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.

Several months ago I had created them but hadn’t posted them on the site yet because I wanted to get further along in the design of the Game 3: Chasing Shadows puzzles first. Some time later they disappeared. Over the following few weeks I searched my laptop, home pc, work pc, every flash drive and every email account I had looking for them. I couldn’t find them. And then suddenly, they turned up. I found them quite by chance in a forgotten backup folder that I had uploaded to the Cluechaser server for safe keeping. Buried deep within the folders they lay.

Their loss had greatly discouraged me and the thought of having to recreate them only added to my procrastination over finishing game 3. They were not of paramount importance to the overall game but they helped set the stage for the present day events that occur in game 3. Add to that the fact that I spent several hours on each video and hated to think it was all for nothing.

Now that they are found I have a more energized desire to finish the game. I know dozens of people are patiently (and in some cases impatiently) waiting for me to release it. I do want to finish the story. I’ve put many many hours into it and certainly feel the NEED to conclude it.

Maybe now I can find the time to exercise the gray matter enough to punch out a couple more puzzles and wrap them all up in a nice bow and present it to the faithful Clue Chasers out there. I very much appreciate your patience and dedication.

So without further ado, here are the final two videos that are part of the Game 3: Chasing Shadows pre-game warm-up. Please enjoy them.

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.

With a solve time of 6 days, 17 hours and 45 minutes this was the second most difficult puzzle in the game. I was impressed with the level of complexity I was able to add into it.

I really like the idea of treasure maps. I think it would be really cool to find an old piece of parchment paper somewhere and discover that it has clues that lead to a buried and long forgotten treasure. This is why I enjoy movies like National Treasure, and The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Goonies. What it must feel like find the clue or solve the puzzle and realize you’re one step closer to finding the prize.

In the end, that’s what I was trying to accomplish with this puzzle. It didn’t start out that way though. I was stuck. I still needed one or two more puzzles to finish out the game and I was out of ideas. For some reason I had a date stuck in my head and decided to Google it and see what I came up with. I can’t remember the date but I know that it took me to a website that talked about a group of colonial rangers that existed during the Seven Years War (from 1756-1763) known as Roger’s Rangers.

I was reading about one battle in particular where they had attacked an Indian settlement and then had to high tail it out of there with the enemy in hot pursuit.

I thought that it might be interesting to create a puzzle from the perspective of one of the rangers. I decided to create a journal where he describes what’s going on around him and, knowing that his time may be short, leaves clues to a secret treasure he has hidden somewhere. I chose Charles to be the writer as he was an actual member of Roger’s Rangers.

I scoured the internet looking for some old, worn, stained paper I could use and then found a font style that pleased me. Once those were located it was time to figure out what the treasure was and what clues I would give to locate it.

In my opinion, the actual “treaure” that Charles hid is quite a let down. I don’t know why I decided to use it. I believe at the time I was considering building one myself for fun. I never did get around to building it but I guess this serves as a good example of how current events in my life play a big part in puzzle design.

Poor treasure choice aside, I am impressed with the clues given in the journal, how it was written, and how it looked. However, I am most pleased with where the clues point to. This is the part that makes this puzzle my favorite.

Similar to the Scatter puzzle, this one also requires the use of previous puzzle items. In this case, two of them. And not just clues, but the actual puzzles themselves. I remember being so excited when I came up with the idea. It took a little rework of the previous puzzles but in no time at all I had it set up.

Another bonus that didn’t occur to me until later is that by setting this, the second last puzzle, up this way anyone who may have stumbled upon it by accident, either outside the game or from a player sharing it with others, wouldn’t be able to solve it. They would have had to already seen two previous puzzles to even understand the clues in the journal.

During game play many players tried to determine some kind of pattern with all the numbers in the journal. But eventually the clues began to make sense and by working together they were able to put it all together and discover the answer. They were very smart players.

So read the journal again and see if you can find the clues and see if you can figure out which two previous puzzles they refer to. Once you know that, there are more clues in the journal that tell you what to do with the two puzzles to find the treasure. I can tell you that probably the most overlooked or missed clue was where it says “shift to” in the journal. If you look closely you will see that there are two spaces on either side of it. This was to make it stand out more but I don’t think anyone got that. It’s probably the most important clue (think of “to” as the number 2).

If you’re stumped, I have hidden what the clues were in the journal and what they pointed to. You can unhide it to read it.

