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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Players accessed this puzzle by clicking on the piece of paper on the desk in front of the black chair. Upon first look, it appears to be a bunch of gibberish. I’m sure many initially thought they were about to sink their teeth into a substitution cypher. I guess in a way it is. However, if anyone tried any standard methods of solving cyphers I’m sure they quickly found it far more difficult than they expected.

A struggle I have is often I am tempted to make a puzzle so difficult that it will take several days to solve. I had to remind myself on several occasions that the purpose of Game 1 was to attact as many players as possible. If I made it too difficult people would just quit and not continue through the storyline. To prevent this from happening I intentionally added some elements to serve as clues.

The first clue is the names of the doctors mentioned. For some, those names made the solution immediately evident. Others may have had to do some research first. A quick Google search of either name should have given the players what they needed to move forward. Just in case, I added a further clue in the letter by mentioning the phrase “other key board members”.

I can save you some time by telling you that Colemak and Dvorak of names of other types of keyboard layouts. The standard layout used on most compute keyboards is referred to as QWERTY after the first 6 letters on the top row of alpha-keys. Studies have shown that by laying out the keys in a more efficient arrangement one could actually type faster. So other designs such as Dvorak and Colemak have been created.

Now that the players had the key to solving the puzzle they just needed to know which lines of text used the Dvorak layout and which used the Colemak. I provided another clue by listing the doctors in the order they appear. Meaning that the first line is solved using the Colemak keyboard, the next line uses Dvorak, the next line Colemak, and so on.

The puzzle is solved by looking at where the letter is on the associated keyboard and then seeing what the corresponding letter is for the same key on the QWERTY keyboard. However, there’s a catch. As a last attempt to increase the difficulty a little I added two additional bits of confusion. First,once solved the players realized that if they tried to read each sentence in order it made no sense. The correct approach is to read all the Colemak sentences first then the Dvorak ones. Doing so revealed E’s message. Second, each sentence contained an extra letter at the end. By starting at the tap and reading downwards the letters spelled a word that when typed into the answer blank at the bottom was the puzzle’s answer.

It didn’t take players long to solve it. The first person finished it in just under 2 hours (1 hour and 54 minutes). The reward for successful solution was the next number in the series, this time a 2, and a link to the next puzzle, Crossword Puzzle.

There was an element to this puzzle that I added and no one seemed to pick up on it. Although I’m not sure why they would. It was a kind of foreshadow of the last puzzle. It can be found at the top of the letter. No, it’s not the eyball with the world in it. It’s the name of the organization in the letterhead. I’m no English major so I don’t know if it’s called something when a part of a word sounds like a letter of the alphabet. What I mean is, take the words “teach” and “tank”. The first part of Teach sounds like you’re saying the letter T. Again, I don’t know if there is a word that describes this type of thing. Regardless, I chose the organization’s name so that each word followed the example I gave you. So “Peter Able’s Eye-wareness Exploratorium” is actually P-A-I-X in disguise. What is PAIX you ask? Well, that will be revealed later on in the game.

Once players successfully solved the puzzle they were rewarded with the next number in the series, this time a 2, and a link to the next puzzle, Crossword Puzzle.

Now that you know the secrets try your hand at solving the puzzle.

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.

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.

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 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.

I started the Mr. E puzzle series with a broad storyline in mind. I was confident that the details would fill themselves in as I went along. And they did. During games 1 and 2 players learned who Edward Fletcher was and that he discovered something very important. By solving the puzzles and following the clues players uncovered a government secret that a disease known as Environmenally Related Rapid Organ Dysfunction Syndrome (ERRODS) was rapidly spreading across the world. Mr E. was on the trail of tracking down the source when a mistakenly revealed password led to an attack on the San Francisco apartment where he and his colleagues were hiding. News reports indicated that everyone in the apartment was killed. With Edward Fletcher presumably dead players were left wondering if the cure for ERRODS would ever be found? This is where the storyline is now.

During the past year the remainder of the story has been brewing in the back of my mind. I knew where I wanted to go and how to get there but still needed to work out what clues would be found along the way. I imagine that fiction authors go through similar thought processes. Things were moving along at a nice pace when suddenly, bad things happened. If you’ve watched the video you know what happened. You know the site was hacked over and over. You know that I had to shut it down.

Now that it is back up and ultra-secure (and I’m a little wiser) the story can continue. During the site down time I did a lot of work on the plot details. Along with that I had to think up different kinds of puzzles. The trickiest part turned out to be trying to figure out how to give out the information the players would need for the story without bogging the game down. Previously I had accomplished this by including the information in the puzzle itself (like this one). Other times I made it part of the puzzle answer (like this one). However, I find that kind of puzzle difficult to design and after creating almost 40 different kinds of puzzles for the previous games and other projects my creative juices were running dry.

The good news is that the creative block in my mind that I had been chipping away at for the past several months finally seems to be giving way. The story line is clear. The path is set. The clues are being placed. Game 3 should be the most exciting one yet. New puzzles, new characters are introduced and more details are revealed.

I am excited to tell you that during the buildup to the launch of Game 3: Chasing Shadows I plan to release mini puzzles to wet your appetite. To get you in the mood so to speak. I also hope to create a couple more teaser videos to help set the stage. My goal is to have everything ready to go by June. In the months prior to that I will be asking for your help to get the word out. The more players we have the better the game experience will be.

This will be the most complex game of the three. Twists and turns await you as you brave the shadows and chase the clues. Reward and reputation are on the line as you race your fellow Cluechasers to the end.

?? – Is E dead
?? – What is the source of the chemical
?? – Who is the mole

These are the questions that need answers. Will you be the one to do it?
We’ll see soon enough.