The players got to the puzzle by clicking on the book labeled “Puzzles” located in the book shelf behind the desk in the office picture.

The puzzle is simple enough. Find the answers to the clues and plug them into the crossword. Some of the squares contained diamonds and some circles. Unscramble the circled letters to get one solution and the diamonds to get another.

I chose to use a crossword puzzle at this point in the game because the players had been gathering bits and pieces of information and I wanted to help them put them together a little. Each clue and answer was specifically selected so that if arranged in a certain order some of the mystery to story would be revealed. I helped the players do this by adding all the numbers to the top of puzzle. For example, the first set of numbers is 6 & 9. If you take the answers to clues 6 and 9 you will get “deteriorating organs”. Continuing to do this with the rest of the answers produced a sort of message. It doesn’t just spell it out to the players but definitely puts some pieces together and begins to give them some answers as to what secret E is hiding.

Although I would have preferred otherwise, I was not able to put the numbers in any kind of order like the Fibonacci sequence (see pic on left), although one day I will find a way to use that sequence in a puzzle.

I’m not sure if any of the players bothered to do this part. I don’t recall reading anything about it in the dicussion board. They were probably so wrapped up in finishing the game that anything that wasn’t directly related to solving a puzzle was ignored. However, it is important to the storyline so I hope they went back later and figured it out. Or perhaps they will do so now. This information may be needed for Game 3: Chasing Shadows. Then again, maybe not. Only I know for sure.

Getting back to the puzzle, once the crossword was solved and the diamond and circle letters extracted from the puzzle all the players had left to do was to rearrange the letters to determine the answer(s). I’m not sure if this was the hard part or if finding the answers to the clues was because according to the amount of time taken to solve the puzzle, this was the third most difficult puzzle in the game. It took 11 hours and 20 minutes for the first person to come up with the correct answer. When that person did, they found out that the diamond letters were a “red herring” and the circled letters were the key to the puzzle’s solution.

The correct answer gave the 8th (and what would turn out to be the final) number in the series as well as a link to the next puzzle, Scrabble.

Try your hand at solving the puzzle yourself and use the clues to learn more about Mr. E’s secret.

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.

Truthfully, I’ve haven’t been looking forward to this review. Its kind of like when you had a party the evening before and left all the cleanup for the next day. You wake up in the morning, crawl out of bed and as you head toward the living room (ground zero) you have this feeling of dread wash over you. You wished you would have just stayed up later to clean because now everything has been sitting out all night and things have been broken and you’re not sure how to fix them. You survey the room, see the extent of the cleanup job, and suddenly have the inexplicable urge to turn and just run out the door and never look back. This puzzle is like that in the sense that it has many pieces and most of them weren’t kept together after the game ended so it has taken a lot of work to gather it all up again.

Unfortunately this is only the first of 3 or 4 puzzles between this game, The Missing Mr. E, and Game 2: Puzzle PiEces that I have this anxiety over. Fortunately though, I seem to have anticipated this a bit and left myself good enough notes that I should be able to stumble through this without too much pain. I have yet to look at the others to see if they will fair the same.

So lets jump in and get this started. I believe this puzzle was accessed by clicking on the “A is for Apple” pic on the wall above the bookshelf in the office which, after the successful completion of the previous puzzle, was now active.

At this point in the game I had some important information related to the storyline that I had to disseminate to the players in some way. This puzzle became the avenue to accomplish that. It is actually 5 puzzles in one, each type of puzzle representing a sentence.

I believe this puzzle, or at least the first part, is a type of rebus. At the time I created it I thought it was a pictogram or pictograph puzzle. I remember doing these kinds of puzzles when I was a kid and always enjoyed them. When creating it I found that it was difficult to put together. Sometimes the picture you need just isn’t easy to find.

Each picture or series of pictures represents a word. So in this first picture you have 4 words. It should be pretty easy to figure out what they are (you can click on it to see it larger). I wanted to use a picture for everything so I had some trouble finding a picture for the word “The”. The pic I used has actually been modified. I erased whatever word was on the knuckles and added my own letters. I mean really, who tattoos “the” on their knuckles?

The next series of pictures requires a little more work. You start with the first picture, a tea bag. Next the “+” sign indicates you should add the next pic, “MDX” to it. Next is the minus sign followed by a bag. So if you remove “bag” you find that so far you have “teamdx”. The next pic indicates you should remove “dx”. Then add the underlined word in the next pic, “coed” and finally remove the “co” leaving you with the word “teamed”.

The next pic is all by itself. Pretty self explanatory…”up”. This is followed by “panda” which becomes “and” after you follow the next pic and remove the “AP”. I suppose it might cause some confusion if you weren’t sure which “a” to remove. But once you realize taking out the first one gives you “nda” and the second gives you “and” it seems pretty logical which one is correct.

Up to this point you have the following message: “The US and China teamed up and”.

