Then there are days when I absolutely love what I do. Today is one of those days and let me tell you why.

Over the past few days I’ve been tinkering with the site to see if I can increase it’s ranking in Google, by far the most popular search engine in the world. I did some things that will hopefully help more of the pages, especially the puzzle pages, show up in search results. Today I tested it out by typing just Cluechaser into the search bar. I was happy to see that many of the results were my puzzles. While scanning through the images I found several that were not mine. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I have fans.

No, not this kind of fans….

But rather this kind….

Okay okay, I obviously doctored that picture for my own benefit but I did find some real live pictures created by fans of Cluechaser. Here are a few of my favorites:

Here are few that are done in the style of those motivational posters you see in office buildings and such. They promote the upcoming Game 3: Chasing Shadows puzzle contest.

And finally, some more motivational type posters:

These last two are my favorites:

Seeing something like this really lifts my spirits. It’s because of Cluechaser fans that I persevere and continue to find the energy and the will to finish creating the remaining puzzles for Game 3: Chasing Shadows. I know it’s been a long time in the making and those few dedicated Cluechasers out there have been very patient. I thank each and every one of them for their loyal support. I feel very strongly that the game will be ready before the end of the year. If all goes according to plan it will be the best puzzle contest yet. I’m confident you won’t be disappointed. It will be quite a challenge.

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.

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.

I’ve always been impressed by vanity plates on cars. I think some are quite original and I especially enjoy ones that make use letters and numbers together to spell something. I recall in my youth toying with the idea of getting a vanity plate that said…

This particular puzzle is multi-layered. First the players needs to decode the words on the plates to understand the message E is giving them. It’s important to the story line. Here is where they learn that there are coded documents that need to located and sent to someone to be decoded. The plates also tell them that there are clues hidden in the puzzles. I don’t think that was new information to anyone but since a lot of the players were new I thought it would be good to let them know that there was more to this puzzle than what meets the eye. One thing I hoped they would notice was that the hyphens on the plates meant the end of a sentence as opposed to each row being a sentence.

Using the message board to communicate with each other it wasn’t too long before someone mentioned that the alignment of the plates as well as the states represented were interesting things to consider. Shortly thereafter the realization that the two letter abbreviations for the states spelled out an entirely different message sparked a flurry of conversation as they raced to learn what the message said.

I think the fact that I made the first sentence short helped immensely in getting people going in the right direction. Another help was that the plates were laid out in way that each row of plates was a single word. All they had to do was unscramble the letters.

Creating a hidden message using only two letter state abbreviations is not easy to do although it didn’t take me as long as it could have. I kind of did it backwards. First I figured out what words could spelled and then used those words to make up a clue. It was bit awkward. For example, I could spell “a password” but had to leave out an “s”. I figured players could still figure it out. Similary, I could spell out “Christmas” but without the “t”. Once I discovered I could also spell “island” I then looked for a way to use them all together. Imagine my surprise when I learned that there was a “Christmas Island” in the world.

One thing I very much like to do is to insert clues in other puzzles. In this case, the sharpest of players recalled the previous puzzle (Letter from E) where it mentioned a pet bird from E’s uncle who worked on an island and the bird’s name was Goldy. This info plus the clues from the license plates that mentioned “flag” and “animal” helped steer the players to the answer they needed.

I also like to create puzzles that take a little research to answer. I don’t think there are too many people in the world that know off the top of their head what kind of bird is on the Christmas Island flag. But a few minutes with Google and the answer became clear.

It took players 2 hours and 46 minutes to come up with the correct answer. The correct answer provided the players with the next number. In this case it was 53.

Challenge yourself to see if you can solve it faster.

It has become tremendously popular to exchange the subtitles for other more comical ones and have Hitler ranting about any current event under the sun. Nothing is overlooked. There are clips about what Hitler thinks about Obama, about the new Iphone, about Microsoft, about Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift during the grammy’s, and just about anything else you can think of. There are hundreds of these videos all over Youtube and other video sites.

I myself have made a few of these parodies. All of mine suggest that Hitler fancies himself a puzzle solving master and is upset that he can’t win any of the Cluechaser puzzle games. It’s all in good fun and in not meant as any kind of commmentary on Nazi’s, Jews, or the Holocaust.

As mentioned yesterday, one of the videos that I had lost and then found was a Downfall parody video. I happily posted it to Dailymotion.com to join the other two in the series that were already there (and have been for some time).

The other day I got an email from Dailymotion.com stating that my video was blocked because they had been notified that it included copyrighted material. They were of course referring to the Downfall movie.

In the last year or so, Constantin Films, the makers of the Downfall movie have been working to have all parody clips removed. I don’t want to get into the legalities of it all except to say that the movie is probably more well known now because of the parodies that it would ever have been without them.

The email I received from Dailymotion included a link to their terms. So I read them. It mentioned that if someone felt that they were the victim of copyright infringement that they had to follow a series of steps including identifying the url of the video in question, explain part of it was copyrighted, and some other stuff.

I’m pretty sure that my video was flagged through the use of this fairly new technique known as video fingerprinting. A whole other issue we could get into is whether these parody videos fall under the protection of a legal term known as “fair use” (which I believe it does).

I decided to challenge the accusation. I sent an email to Dailymotion asking them to provide me with copies of the information that the accuser should have sent to them as per their guidelines. I said that if I determined that the procedure was correctly followed and agreed that the video was a copyright infringement then I would promptly remove it. Otherwise I expected it to be restored immediately.

A few minutes later I received another email asking for the exact url of the video in question. I sent them the requested information. A few minutes after that I received another email saying that the matter was resolved and my video had been restored.

SUCCESS! So now all my Downfall parodies are available to be seen. Here they are for you to see. The first is the original bunker scene and the other 3 are from other parts of the movie. I decided it might be kind of fun to make them into a kind of sitcom called Adolf. Enjoy!

Side note- If you watch part 3 of 3 you might find that it looks vaguely familiar to the Hitler’s a player video. Well that’s because it is. I took a portion of the clip and flipped it. So it’s a mirror image. I think it looks pretty cool.

Hitler’s a player (Downfall movie parody)

Hitler’s gets some bad news (part 1 of 3)

Hitler’s gets some bad news (part 2 of 3)

Hitler’s gets some bad news (part 3 of 3)

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.

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.