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.

Truthfully, I’ve haven’t been looking forward to this review. Its kind of like when you had a party the evening before and left all the cleanup for the next day. You wake up in the morning, crawl out of bed and as you head toward the living room (ground zero) you have this feeling of dread wash over you. You wished you would have just stayed up later to clean because now everything has been sitting out all night and things have been broken and you’re not sure how to fix them. You survey the room, see the extent of the cleanup job, and suddenly have the inexplicable urge to turn and just run out the door and never look back. This puzzle is like that in the sense that it has many pieces and most of them weren’t kept together after the game ended so it has taken a lot of work to gather it all up again.

Unfortunately this is only the first of 3 or 4 puzzles between this game, The Missing Mr. E, and Game 2: Puzzle PiEces that I have this anxiety over. Fortunately though, I seem to have anticipated this a bit and left myself good enough notes that I should be able to stumble through this without too much pain. I have yet to look at the others to see if they will fair the same.

So lets jump in and get this started. I believe this puzzle was accessed by clicking on the “A is for Apple” pic on the wall above the bookshelf in the office which, after the successful completion of the previous puzzle, was now active.

At this point in the game I had some important information related to the storyline that I had to disseminate to the players in some way. This puzzle became the avenue to accomplish that. It is actually 5 puzzles in one, each type of puzzle representing a sentence.

I believe this puzzle, or at least the first part, is a type of rebus. At the time I created it I thought it was a pictogram or pictograph puzzle. I remember doing these kinds of puzzles when I was a kid and always enjoyed them. When creating it I found that it was difficult to put together. Sometimes the picture you need just isn’t easy to find.

Each picture or series of pictures represents a word. So in this first picture you have 4 words. It should be pretty easy to figure out what they are (you can click on it to see it larger). I wanted to use a picture for everything so I had some trouble finding a picture for the word “The”. The pic I used has actually been modified. I erased whatever word was on the knuckles and added my own letters. I mean really, who tattoos “the” on their knuckles?

The next series of pictures requires a little more work. You start with the first picture, a tea bag. Next the “+” sign indicates you should add the next pic, “MDX” to it. Next is the minus sign followed by a bag. So if you remove “bag” you find that so far you have “teamdx”. The next pic indicates you should remove “dx”. Then add the underlined word in the next pic, “coed” and finally remove the “co” leaving you with the word “teamed”.

The next pic is all by itself. Pretty self explanatory…”up”. This is followed by “panda” which becomes “and” after you follow the next pic and remove the “AP”. I suppose it might cause some confusion if you weren’t sure which “a” to remove. But once you realize taking out the first one gives you “nda” and the second gives you “and” it seems pretty logical which one is correct.

Up to this point you have the following message: “The US and China teamed up and”.

Continuing on with the next series of pictures gives you:

“Green Acres” minus “green” plus “Ted Koppel” minus “apple” (at this point you have “crestedko”) minus “osk” (now “creted”) plus “A” equals “created”.
“ABC” minus “BC” equals “A”.
“rest area” plus “chick chat” minus “at-at” minus “chick” equals “resreach”. I figured the players would realize the word is a bit scrambled and should really be “research”.

This is followed by:

“gold” minus “old” plus (”trout” minus “tt”) plus “P” equals “group”.
“last call” plus “superman” plus “p” minus “last supper” (so far you have “callman”) minus (”coleman” minus “cole”) plus “deed” minus “ed” equals “called”.

And you finish off the first sentence with:

“green light project” minus “green light” equals “project”.
“Coca Cola” – “COCA” plus “b” (the hand is representing the letter B in American Sign Language) equals “Colab”.

My original plan was to do the entire message like this. However, you can probably imagine how long it took me to put that one together. And I had 4 more sentences to go! I knew then that I had to figure out something different. That was when I decided to code each sentence in a different type of puzzle.

I really have no idea how I came up with the next one, but I like it. It’s just so simple yet not obvious. At least not right away. I imagine the players looking at it and saying “what the….?” But after you look at it for a few minutes I think the solution starts to become clear.