Continuing on with the next series of pictures gives you:

“Green Acres” minus “green” plus “Ted Koppel” minus “apple” (at this point you have “crestedko”) minus “osk” (now “creted”) plus “A” equals “created”.
“ABC” minus “BC” equals “A”.
“rest area” plus “chick chat” minus “at-at” minus “chick” equals “resreach”. I figured the players would realize the word is a bit scrambled and should really be “research”.

This is followed by:

“gold” minus “old” plus (”trout” minus “tt”) plus “P” equals “group”.
“last call” plus “superman” plus “p” minus “last supper” (so far you have “callman”) minus (”coleman” minus “cole”) plus “deed” minus “ed” equals “called”.

And you finish off the first sentence with:

“green light project” minus “green light” equals “project”.
“Coca Cola” – “COCA” plus “b” (the hand is representing the letter B in American Sign Language) equals “Colab”.

My original plan was to do the entire message like this. However, you can probably imagine how long it took me to put that one together. And I had 4 more sentences to go! I knew then that I had to figure out something different. That was when I decided to code each sentence in a different type of puzzle.

I really have no idea how I came up with the next one, but I like it. It’s just so simple yet not obvious. At least not right away. I imagine the players looking at it and saying “what the….?” But after you look at it for a few minutes I think the solution starts to become clear.

There are 3 parts. The first part is solved by following the roman numerals. I thought using roman numerals looked better than regular numbers and added a bit of difficulty to the puzzle. Following them gives you the words, “There were”.
The next part is obvious, “18″
The third part is a litttle trickier. Again you have to follow the numbers but it might take a little time to figure out which direction the word goes. It’s solution reads, “First three letters of scissors plus dentists minus first letter”. In other words, “sci” plus “entists” which equals “scientists”

Seeing a need to speed this up even more I looked for ways to code the remaining sentences faster. I decided to use semaphore for the third, American Sign Language for the fourth and morse code for the fifth sentence.

So the third sentence translates to:

The fourth to:

And the 5th to:

That URL no longer leads anywhere. It was only active during the game and it led to the next puzzle. Once there the players learned the next number in the sequence which was 4.

I don’t have much else to say about this puzzle. I don’t have any strong feelings about it. It served its purpose which was to communicate important background information from E to the players. I was able to deliver it in a variety of unique and interesting ways although none of them proved to be very difficult to solve. The same thing goes for the next puzzle, Doctor Letter. It was also quickly solved by the players but it also included a hidden clue that I’m positive was overlooked by every single player. It was pretty subtle. Read about that one in the next review.

Another puzzle idea used in the previous game was an overlay requiring the players to lay the solution to a maze from a previous puzzle on top of a picture with letters and symbols scattered all over it. Players observed that the line passed over specific letters that formed a sentence.

Players reached this puzzle by locating the pile of newspapers on the floor at the far left of the office picture and clicked on the link which was now active.

When designing this I knew that I wanted the picture to be the key. I needed something that was inconspicuous but when layed on top of the news article in a particular way it would somehow reveal the answer. I scoured the internet for literally hours looking for the right picture. I just couldn’t find anything I liked. The trouble was, I either had to find something that would line up with the text I had or design the text to line up with the picture. Neither was easy to do. Finally I decided to just create my own picture. With this in mind I set out to create the news articles intending to make the picture later. So with a strong feeling of nostalgia I headed once again over to The Newspaper Clipping Generator website to create the clippings I would need.

First I wanted to use the main article as an opportunity to add some detail to the story and tie it in to the winning T-shirt design which featured a wanted poster displaying a shadowed image of Edward Fletcher. I also wanted the players to know that although the office in his home was in neat order, his basement lab was a shambles as though someone were looking for something. I decided to throw some other stuff at the players. Like the names of the people mentioned in the article; police chief D.K Raight and officer Theo Riess. Like Mr. E’s name, these are homonyms for other words or phrases.

The Personals had two purposes. The first was to add a bit of humor to the game. My favorite is “Got Shovel. Will dig Holes. Please call”. It’s just so simple and yet… I don’t know…desperate? The second purpose can be found with the odd use of capitalization within each of the ads. If you look closely you will see that in addition to the first letter of each sentence being capitalized there is also one other word with a capital letter. It seems the purpose of this has escaped me after all this time. I believe it was a clue to use the picture as an overlay. The letters are UPLAAHFL but now I’m not sure what I was trying to spell. When I type that into an anagram solver the most interesting solution I get is HULA FLAP. I checked my notes and nowhere did I explain what I was doing here. I must have come up with it at the last minute. Oh well, moving on.

The next step was for me to figure out what I wanted the puzzle answer to be. This may sound easy but since I wanted each answer to be a clue to the mystery, I had to put some thought into this. Once I had that determined I then selected the necessary letters from within the articles. I recall that I had to re-word some of it to get the letter I needed.

