Next up in our review and breakdown of previous Cluechaser puzzles is the one titled Good Luck. Hands down this puzzle was the most confusing for players. The difficult part it seems was not coming up with the pieces you needed to solve the puzzle but rather in putting them together in the right order and understanding what they meant. Although it only took 2 days, 17 hours and 17 minutes solve no other puzzle has generated more discussion on the message board than this one.

The original puzzle differs slightly from the one you see now. It had two directions. During the redesign I changed the answer into something less obscure but to do so I had to add another directional arrow so now there are three.

It didn’t take long for the majority of the players to figure out that you had to click on the pictures of the thermometer, feet, and ruler to get to the meat of the puzzle. There they realized that irritating and frustrating math problems awaited them. The math wasn’t particularly difficult but I tried to make it as confusing as possible. I knew most people would just copy and past the numbers into a spreadsheet so I made them bitmaps instead. Players were forced to read the numbers and enter them by hand into something. I’m sure it was the cause of many incorrect answers due to fat fingered data entry errors.
A funny side-note, one player didn’t realize you needed to click on the pictures so they were trying to translate the read-out on the thermometer, the 2 feet, and the distance on the ruler into something. I believe that a friendly hint from a fellow player got that person back on the right track.

Once players came up with the answers to the math problems it was pretty obvious that the purpose of the color coding was to put all the answers together by color. Not too much time after that someone mentioned that feet and inches is another way to represent minutes and seconds of latitude and longitude coordinates. From there it was just a matter of plugging these coordinates into Google Maps or Google Earth and seeing what was there.

Players quickly understood that the image they zoomed into at each of the coordinates was a building that was shaped like a letter. Soon the players had the 5 letters they needed. But now what? That proved to be the most difficult question to answer.

One thing I like about this puzzle is the multiple steps needed to get to the answer. There was quite a lot of work involved. I think the reason it was so hard to come up with the answer is that aside form the letter shaped buildings, there was no other clue as to what the answer was. Had I been a player, I would have immediately recognized what they represented and solved it right away. I find it interesting that no one came up with it on their own. I had to give A LOT of hints on the message board to nudge people in the right direction. I didn’t like having to do that and have since designed puzzles with enough clues in them that they can be solved without hints from me. This however, makes the puzzles easier to solve and that’s why Cluechaser games now take 3 or 4 days to finish instead of 31 days.

Eventually, after many hints, someone finally figured it out and then dropped a couple hints of their own on the message board and so after more than 7 days of chipping away at it, the puzzle was solved and most of the players were onto the next one.

What was the answer? Well, the letters indicated by the building shapes were E, I, O, X, and Y. I was hoping that players might recognize that the letters were an English alphabet representations of similar looking Greek letters. Realizing that I thought they might come up with IXOYE which is something I have seen on many bumper stickers and vanity plates and it represents JESUS, which was the correct answer. No one got that on their own although one player said that he unknowingly said the answer out loud when he first saw the math problems. I thought that was pretty funny.

For the redesigned version of the puzzle, the answer is much easier to figure out and the sentence at the top gives a pretty good clue to assist you.

Challenge yourself. Solve the math problems to find the coordinates, plug them into Google Maps (or Earth), see the alphabet shaped buildings and take a stab at the answer by typing it in the answer blank at the bottom.

If you get stuck or just want the answer you can unhide it here:

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:

Pre-game videos

There are two of these. The purpose of these videos is to help set the stage for the game by describing the alternate present that players will be immersed in. The first video is out now, the second will come out in a few weeks. Be sure to watch them.

Downfall Parodies

These are fun videos. Hitler considers himself a puzzle master and is desperate to prove it by getting his name in the Cluechaser Hall of Fame (which will be back up shortly). Through the three video series he (and you) will learn about some of the new twists to Game 3: Chasing Shadows. Hopefully you get a laugh or two out of them.
If you haven’t heard of or seen any Downfall parodies they are all over Youtube. People are taking clips of the German movie “Der Untergang” (Downfall) and adding their own subtitles; often with quite hilarious results.

Pre-launch puzzles

These aren’t videos but will provide you with the all important key to gaining access to the start of game 3. I will provide plenty of time for people to solve them and they won’t be difficult. They’re intended to be a little warm-up before the game.

Hopefully that will help clear up any confusion.

Game 3 will have a heavy emphasis on videos, the reason for which will be clear during the game. Also, because I like making them.

If you’ve got questions feel free to shoot me an email.

Cowpatty Bill

First of all, Game 3 is still on schedule to be launched sometime this summer. It will be the last game in the Mr. E series but not the final ClueChaser game. I’m already working on ideas for the next one.

Secondly, since some time has passed since the events of Game 2: Puzzle PiEces I will be giving everyone a brief refresher in what has happened and where we are in the story. I will be doing this in the form of some small build-up puzzles. They will be fairly easy puzzles that once solved, will reveal a portion of events that have happened over the past two games. They are also a nice way to get you back in the groove since ClueChaser puzzles seem to have their own “style” of puzzlery.

And finally. I thought it would be fun to add a little twist and include a “key” in each build-up puzzle. In addition to the plot summary you get with each correctly solved puzzle you will also get a word or a number (or some such thing, I haven’t decided yet) that will be needed to start Game 3. Without all of them you won’t be able to begin. I will provide a discussion area where you can discuss the puzzles with others but any posting of the answer will be removed.

Incidentally. the comment board will be different in game 3. It will be located at a different site. I found that having a comment board within ClueChaser made it much easier to be hacked.

So stay tuned. The build up puzzles will begin soon and will show up intermittently between now and the game start date.

Good luck and happy chasing!

I started the Mr. E puzzle series with a broad storyline in mind. I was confident that the details would fill themselves in as I went along. And they did. During games 1 and 2 players learned who Edward Fletcher was and that he discovered something very important. By solving the puzzles and following the clues players uncovered a government secret that a disease known as Environmenally Related Rapid Organ Dysfunction Syndrome (ERRODS) was rapidly spreading across the world. Mr E. was on the trail of tracking down the source when a mistakenly revealed password led to an attack on the San Francisco apartment where he and his colleagues were hiding. News reports indicated that everyone in the apartment was killed. With Edward Fletcher presumably dead players were left wondering if the cure for ERRODS would ever be found? This is where the storyline is now.

During the past year the remainder of the story has been brewing in the back of my mind. I knew where I wanted to go and how to get there but still needed to work out what clues would be found along the way. I imagine that fiction authors go through similar thought processes. Things were moving along at a nice pace when suddenly, bad things happened. If you’ve watched the video you know what happened. You know the site was hacked over and over. You know that I had to shut it down.

Now that it is back up and ultra-secure (and I’m a little wiser) the story can continue. During the site down time I did a lot of work on the plot details. Along with that I had to think up different kinds of puzzles. The trickiest part turned out to be trying to figure out how to give out the information the players would need for the story without bogging the game down. Previously I had accomplished this by including the information in the puzzle itself (like this one). Other times I made it part of the puzzle answer (like this one). However, I find that kind of puzzle difficult to design and after creating almost 40 different kinds of puzzles for the previous games and other projects my creative juices were running dry.

The good news is that the creative block in my mind that I had been chipping away at for the past several months finally seems to be giving way. The story line is clear. The path is set. The clues are being placed. Game 3 should be the most exciting one yet. New puzzles, new characters are introduced and more details are revealed.

I am excited to tell you that during the buildup to the launch of Game 3: Chasing Shadows I plan to release mini puzzles to wet your appetite. To get you in the mood so to speak. I also hope to create a couple more teaser videos to help set the stage. My goal is to have everything ready to go by June. In the months prior to that I will be asking for your help to get the word out. The more players we have the better the game experience will be.

This will be the most complex game of the three. Twists and turns await you as you brave the shadows and chase the clues. Reward and reputation are on the line as you race your fellow Cluechasers to the end.

?? – Is E dead
?? – What is the source of the chemical
?? – Who is the mole

These are the questions that need answers. Will you be the one to do it?
We’ll see soon enough.

To tell that story we’ll have to jump into the Way-Back machine and travel back in time to the mid 80’s. Uh, that’s 1980’s. Somewhere around 1983 or 84.

I had a tape recorder. For the young ones reading this that my not know what a tape recorder is, read the wikipedia article. It looked a little like this one.

My friends and I used to record ourselves all the time doing all kinds of things. Eventually it morphed into an imaginary radio station called Station F.A.R.M. (I grew up in very rural northern Alberta, Canada). We needed radio names so I created Cowpatty Bill. It just popped into my head. My friend Bryce was Gooseneck Frank and another friend Terry was Barnyard Joe. We made up news stories, traffic reports, even commercials, and we taped them all. I recall that we had a lot of fun with it.

Fast forward (get it? Sorry, tape humor) a few years to about 1997. The internet was becoming very popular. Eager to get in on the action I teamed up with a friend and created a website to do movie reviews. We called it Chili-n-Willie’s Movie Reviews for the Common Man. Thanks to the beauty of the internet never getting rid of anything the site is still up. I have long since closed my account with that ISP so I no longer have access to add, update, or at least remove the content. So there is sits in all it’s faded glory. You can see it….here.
(Watch the looping video clip on the front page. It’s funny)

We had a unique rating system. We used cow patties (poop) and the more patties a movie had, the more it stunk. So a movie with one patty was great whereas a movie with five patties was considered a terrible flick.

Branching off the imagined success of that I created a site where I challenged visitors with movie quote trivia. With the idea in mind that I would create several more successful sites I needed a main portal to encompass them all. That’s when I resurrected the name and created Cowpatty Bill Entertainment See it…here.
(I like how I make it sound like there are several people involved in the various sites when in reality it was all just me)
You can see that I even have a store that is still open.

So that is how it all started. Since then I’ve tried to keep my real name out of the internet by usng my alias. Is my real name out there? Yes, I can google myself and find a few links to me. Even some that tie me to the Cowpatty Bill name. I’m okay with it though. That name is more popular than my real one.

I’m married (12.5 years now) and have 3 incredibly awesome children. My oldest, Tyler is almost 10 and has Type 1 diabetes (this is why I support dyf.org), my daughter Emily is 8 and is becoming a talented piano player. My youngest is Ryan who is 2 and a half and is pre-diabetic. He is qute the handful.

Recently Ty and Em announced to me that they wanted their own Cowpatty identities. Tyler said he wanted to called Cowpatty Jr. Emily decided to be clever and came up wth Cowpatty Belle. It almost brought a tear to my eye. Kids are great.

By the way, my friend Bryce (Gooseneck Frank) went on to become an actual radio DJ. I like to think that I had a hand in that.

Thanks for reading.
Cowpatty Bill

At long last Cluechaser is back online.  To celebrate this momentous occasion I created a new video and it’s dedicated to you.

The layout and purpose of the site is changing.  It is being redesigned to be a place you can come to find all the latest info on puzzle games that are like Cluechaser.  I will be posting most of the previous puzzles as well as new puzzles as I create them. 

What about <b>Game 3: Chasing Shadows</b>? I am still working on it.  I hope to have it ready to be released by the end of the year.  For those who don’t know, Game 3 is the third and final puzzle contest in the Mr. E series where players have to solve a series of puzzles to unlock clues in order to solve the mystery.

Anyway, look around, enjoy the site and let me know what you think.  I’m glad to be back.

Cowpattybill