There are 3 parts. The first part is solved by following the roman numerals. I thought using roman numerals looked better than regular numbers and added a bit of difficulty to the puzzle. Following them gives you the words, “There were”.
The next part is obvious, “18″
The third part is a litttle trickier. Again you have to follow the numbers but it might take a little time to figure out which direction the word goes. It’s solution reads, “First three letters of scissors plus dentists minus first letter”. In other words, “sci” plus “entists” which equals “scientists”

Seeing a need to speed this up even more I looked for ways to code the remaining sentences faster. I decided to use semaphore for the third, American Sign Language for the fourth and morse code for the fifth sentence.

So the third sentence translates to:

The fourth to:

And the 5th to:

That URL no longer leads anywhere. It was only active during the game and it led to the next puzzle. Once there the players learned the next number in the sequence which was 4.

I don’t have much else to say about this puzzle. I don’t have any strong feelings about it. It served its purpose which was to communicate important background information from E to the players. I was able to deliver it in a variety of unique and interesting ways although none of them proved to be very difficult to solve. The same thing goes for the next puzzle, Doctor Letter. It was also quickly solved by the players but it also included a hidden clue that I’m positive was overlooked by every single player. It was pretty subtle. Read about that one in the next review.

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.

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:

If you don’t know Jesus, I pray that during the 2010 year you take some time to look into that. I didn’t become a Christian until I was 30 and even then it was only after much reading, studying, sole searching, questioning, and finally praying. Looking back on it I can’t believe it took me so long and how stubborn I was to accept it. I hope your journey is not as long and difficult as mine was.

Merry Christmas all you Cluechasers out there. Be safe. Be joyful.

I wanted to start with a puzzle that is close to my heart. It’s not a puzzle in the true sense of the word but it’s certainly a problem that is very difficult to solve yet must be attempted on a daily basis. My 10 year old son has been doing so since he was 6. And soon my 2 year old son may be joining him.

Type 1 Diabetes – Hitting a moving target

There are two main types of diabetes. The most common (particularly in the US) is type 2. This type generally occurs in adults and is caused in large part to poor diet and being overweight. The body becomes resistant to insulin (produced by the pancreas, insulin acts as a doorway that allows sugar to enter the cells to be converted to energy). When your body doesn’t properly use insulin the cells don’t get the sugar and it stays in the bloodstream and your blood sugar level goes up. This is corrected by taking additional insulin, usually in pill form. Over time continuous high blood sugar levels can cause a variety of health issues such as heart disease, blindness, poor circulation, etc. This type of diabetes can usually be controlled with a proper diet, exercise and weight loss.

Type 1 (previously referred to as juvenile diabetes) occurs more commonly in children. It is an autoimmune disease which means that the body’s own immune system attacks the pancreas and destroys the islets that produce insulin. With little or no insulin being produced the cells can’t get the sugar which causes the blood sugar level to increase. If it goes too high the person will become comatose and without treatment will die. To prevent this insulin must be administered manually.

Thank to advances in medical science this process has become a little easier. Several times a day my son must prick his finger to draw a droplet of blood. He uses a meter to measure the amount of sugar in his blood.

If the level is above the desired range he must give himself insulin to bring it down. If the level is too low he needs to eat or drink something that contains enough carbohydrates to bring his sugar level back up. If the level goes to low he could pass out or go into a coma. Whenever he eats or drinks he has to determine the amount of carbs in the meal or snack and give himself enough insulin to cover it and keep his sugar level within range.

He wears a device called a pump that contains a small reservoir of insulin and is connected to him via a small tube and catheter that is inserted into his skin.

Every 3 days he has to change out this catheter (called an infusion set). This is the part he dislikes the most. The needle is about an inch and a half long and is inserted in fatty parts of his body like his arms, legs, belly, etc.

Attached to the needle is the small catheter. The needle is removed and the catheter remains. The plus side of this process is he only needs one needle every three days instead of several needles each day. The pump has an interface that allows him to enter in his blood sugar level and the amount of carbs he is consuming. The necessary amount of insulin is delivered by the pump, through the tube and catheter into his body based on predetermined algorithms.