I would have preferred this to be the last puzzle and I think I may have even planned it to be until I came up with a better idea for the last one. Another puzzle that required first hand knowlege of the game from the beginning. I’ll discuss that more when I review “To-Do List”

Journal Clues

Clue 1 show

Indicates that other puzzles are involved.

Clue 2 show

One day ago refers to the previous puzzle which was the crossword, also indicated by the square rocks with numbers on them clue.

Clue 3 show

The word scatter refers to the scatter puzzle that was previously solved but also that the answer was scattered about the page.

Clue 4 show

A suggestion to use Microsoft Paint

Clue 5 show

This clue indicates that you should work with the puzzle images in their actual size.

Clue 6 show

The most important clue in the puzzle. The blank look refers to the answer in the crossword puzzle that didn’t have a number. The “shift to” (notice the extra space on either side of it) is intended to indicate SHIFT 2 on the keyboard, the @ symbol. The red refers specifically to color of the @ symbol. So if you look at the scatter puzzle there is one red @ symbol. Using Paint and the actual image sizes, line up the non-numbered square of the crossword puzzle with the @ symbol in the scatter puzzle.

Clue 7 show

Follow the numbered squares for each crossword puzzle answer. You will see one letter lined up in each of the numbered squares (not every square in the crossword, just the first one in each answer).

Clue 8 show

This clue refers to what the word found by combining the Crossword and Scatter puzzle is. It’s a large object and has something to do with launching.

You should be able to figure the rest out yourself. If you think you have it, go to the actual puzzle page and type your answer in the blank in the bottom and it will tell you if you’re right or not.

What puzzle game would be complete without a crossword puzzle? Not this one, that’s for sure. I knew I wanted to include one but wasn’t sure how I could turn it into something useful. Obviously I had to bury a clue or an answer somewhere but how? There were some obvious choices but finally I had a moment of inspiration and came up with what I thought at the time was a brilliant idea. Looking back on it 3 years later I see it as more lame than brilliant. But still, it is a clever trick if I do say so myself.

The first thing one probably notices upon first looking at the crossword is that the numbering of the boxes is not in order and that one has no number at all. In the clues you see that there is no number 9 but there is a clue with no number. For the most part, that is all a diversion, a red herring as it’s called. My hope was that players would think those were clues and waste time pursuing that assumption.

I also figured that a players first instinct would be to solve the crossword and then use the answers in an attempt to ascertain the puzzle’s solution. So I wanted to do the complete opposite. I decided the solution wouldn’t be contained within the crossword answers at all. It can however, be found in the clues themselves.

I created this puzzle by working backwards. I wanted to continue to have players travel to different websites, like they are on a hunt or an exploration. I wanted the solution to point to an outside website, much like “The Office” and the “Social Network” puzzles. Up to this point I was unsuccessful in finding companies that would pay me to incorporate their website into the game so again I decided to have my own site for players to find. But first, I had to figure out where to send them.

My plan was to use the clue number to point to the letter needed. For example, in clue 3 across, the letter needed is the third one in, the “o” in “Quote”. For 3 down it was the “E” in “SEED”. Each clue containing one letter needed for the answer. Spaces and punctuation were included. Before I decided the answer would be contained within the crossword clues I already had them written down. So instead of starting over I forced some of the clues I had to point to the necessary letter either by changing the clue number or by rewording it. By doing this I established the “.com” part of the answer. For the remaining clues I assigned numbers at random, took the random letters they pointed to, and plugged them into Andy’s Anagram Solver to see if there were any recognizable words. I wasn’t surprised to see that there wasn’t anything useful. So I tried eliminating a letter. Eventually I found the right combination of letters and came up with ITFELT. So the solution to the puzzle became itfelt.com. I was pleased to see that the URL was not already taken so I purchased it for use in the game. I have since let it go and is now dead.

But I had a small problem. I had an answer that was 10 letters (including the period) but the crossword had 11 clues. What I came up with worked out better than I could have possibly imagined at the time. My solution was to just remove the number. This would prove clever not only because of the added confusion it would give the players, but also because it would allow the crossword to be used again later on in what I consider to be my greatest puzzle EVER. You’ll read all about it when we look at Historical Documents.

The part I like best about this puzzle was that it isn’t even necessary to solve the crossword puzzle. The answer lies completely within the clues. I don’t think any player realized this. All of them solved the crossword first. It took 5 days, 7 hours and 8 minutes to solve it and move onto the next one.