Now it was time to create the picture that would be used to locate the letters. As I drew the circles and the dots I thought they looked like a constellation. Figuring this would be the best and easiest solution I conducted a brief search of the internet but failed to produce anything even remotely close to what I had. I then looked at the circles and let my imagination drift. It occured to me then that if I joined a few of them with straight lines it kind of looked like a stick person holding a kite. Something I child might draw. That was when I decided that is exactly what it would be and the Constellation Contest was born. I created a news article to explain it.

The final step was to create the reference point the players would need to correctly align the picture with the articles. After considering several options I decided on bullet holes in the paper. I found a couple splat images on the internet that I liked and modified them to suit my needs. I placed them in various places around the newspaper, each of them a different shape and size. Except for two of them. The hole in the picture is identical to one of the holes elsewhere on the newspaper. These are what the players needed to line up. Once that was done it was a simple matter of following the alphabet in the picture and writing down the letters that red dots within the circles touched.

Now, do you think you’ve got enough information now to finish it yourself? It took the lead player 4 hours and 20 minutes to solve this one. Can you do it faster?

I should also mention that the puzzle solution also revealed the next number in the series which was 27.

Players got here by clicking on the blue piece of paper taped to the bookshelf behind the desk in the office photo which was now an active link once the second puzzle was successfully solved.

The puzzle is a message, scrawled on a piece of memo paper by “Iggy”. At this point not much is known about Iggy other than he is a friend of E’s and likely a fellow scientist. The players first learned of Iggy at the beginning of the game. His was the voice heard in the voicemail message. Apparently E had previously asked him to do some analysis for him of which this memo is the result. How Iggy figures into this mystery is at this point unclear.

On the outside this is quite a strange puzzle. It’s clear that the elements mentioned by E’s friend are a clue.
Another clue that seemed to go largely unnoticed, or at least unmentioned in the message board discussion, is the picture. I’m not sure of the exact title but I believe it’s called The “Betsy Ross” flag. The key to the picture is the 13 stars.

As you know, the stars represent the original 13 colonies of the United States. Those states in alphabetical order are:

Connecticut
Delaware
Georgia
Maryland
Massachusetts
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New York
North Carolina
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
Virginia

If you take the first letter of each state you have CDGMMNNNNPRSV. There was no clue to indicate this but if I gave a clue for every step then the puzzles wouldn’t be that difficult. My hope was that someone would come up with this in the message boards.

Iggy’s memo lists the elements contained in the sample E gave him. I’m not sure what the correct scientific way is to write that but the way Iggy did it revealed an important clue. If you write out the symbols for the elements listed you have:

CD for Cadmium
MN and MN for two Maganese
N and N for two Nitrogen
P for Phosphorus
S for Sulfur

The next step is a biggy. If you take the letters from the elements and apply them to the letters from the 13 states you will be left with 3 letters, G R, and V. Iggy refers to these as the three he wasn’t able to identify. He gives the clue to the next step when he writes,
“… if we get these in the correct order by date, their atomic numbers will reveal which elements they are.”
Here is the part of the puzzle that just amazes me the most. While creating this puzzle I had no idea if the end result would produce anything usable. I was quite surprised when it did.

Following Iggys clue, if you put the left over letters that represent the states of Georgia, Rhode Island, and Virginia in order by the date they joined the union you get G, V, R. When compared to the other states you learn that Georgia was the 4th state to join, Virginia the 10th, and Rhode Island the 13th.

Going back to the periodic table and looking at the 4th, 10th and 13th elements you find BE for Beryllium, NE for Neon, and AL for Aluminum. Iggy’s next clue says,
“Perhaps we can combine them together in some way and see what they become.”
This is another way to say “ANAGRAM”. Rearranging the 6 letters reveals the answer to the puzzle.

Now see if you can solve it yourself:

Of the 10 puzzles in the game this is the only one that took longer than 1 day to solve. In fact it took 1 day, 3 hours, and 44 minutes. Successfully solving it gave the players the next number in the series, which is 72 ]]> http://www.cluechaser.com/blog/game-1-puzzle-3-iggys-memo/feed/ 0 http://www.cluechaser.com/blog/new-t-shirt-design/ http://www.cluechaser.com/blog/new-t-shirt-design/#comments Fri, 01 Jul 2011 23:24:42 +0000 cowpattybill http://www.cluechaser.com/?p=1237 The ClueChaser logo that I created a few years ago is both sad looking and kind of boring. So I decided to change it. Well sort of. I am still working on a new logo but in the mean time I have a new design for t-shirts and other ClueChaser apparel. This new design is based off something created for ClueChaser by Trillustrations and it looks pretty good on a t-shirt.

Here’s it is.

ClueChaser Puzzle Shirt by ClueChaser

So be quick and run over to Zazzle.com and be first in your area to proudly sport the new look.

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