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.
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.
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