I did add the sentence at the top so that players might recognize the answer when they saw it since the web address itself is fairly obscure.

For the redesign, all I did was add the answer blank at the bottom and asked players to just type in the URL instead of going to the website itself since I no longer own it.

You can solve the puzzle by clicking on the Play button below. See if you can solve it yourself. Otherwise you can unhide the solution here:

I like this puzzle because it was my first non-independant puzzle. In other words, this puzzle can’t be solv ed on it’s own. You need something else in order to solve it. In the puzzle “Social Network” there was a lot of misdirection on the site. However, not all of it was intended to fool you. Located among the extraneous material were some pictures.One of them was a picture of a fairly simple maze with the solution already outlined (exactly like the one on the right here). This was what was needed to solve the mystery of the scatter puzzle.

It took longer to solve this puzzle than any other the others in Puzzle Master, a whopping 7 days, 10 hours, and 29 minutes. Most of that time was spent trying figure out if there was any pattern to the data scattered about the puzzle.

I don’t recall how someone eventually figured out that the maze was needed. I believe I had to drop a hint that the scatter puzzle was the lock and they needed a key to unlock it. At some point a player realized that the sizes of the scatter and the maze were the same and if you used a program like MS Paint and pasted one image over the other, the black line solution to the maze ran through a series of letters on the scatter puzzle. Those letters spelled out a question. Once the players figured out the answer to the question, they had the answer to the puzzle as well.

I liked the idea of having a puzzle with seemingly random letters and numbers scattered across a page. I added different colors and symbols to add to the confusion. I also intentionally put some letters close together to add some red herrings to the mix. I knew players would separate the data by colors trying to make some sense of it. I like that it didn’t occur to them until days later and a hint from me that perhaps something else was needed.

In the redesign of this puzzle I added some clues in the sentences at the top. There is one clue in each sentence. The clue in the first sentence is the word “amazingly” referring to the maze. I will leave the second clue for you to figure out but I will tell you that it points to the location of the maze. Or more precisely, where you can find a clue as to its location.

If you can’t figure it out unhind the answer to the maze’s location.
show

If you would like to solve the puzzle yourself click the Play button.
Stumped? Or maybe just want the answer? You can unhide it.
The question:
show

The answer:
show

I love the simplicity of this puzzle. By itself, there is no way that you could solve it. And “by itself” I mean if you were to print the picture out and hand it to someone the answer would elude them forever. This is a perfect internet style puzzle. A fairly decent comprehension of the internet is needed to solve it. Many of the players must have had this level of comprehension because it only took 1 day, 11 hours, and 4 minutes to figure it out. I was hoping players might think this was similar to “The Office” puzzle . This did happen in the beginning but it didn’t take long for someone to see deeper into the puzzle.

In the original game play there was no sentence at the top of the puzzle to shed some light on what you were looking for. It was interesting to watch some players spend time determining that the building was the Watergate Hotel. To be honest, I had no idea what hotel it was and as they would soon learn, it doesn’t matter. Just the fact that it was a hotel is all that’s important. One player noted that the balconies at the top looked like bars similar to those in the AT&T wireless commercials that were going on then so time was wasted trying to establish some kind of mathematical relationship between the balconies and applying it to the Watergate scandal in some way. All useless directions.

It wasn’t until someone realized the the picture’s file name was 1.jpg that the ball started rolling and suddenly other images were discovered. They were found by changing the 1.jpg to 2.jpg and then 3.jpg, and so on. Soon the players had eight images to work with.

I’m not sure who came up with it first but one person said he realized the connection between the pictures when he was communicating his drivers license number to someone over the phone. For the letters he used the phonetic alphabet. That’s when it hit him. Once that clue was discovered the puzzle was quickly solved. It was a little tricky figuring out which phonetic letter some of the pictures represented but either they were eventually determined or they had enough letters figured out to be able to guess the rest. A quick check over at Andy’s Anagram Solver (Google it, it’s a great tool for puzzle solving) produced the correct answer.

Now that you know how to get to the images, see if you can solve it the rest of the way. When you think you have the answer, type it into the answer blank at the bottom of the puzzle page and see if you’re right.

If you’re stumped you can unhide the answer here:

I suppose it couldn’t be helped. I put alot of useless information in here. Some of it was intended to misdirect but most of it was just filler to make the page look more authentic. I created the page weeks before the Puzzle Master game started and periodically logged in and added more info to give it more history. I guess it worked because it took players 4 days, 21 hours, and 40 minutes to solve it. During that time many wrong paths were taken, many wrong ideas explored. Enough red herrings were found to fill small pond.

