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.

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.

I call it The Matrix.

I got the idea from the movie by the same name (obviously). Originally I intended this to look much cooler than it ended up as. I wanted it to look something like this:

But that’s okay, it served it’s purpose.
So where do you go with this puzzle? I can tell you that it didn’t take players very long to figure that out because this puzzle was solved the fastest at 1 hour and 4 minutes.

At first glance it appears to be a series of zeros and ones. Binary language perhaps? I hoped that might slow players down a bit as they pursued that angle (I was wrong). How about the different colors of black, blue, red, and green? Surely that must mean something. Sorry, another red herring. A clever deception that apparently didn’t fool anyone either.

Maybe the phrase “What hath God wrought” means something. Yes, now you’re on the right track. Typing this into a search engine and a short amount of investigation reveals that, among other things, this was the first message sent by morse code on May 24th, 1844 by Samuel Morse (see pic on left) marking the official opening of the telegraph system.

If you know morse code then you know that it is a series of dashes and dots that when combined together in certain patterns represent the alphabet. This could also be sent electrically by telgraph as a series of audible “dits” (dots) and “dahs” (dashes).

Now that you know this, if you look at the puzzle again it’s solution is perhaps more clear. In this case rotating the puzzle 90 degrees counter-clockwise reveals that the 1’s now look like dashes and the 0’s now dots. All you need is a handy dandy translation key (see right) and you can begin to solve the puzzle.

Soon you may notice that although you’re translating the code into actual words, together they don’t make much sense. Here is the second last stumbling block I threw in there. I coded the sentence in reverse order. I guess my hope was that players wouldn’t be able to understand the sentence until you completely solved it instead of solving half of it and guessing what the last half would be or something like that.

So once solved the solution now poses the player with a question. A riddle to be more precise. My last attempt to increase the complexity of the puzzle. And what is the riddle? Well, you’re going to have to figure that out for yourself. I have to leave some mystery and challenge for you. I can tell you that the correct answer reveals the next number in the sequence which is 19.

Do you have the skills to finish solving it? Let’s see:

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.

A problem I had with the previous game was that because it wasn’t in a secure location any of the puzzles could have shown up in a Google search thereby allowing a player to jump ahead. To prevent this from happening in this game I required players to register. That way I knew how many I had and also allowed me to email them a username and password that could be used to access the puzzle site which resided on a secure server.

So when the start time came I posted the link to the secure site and players used the username and password to access the game and get their first look at it. The first thing they found was this:

That message set the stage for the game. Now the players knew that Fletcher Edwards was missing, that mysterious people were looking for him and his friend Iggy is concerned. This combined with the intro video gave the players the background information they needed to begin the journey.

Included on the intro page was a link. Once clicked the players were greeted with a picture of the interior of an office. My intent was for players to understand that the office was a room of E’s house which was the house seen in the intro video. Since he is a scientist I thought he should have a nice looking office. I searched a long time to find the right picture for this. I first tried to find one that was in disarray but finally decided a nice neat upscale office would work just fine.

I think it’s pretty clear that the picture was doctored. Several items were added. Eventually the players would learn that each item would become a link to a puzzle once they got to that point in the game. At this point though, the only active link was the one attached to the crumpled up wad of paper on the floor. Once players found that and clicked on it they got to see the first puzzle (click on the picture at the top of the post to see a larger version of the letter).

I wanted as many people as possible to play the game and figured the further they got into the story and the puzzles the more interested in it they would become. Therefore I designed the puzzle to be very easy.

The letter makes it clear that Edward Fletcher (aka Mr. E) is gone and plans to be for awhile. He trusts his friend Iggy enough to tell him this and also to place the care of his bird Goldy in his hands.

If this were a real-life letter perhaps the bit about the pet bird would not seem strange but in a puzzle game everything is a potential clue. In this case E’s pet bird is actually a clue for the next puzzle. As is the mention of the island. I think I’ve gotten quite good at inserting clues into puzzles that will be needed for future ones.

Players noticed right away that there were several spelling and grammatical errors in the letter. By taking the extra letters, missing letters and, in the case of misspelled words, the correct letters, players were able to spell out the answer to the puzzle.

Another goal I had with this game is that all the puzzle answers would themselves provide clues to the mystery. In a later puzzle I would provide a clue to the players as to how the puzzle answers should be arranged to help shed some light on what was going on.

One thing I never noticed until now is that there is a mistake in the answer. A letter is missing. Obviously players figured that out but I can’t believe I never noticed it. An “A” is missing. I spent a lot of time on this puzzle making sure I arranged it correctly to reveal the answer and I just don’t see how I missed that. And I don’t recall anyone ever pointing the mistake out to me. Anyway, there should an “A” as the third to last letter.

It took players a mere 39 minutes to solve it. Once the correct answer was typed in the players were taken to a congratulations screen where in addition to a link to follow, they were give a number. For this puzzle the number is 50. It would be a wise choice for the players to write that number down. It becomes very important later on.

By clicking the link, players were taken back to the office where now a new link was activated. This time over the license plate on the wall. This took the players to the next puzzle License Plates which will be reviewed next.

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: