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: