765 - Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
• 9780679736370 - Sophie's Choice by William Styron
• 9780141181264 - Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
• 9780451419439 - Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
• 9781720760153 - Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
• 1420956493 - Howard's End by E. M. Forster
• 1853262501 - The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
• 0060934344 - Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
• 8187138750 - Animal Farm by George Orwell
• 9780060850524 - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• 9780061124952 - Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
• 9780140447897 - Metamorphases by Ovid
• 9780525444435 - Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
• 9780679732266 - Light in August by William Faulkner
• 9781503207332 - Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Looking only at the colored letters we find the message: "They Are Called The Ouroborous". Well, I'm glad we figured something out - these puzzles are definitely getting progressively harder and I was beginning 

We went back to the stamps. One hunch, that they were all written about the same location, was proven wrong - Mother Land takes place in Cape Cod, while Protect and Defend seems to take place in Iran. 

I began to wonder if I hadn't just miscounted. I tried using an online book cipher tool at Boxentriq to do the counting, knowing my eyes blur. That didn't get me much farther. Then I tried treating the titles as the enciphered code, and just looked at the letters in order. Nope.

• Isaac Asimov, Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain - Chapter II, sentence 7, word 22: After
• Sun Tzu, The Art of War - Chapter I, sentence 12, word 10:: Military
• Truman Capote, Summer Crossing - Chapter 4, sentence 37, word 19: Ship.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet - Chapter 12, sentence 14, word 9: The
• Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. - Chapter 2, sentence 6, word 10: Yellow
• Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity - Chapter 11, : Eternal
• Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
• Leo Tolstoy, Bethink Yourselves - Chapter I, sentence 11, word 9: They 

We tried again. Chapter - Paragraph - Word. Nope.

• Isaac Asimov, Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain: After
• Sun Tzu, The Art of War: Military
• Truman Capote, Summer Crossing - Chapter 4, sentence 37, word 19: Ship.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet - Chapter 12, sentence 14, word 9: The
• Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. - Chapter 2, sentence 6, word 10: Yellow
• Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity - Chapter 11, : Eternal
• Upton Sinclair, The Jungle : Place
• Leo Tolstoy, Bethink Yourselves - Chapter I, sentence 11, word 9: They 

We tried again: Chapter - Word - Word. Nope.

• Isaac Asimov, Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain: Then He
• Sun Tzu, The Art of War: It The
• Truman Capote, Summer Crossing - Chapter 4, sentence 37, word 19: Ship.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet - Chapter 12, sentence 14, word 9: The
• Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. - Chapter 2, sentence 6, word 10: Yellow
• Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity - Chapter 11, : Eternal
• Upton Sinclair, The Jungle : Place
• Leo Tolstoy, Bethink Yourselves - Chapter I, sentence 11, word 9: They 

We were tired, then, and took a break, not wanting to use a hint unless we had to. We did realize, though, that the Tolstoy book wasn't Bethink Yourselves, but was instead War and Peace, despite some annoying links on Amazon claiming otherwise. We will hope that our brains process this as we sleep. Thankfully tomorrow is a holiday, happy Orthodox Good Friday! 

Wish You Were Here - Card Three

This post is full of spoilers for episode three of Enigma Emporium's Wish You Were Here. You've been warned. Caveat Lector

In yet another instance of my good friend enabling my delinquency, we delved tonight into the third card of Enigma Emporium's Wish You Were Here puzzle series. To date, our nefarious pen-pal has stolen Leonardo DaVinci's "Lady with an Ermine" from a traveling gallery in Rome, and gold bars from the Athenian branch of an Iranian bank. They claim, variously, to have been hired by a cult, and forced to steal against their will. Is it the same pen-pal? Is it someone with multiple personality disorder? Am I reading too much in to this? Who knows...

Today's card takes us around the globe. It was sent on March 9, 2018, a Friday this time, from somewhere in the US. The card's front is in black and white, with what looks to be the emblem of the United Nations, white on a black field. Below it reads RESPICE AD CRUCEM, three times fading into the background (Per google: Look at the Cross). The emblem is surrounded by intersecting white lines/fragments. At the top of the emblem, inside the outermost circle, are a series of numbers, possibly dates, with some individual numerals in red rather than white. 20/09/60, 21/09/71, 12/12/58, 25/09/81. A quick check of the numbers in red reveals that they're not a simple A=01 cipher, but we continue.

On the back side of the card, we find a hodgepodge of clues. There are 11 stamps of the flags of different countries, each with a number at its bottom right corner. Tucked behind the flag stamps is what looks to be a small Polaroid of Asian people in a street - the majority of the picture is lightly grayed out, except for a circle around the head and shoulders of a young man in a track suit with a messenger bag, looking down. Below the picture, on the tag of the Polaroid, is a series of black squares in a grid, three high. Behind all of these things, and covered by both stamps and Polaroid, is what looks to be a long enciphered message.

We started with the dates, thinking perhaps they would be accession dates of member states.

• 20/09/60 - 14 countries ratified the UN Charter on September 20, 1960. In alphabetical order, the 9th, designated by the red number 09 is the Democratic Republic of Congo.  
• 21/09/71 - AND, this is where we hit a snag - only 3 countries ratified on that date, and the red number would be 7. Back to the drawing board. 

We then bounced to the stamps. First, we looked up the countries, in order from left to right, then I guessed it would be the # letter in their name:

• Brazil (3) - A
• Pakistan (5) - S
• Kosovo (3) - S
• Uganda (3) - A
• Sri Lanka (1) - S
• Tunisia (5) - S
• Ethiopia (4) - I
• Spain (5) - N
• Saint Lucia (2) - A
• Turkey (1) - T
• Brunei (5) - E

Assassinate. What a cheerful message. At least we're getting somewhere. I'm guessing we're going after the guy in the picture?

Speaking of, let's look at the boxes under the picture. What else is three boxes high? BRAILLE! Going for the straight code, we get ROGUE AGENT. So, our perfidious pen-pal is now assassinating a rogue agent - but for what government!? And WHERE?! We were so happy to move forward!

We looked again at the dates: 20/09/60, 21/09/71, 12/12/58, 25/09/81. This time, we tried looking at the number of countries that ratified the charter on those dates: 14, 3, 1, and 1, respectively. A wild goose chase then ensued as we realized that if A=01, that spells NCAA, or the National Collegiate Athletic Association. There is not, however, a division 09. There is a video game NCAA 09, but we figured we were off track. Again.

20/09/60, 21/09/71, 12/12/58, 25/09/81. While my partner in crime-solving continued poking at the numbers, I tried some simple Caesar cipher decodes on the text behind the picture and stamps. Nada. For a brief few happy seconds, I managed to make the first two sets of four letters say 'the key' but I think that was apophenia more than anything else. Randomly, #097125 is a hex code for a very serviceable green. 97125 is the zip code for Manning, Oregon, but the 0 is highlighted so it must be important. Simply typing in 09 7 12 5 into google leads us to 9°00'00.0"N 7°12'05.0"E, which is in Abuja, Nigeria. Maybe s/he's there? New hunch: the UN is headquartered in New York City. Did anything happen there on those dates? Outside of UN accessions, that is. No.

Ok, we broke down at this point and got a hint. We were on the right track with the original thought that each of the dates was related to the accession of a country. Here is who acceded to the UN on those dates (thank you Wikipedia):

• 20/09/60: 

  	Benin[note 1] (Republic of Benin)	20 September 1960
  	Burkina Faso[note 3] (Republic of Burkina Faso)	20 September 1960
  	Cameroon[note 6] (Republic of Cameroon)	20 September 1960
  	Central African Republic[note 7] (CAR)	20 September 1960
  	Chad (Republic of Chad)	20 September 1960
  	Congo[note 8] (Republic of the Congo)	20 September 1960
  	Côte d'Ivoire[note 9] (Republic of Côte d'Ivoire)	20 September 1960
  	Cyprus (Republic of Cyprus)	20 September 1960
  	Democratic Republic of the Congo[note 10] (DR Congo)	20 September 1960
  	Gabon (Gabonese Republic)	20 September 1960
  	Madagascar[note 17] (Republic of Madagascar)	20 September 1960
  	Niger (Republic of Niger)	20 September 1960
  	Somalia (Federal Republic of Somalia)	20 September 1960
  	Togo (Togolese Republic)	20 September 1960

• 21/09/71 

  	Bahrain (Kingdom of Bahrain)	21 September 1971
  	Bhutan (Kingdom of Bhutan)	21 September 1971
  	Qatar (State of Qatar)	21 September 1971

• 12/12/58 

  Guinea (Republic of Guinea)

  12 December 1958

• 25/09/81 

  	Vanuatu (Republic of Vanuatu)	15 September 1981
  	Belize	25 September 1981

We were stuck. Again. And needed another hint. Thankfully, Enigma Emporium has hints. The trick, apparently, is that you first find the country in each accession group that has six letters in its name, and the highlighted numbers give you the letter places in that country's name. This pen-pal is brilliantly insane. I ❤ them

• 20/09/60: CYPRUS
• 21/09/71: BHUTAN
• 12/12/58: GUINEA 
• 25/09/81: BELIZE

So, our criminal of all trades is assassinating a rogue agent in Prague. There's usually a message, though. Where is it?! We were stuck once again, trying to link the 'Look at the Cross'. Again, we had to look for a hint. This is where it would have been reallllly handy to have the physical copy of the postcard. What you need to do is basically poke a hole where the crosses are and see what letter you hit on the other side. But, how do you do that with a pdf?? You use photoshop! Or, if you're like me and not willing to pay an arm and a leg for a toy I'd only use occasionally, you use a combination of MS Paint and ipiccy.com. Make jpgs of both, drop flip and reverse the front and overlay it on top of the other image in ipiccy, with a significant fade. Then, read from top to bottom, then over: THEY HAVE MY WIFE. 

So, we know that for this crime, they are going to assassinate a rogue agent in Prague because a mysterious 'they' (the cult?) has their wife. I remain unsure if this is one or several criminals, who have been alternately hired by a cult, forced to commit crimes, or been leveraged into doing so. It's quite a varied skill set - art thief, bank robber, and assassin. Or so I would expect.  

Thus ends episode three of Wish You Were Here by Enigma Emporium. Unlike the first two, it was hard enough that it stumped us - twice! I do think that with the physical cards - coming soon by mail I hope! - we would have gotten the cross message, but the spatial reasoning to get the country names? I'm not so sure - even with two of the dates only having one country in them. So, card three was frustrating at times, but still fun, and good for a couple hours of fun at least. I definitely recommend this for anyone who loves puzzles, though I hope you read this only AFTER you've finished the puzzles.