All in all, I would say that I liked this puzzle the least of all of them. I’m not sure why. I certainly put the most work into it. I guess I felt the players had to reach to far to get the answer. Maybe just the answer itself was just really weak. Clever, but not interesting. I don’t know. It’s what YOU think that matters more I suppose.

Although many players got lost travelling down the side roads, a few caught on that an important clue was the newspaper clipping picture. They realized there was something special about it. The headlines contained palindromes. Know what those are? They’re words or sentences that are the same forward and backward, like “mom” or “level”.

And that was my intent. I wanted a puzzle about panlindromes. I researched websites that listed palindromes looking for something I could use. I got really excited when I found one that I could actually use as a web address and even more excited when I found out the URL was available. So I bought it. Then I came across a few that more that I liked and that could be used as news headlines.

My intent was for the headlines to indicate to the players that palindromes were important. As they read the rest of the stuff on the site I thought the players might just find one particular post to be just odd enough to be important. And many did.

I wish I could remember all the different theories people came up. It was really quite interesting. Someone even tried to make some kind of sense out of pangaea_joe’s birthday and state. I chose Oxford, NJ because I used to live there once when I was a young boy.

In the end though, someone found the final palindrome buried within one of the posts and realized what it’s true nature was. A web address. So off they went taking a few others with them to the next puzzle.

Here is the text from one of the posts. The palindrome is buried inside of it. See if you can find it. Check your answer by unhiding it below. You can’t go to the website indicated by the answer though as it is no longer active.

About me

There. That’s enough about me.

The answer is hidden above. Find it and check your answer by unhiding it below.

You can also click on the picture at the top to get a better view of the newspaper article. I think it’s quite good.

I’ve always been interested in evolution. I recalled an article I had read regarding tectonic plates. It showed pictures of what the earth might have looked like millions of years ago when it was all one giant land mass. The article referred to this supercontinent as Pangaea. So I decided that I wanted a puzzle that included that. And like Pangaea, this puzzle also evolved from that single idea into what it is today.

I had, I don’t know… a desire I guess, that while people were solving my puzzles I could also teach them something. I realized I may have accomplished this on some level at least when I received an email from a player who said that she loves playing Cluechaser games because she learns things she didn’t know before and then listed several of them.

At this point in the Puzzle Master creating process I decided that I wanted to have a fake website set up that for all intents and purposes looked real but hidden within it were the clues necessary to solve the puzzle. I looked for a way for the Pangaea idea to get me there. After a bit or research and thinking I determined that creating my own web page from scratch was too time consuming so I looked for other alternatives. I found it at Myspace. At this time (November 2007) Myspace was growing rapidly and Facebook barely registered on anyone’s radar. I know it was there though because I looked at Facebook as a possible solution to my problem but went with Myspace because it allowed you to create your own page.

So with the decision made to use Myspace for the next puzzle, I needed to create a puzzle that would direct the players there. Knowing that I wanted to use Pangaea I decided that displaying it on a shirt was the best way to do it. So I scoured the internet looking for just the right picture to use. I knew I wanted it to be a crowd of people and I didn’t want it to be easily found by a player looking for the original so I chose one that showed up dozens of pages deep in the Google image results then tried a bunch of different key word combinations to see if I could easily find it. When I couldn’t, I settled on the one you see above.

I then modified the picture using my faithful companion MS Paint. I changed one of the banners to show Myspace.com and added the Pangaea image to a person’s t-shirt as well as a name tag, which when zoomed in on would provide the final piece needed to solve the puzzle. The end result was not great but I told myself that not all the puzzles have to be hard and that players needed an easy one here and there to boost their spirits.

So that’s how it came to be. Not my best work but it served its purpose. During gameplay the players easily figured out which parts were doctored but it took a few days to figure out what the t-shirt image represented. It took a little bit longer after that to see how the name tag fit into it. Once it was all put together some had an issue with accessing the Myspace page because they didn’t have a login. I hadn’t forseen that so I created a dummy login for players to use.

What they found when they got to the site would stump them for nearly 5 days and produce more incorrect theories than any other Cluechaser puzzle. Learn more about that in the next blog “Social Network“.

Meanwhile, click on the picture above to view it full size then see if you can put the clues together to solve it.

If the secret of Pangaea proves too difficult or you just want to know the answer, unhide it.

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: