Players accessed this puzzle by clicking on the piece of paper on the desk in front of the black chair. Upon first look, it appears to be a bunch of gibberish. I’m sure many initially thought they were about to sink their teeth into a substitution cypher. I guess in a way it is. However, if anyone tried any standard methods of solving cyphers I’m sure they quickly found it far more difficult than they expected.

A struggle I have is often I am tempted to make a puzzle so difficult that it will take several days to solve. I had to remind myself on several occasions that the purpose of Game 1 was to attact as many players as possible. If I made it too difficult people would just quit and not continue through the storyline. To prevent this from happening I intentionally added some elements to serve as clues.

The first clue is the names of the doctors mentioned. For some, those names made the solution immediately evident. Others may have had to do some research first. A quick Google search of either name should have given the players what they needed to move forward. Just in case, I added a further clue in the letter by mentioning the phrase “other key board members”.

I can save you some time by telling you that Colemak and Dvorak of names of other types of keyboard layouts. The standard layout used on most compute keyboards is referred to as QWERTY after the first 6 letters on the top row of alpha-keys. Studies have shown that by laying out the keys in a more efficient arrangement one could actually type faster. So other designs such as Dvorak and Colemak have been created.

Now that the players had the key to solving the puzzle they just needed to know which lines of text used the Dvorak layout and which used the Colemak. I provided another clue by listing the doctors in the order they appear. Meaning that the first line is solved using the Colemak keyboard, the next line uses Dvorak, the next line Colemak, and so on.

The puzzle is solved by looking at where the letter is on the associated keyboard and then seeing what the corresponding letter is for the same key on the QWERTY keyboard. However, there’s a catch. As a last attempt to increase the difficulty a little I added two additional bits of confusion. First,once solved the players realized that if they tried to read each sentence in order it made no sense. The correct approach is to read all the Colemak sentences first then the Dvorak ones. Doing so revealed E’s message. Second, each sentence contained an extra letter at the end. By starting at the tap and reading downwards the letters spelled a word that when typed into the answer blank at the bottom was the puzzle’s answer.

It didn’t take players long to solve it. The first person finished it in just under 2 hours (1 hour and 54 minutes). The reward for successful solution was the next number in the series, this time a 2, and a link to the next puzzle, Crossword Puzzle.

There was an element to this puzzle that I added and no one seemed to pick up on it. Although I’m not sure why they would. It was a kind of foreshadow of the last puzzle. It can be found at the top of the letter. No, it’s not the eyball with the world in it. It’s the name of the organization in the letterhead. I’m no English major so I don’t know if it’s called something when a part of a word sounds like a letter of the alphabet. What I mean is, take the words “teach” and “tank”. The first part of Teach sounds like you’re saying the letter T. Again, I don’t know if there is a word that describes this type of thing. Regardless, I chose the organization’s name so that each word followed the example I gave you. So “Peter Able’s Eye-wareness Exploratorium” is actually P-A-I-X in disguise. What is PAIX you ask? Well, that will be revealed later on in the game.

Once players successfully solved the puzzle they were rewarded with the next number in the series, this time a 2, and a link to the next puzzle, Crossword Puzzle.

Now that you know the secrets try your hand at solving the puzzle.

I realize that some of you are probably saying “Wait, if this is game 2 then why is it called Game 1?” Great question. Although it’s true that this is the second contest, it is the first game in a three part game series called the Mr. E Series.

After the success of Puzzle Master I was eager to get going on another contest. I decided it would be fun if the puzzle answers themselves were clues that helped solve a larger puzzle. I thought that it would be more exciting for the players. That way they could feel like detectives solving a crime.

In addition to this I designed the game so that each correct answer gave the players a number. These would be need later in the game in order to solve the mystery.

I’m not sure how the Mr. E story line got into my head but I spent several days just writing down all my ideas. Eventually they all sort of came together into an international mystery involving a scientist, his associates, and an ultra-secret department of the US government.

My intent was to create a conspiracy theory. I wanted it to be plausible and contain some elements of truth. I even named the character Fletcher, giving a nod to the Mel Gibson character in the movie “Conspiracy Theory”. I used Edwards as the last name because I needed something that started with an E, to go along with Mr. E (which most of you realize I’m sure is a homonym for “mystery”).

I decided that I wanted to promote this game somehow and get as many people interested as I could. I posted on puzzle message boards, I wrote a press release, and also took my first steps into videography. I discovered that Windows Movie Maker, a video editing software was free and already installed on my PC. So I learned how to use it. I scoured the internet looking for pictures and sound that I could use to convey the mystery of the game. Considering it was my first video ever, I’m still pleased with it today although I think the ones I’ve made for the games since then are MUCH better.

Overall, I really love the storyline. To me it’s exciting. A scientist, fearing for his life because of a secret he’s stumbled across. He doesn’t know exactly what it means but he knows that others have been killed in an effort to keep it from becoming public. He disappears and goes into hiding but leaves clues hidden in puzzles for someone to solve, gathering bit by bit the knowlege that would be needed to discover what the secret is. I think it would make for a pretty good movie or at least a book.

The game started on April 1st, 2008 at 8AM PST. It would turn out to be the shortest Cluechaser game ever. The last puzzle was solved by two players named towerofbabel and e8 working together a mere 3 days 6 hours and 22 minutes after it began. This was about 1/10th the amount of time as the previous game. I didn’t mind the short play time too much. I had designed it to be easier because I wanted more people to play it, finish it, get drawn into the storyline, and be eagerly awaiting the next game. It worked pretty well because more people did play than before.

Now that you know the history, join me for the next few weeks as I tear apart Game 1: The Missing Mr. E and explain each puzzle, how it works, how it was created, and share any stories behind it. You will also have the opportunity to try and solve it on your own and experience for yourself the excitement of unlocking the first few tantalizing clues to the mystery.

Let’s start by watching the trailer video:

First, some notes about this video. The warning at the beginning was not originally there. I added it later at the request of my wife. You see, during the creation of Game 1 a couple of strange things happened. After I started uploading the puzzles to the web and putting the game together I added a hit counter to each page so I would know when a player started on the next puzzle. This way I could track everyone’s progress. Since the game hadn’t started I had all the counters set to zero. Imagine my surprise when one day I see that there was one hit on several of the pages.

Luckily one feature at my disposal was the ability to see on a map where the visitor came from. I zoomed in and discovered that the visitor was from somewhere within Washington, DC. Since the game was about things like government coverups and conspiracy theories and secrets between USA and China this “visitor” caused some hairs to stand up on the back of my neck. Of even greater concern to me was the fact that all the puzzle pages were in a password protected area. No one should have been able to access the puzzles unless they had the password or knew how to hack their way in. Was this the FBI or CIA checking me out? Needless to say, I was concerned.

Then, the very next day three guys came into the office where I worked and started looking around. They said they were with the fire department and just doing a routine check. It struck me as very odd. I thought about my Washington DC visitor and this got me even more worried. I told my wife about it and she tried to convince me to stop working on Cluechaser. I refused but compromised by adding the warning to the video.

In the end, nothing came of my mysterious visitors. Just coincidences I guess. I decided perhaps my DC visitor was really just myself. I may never know.

The second note regarding the video is that it begins to set the stage for an alternate reality that I needed to create for the players. It hints at things to come. Little of this is revealed in this game but it is in the following game, Puzzle PiEces.

And now, on with the video:

Intro video

I wanted the last puzzle to be pretty easy. I figured by this time I had put the players through a pretty rigorous workout and although they were probably expecting the last to be the most difficult, I decided to throw a curve ball and make it relatively easy. Though solving the puzzle was easy, finding what you needed to finish it could only be done by someone who had been playing since the beginning. How did I do that? Well, it wasn’t easy.

I decided that the best way to finish the game and determine a clear winner was to have them email me something. That way, the first email with the correct answer was the winner. I could have done it by IP address or something but I had no way to prove whose IP address was whose. Email seemed to be the best. But, what to email. I considered requesting a simple email to say they were done but what if someone had stumbled across the puzzle by accident and solved it? That wouldn’t do. I wanted to make sure the winner was someone who had weathered the storm and fought the good fight. To do that I needed them to send me something that proved that. I toyed with the idea of using the first letter of each puzzle answer but eventually my brain spit forth a beautiful and elegant solution.

Something I haven’t mentioned in discussing the previous puzzles is that occasionally I come up with an idea that requires me to go back and modify a previously completed puzzle. So it was in this case. I decided to modify the first puzzle, Cipher, to include a dead end or “red herring” as it’s called in the puzzle world. That dead end would be discovered by anyone who solved the cipher but did not solve the part beneath the picture of the fox jumping over the dog. Solving the top portion of that puzzle alone took the players to a site where they saw this picture on the right. Solving both the top and bottom parts of the cipher took the players to the correct location of the second puzzle. (Note – later on when making the puzzle suitable as a standalone puzzle I removed the red herring and created a different answer so the wrong path no longer exists)

I set the dead end page up so that it was clear to players that this was the wrong direction. What they didn’t realize, and wouldn’t until the end of the game, was that this page had an secondary purpose. It was the key to the solution of the final puzzle. For what they didn’t know was that this picture was actually 4 separate pictures that were arranged on the screen to look like one.

Actually, one person did notice this and they described it in considerable detail on the message board. In addition to noticing that there were four separate pictures, that clever player also noticed that the individual pieces were named clue1.JPG, clue2.JPG, clue3.JPG, and clue4.JPG. Thankfully there was seemingly no purpose to this so it was overlooked and ignored by everyone. This was truly a relief to me because I suddenly feared that someone would remember that information and the final puzzle would be solved in mere minutes. Despite my fears this didn’t happen.

The next step was to design the final puzzle to direct the players specifically to the clue1 and clue 2 images. I wanted them to find those two images and email them to me. What they spelled would pretty much be a guarantee to the player that they found the right images. So the puzzle told them what they were looking for but it was up to them to recall where they might have seen it.

It worked. It took only minutes for players to see the clue that was spelled out by the first letter of each item on the to-do list. It would take quite a bit longer to actually locate the images.

There were some wrong answers. Some players went in a completely wrong direction but as I’ve said before, it’s interesting what unintentional clues people find when they play. Such as one player. I asked him in an email how he came up with his wrong answer and here’s what he said:

LOL well there was the obvious CLUE 1 AND 2 JPG in the to do list, so I took the decryption key for Puzzle #1 and applied it to the letters with arrows pointing to them on the box in Puzzle #2 and came up with RE_US. ‘B’ wasn’t used in the original encryption, so I figured that must be it, especially since it appears that is the name for ‘Picture Puzzles’:

LOL, if that’s truely got nothing to do with it, it’s a fantastic red herring. I thought for sure I had to go back through all the images from previous puzzles for a ‘Rebus’

That was quite some impressive work he did. Even though it was wrong.

To make this puzzle suitable as a standalone puzzle I redesigned it so there is a link hidden in the picture that takes you to the four piece picture. See if you can find the link and figure out what clue 1 and clue 2 spell and type them into the answer blank at the bottom.

I like this puzzle because of it’s simplicity. One player commented in an email to me that he had never encountered a puzzle like this before. Just an image from which you had to determine not only how to solve it but what it was you were in fact solving.

Interestingly enough it took 8 hours and 15 minutes for the first person to solve it which is 4 times longer than the first cipher puzzle.

I found the image online and then modified it by removing some things and adding others. I figured most might solve it by finding the original image and then seeing what changed. Because of that I modified it more than I needed to in hopes of incorporating some misdirection. I don’t think it worked though. One thing in my favor was that at the time, the website the answer pointed to was not well known and like many of the puzzle solutions, it took just the right person to understand what they were seeing and solve the puzzle.

The hardest part was removing anything from the picture that had numbers or letters or something that would cause too much confusion.

Although the answer is a url, I chose it because it is not your standard web address and therefore more confusing.

I don’t have a page that you can go to check your answer but I can hide it below and you can compare your answer to that. Or, you can just try going to the site indicated by the answer. It is still there, however the link to the next puzzle is no longer active. I can tell you that if you see something referring to Math.com then you found the right place. That puzzle will be discussed in the next blog post.

I hope you enjoy the puzzle. Keep in mind that the puzzles I create are very low tech. One goal I had was to not spend any money creating them so any graphics work that needed to be done I did with MS Paint. Many hate the program but I can do just about anything in it although often it is painstakingly slow.

You can click on the picture above to see it full size. Then you can try to solve it.

Once you think you have it solved, check your solution here:

This was my first attempt at designing puzzles. The picture you see had a lot to do with the key for solving the puzzle. However, I quickly discovered that the players were much smarter than me (not that it’s difficult) and the majority solved it by “brute force”, meaning that they looked for commonly repeated letters and exchanged them for commonly used letters in the alphabet and then used what they had to figure out the rest.

What amazed me the most was that I anticipated this and therefor reversed the order of the key for the part below the picture and used very few letters so the answer couldn’t be guessed without the key. I was still wrong. There are some pretty smart folks out there. It took just 2 hours and 6 minutes to be solved by the first person.

Now I will explain how to solve the puzzle (the way I intended for it to be solved). If you want to try it on your own, don’t read the next part.

If you’re like me and terrible at solving ciphers I will tell you that the picture is a graphical representation of the popular pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. A pangram is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. So if you remove the repeated letters you are left with 26 letters. If you then write the alphabet below that in alphabetical order you have just created the key for solving the cipher. I don’t remember if you substitute up or down but for the part of the cipher below the picture, you do the opposite.

I recall being very proud of myself when I created that and sad when no one seemed to figure that part out.

So have fun with it. Print it out, challenge your friends and family. Try creating your own cipher. But don’t send them to me. I love creating puzzles but I’m no good at solving them. Enjoy.

Solve the puzzle and check your answer by typing it into the field at them bottom.

Since then the websites that contained the hidden map pieces have updated their sites and the pieces are no longer there to find. Because of this many of the puzzles had to be reworked. So now, in the instances where the puzzle reveals a URL, you will type the URL as the answer (without the http://) instead of navigating to the website indicated (unless instructed otherwise).

If you wish to see the individual map pieces and solve the puzzle therein I will put them all together at the bottom of the list but they shouldn’t be done until all the other puzzles have been done.

Also keep in mind that within this game, you may need clues from previous puzzles in order to solve others.