Sounds easy enough right? So what makes this an ultimate puzzle? The body is a wonderfully complex system. There are numerous factors that affect how the body uses insulin. The insulin my son would give himself to cover the carbs in a meal may keep him in range one day but the same amount for the same meal on a different day might cause him to “go low” (have a blood sugar level below his desired range) or “go high”. It is not an exact science. The variables fluctuate. Things like exercise, stress, illness, food combinations, mood, hormones, all affect blood sugar levels. Getting the right amount of insulin in his body to keep him in range is like shooting at a target on a jackrabbit racing through tall grass while you’re riding a mechanical bull attached to a rollercoaster. It’s frustrating and maddening.

Blood sugar highs and lows take a toll on the body. Over time they can cause many health related issues. Some of them I’ve already mentioned like heart disease and blindness but some additional ones are high blood pressure, mental health issues, and neuropathy (nerve damage). Fortunately my son is very in tune with his body and feels when he is going low and takes care of it. So far we have not experienced the scariest parts of going low or going high although we have come close. It’s a constant battle and always on our minds. It is something that he can never take a break from.

Occasionally, my wife and I do get a break from it. Thanks to a place called Bearskin Meadow Camp.

The camp, run by the Diabetic Youth Foundation (DYF), is for children with type 1 diabetes. Their kids camps allow parents the opportunity to let their child go away for a week and have an incredible time doing wonderous things with other children with diabetes. The camp is staffed with knowledgeable counselors and staff that are not only well trained but who also have type 1 diabetes. Parents get a well needed break and the kids get to feel “normal” for awhile. Instead of being the only kid in their class who has to check their blood or read a nutrition label they are surrounded by friends who all do it. It is the highlight of my son’s year. They also have family camps that our whole family can attend. The kids get to do activities, crafts, swimming, hiking, archery, games, plays, etc and the parents attend workshops to learn how to better manage diabetes, what the latest technology is, and also talk with other parents who understand the struggle and the pain and the worry and can be a sympathetic ear when you need it most. Strong friendships are forged among kids and parents. It is truly a magical place.

DYF is a non-profit organization and it takes a lot of money to run these camps. My wife in I co-chair a yearly walk called the Families in the Forest Fun-raiser Walk in the Sacramento, CA area. It is one of their main fundraisers of the year. Last year my son reached his sponsorship goal of $2500 despite the economic situation. This year his goal is more ambitious. He’s trying to raise $3000 which helps kids like him go to the camp. It is a very worthy cause. If you are interested in helping Tyler reach his goal you can donate online at www.firstgiving.com/tylerchilcote. If you prefer not to do it online you can contact me at cowpattybill@yahoo.com to discuss alternative options. But please do not feel obligated.

If you would like more information about the Diabetic Youth Foundation visit their website at www.dyf.org .

For more information about Diabetes in general please visit www.diabetes.org.

The most important thing to remember is that my son and everyone else with type 1 diabetes is normal in every way. The only difference is their pancreas doesn’t work properly. They can do anything and everything that anyone else can. They can eat whatever they want and they can become whoever they want to be. They are not defined by their condition. They are not diabetics. They are people with diabetes.

Thank you for reading this. I hope you got something out of it. Diabetes management is one difficult puzzle. So for all you puzzle lovers out there, this is one I would love to see solved. Soon.

Cowpatty Bill
aka Tyler’s Dad.

Since then the websites that contained the hidden map pieces have updated their sites and the pieces are no longer there to find. Because of this many of the puzzles had to be reworked. So now, in the instances where the puzzle reveals a URL, you will type the URL as the answer (without the http://) instead of navigating to the website indicated (unless instructed otherwise).

If you wish to see the individual map pieces and solve the puzzle therein I will put them all together at the bottom of the list but they shouldn’t be done until all the other puzzles have been done.

Also keep in mind that within this game, you may need clues from previous puzzles in order to solve others.