Players found the puzzle by accessing the pile of Scrabble tiles on the floor in front of the desk in the office. (If you click on the image above you can see the entire puzzle)

The puzzle took players longer to solve than it should have. Mostly because it had not one but TWO mistakes in it. That’s what I get for having someone else double check my work. Unfortunately I don’t recall who pointed out the mistakes but I remember that he was clever enough to have figured out what the correct number should have been. Once I found out about it I fixed it quickly and reposted it. So with the errors it took 19 hours and 52 minutes for the first player to solve it, making this the second longest solve time in the game. Without the errors it probably would have been done several hours sooner.

So how is it solved? The color coded numbers below the tiles is the key. Each color represents a different direction. To aid in determining which was which I added a colored line to each side of the puzzle. If you look closely (or zoom in, if you have that capability) you can see that the left side had a Red line, the top line is Blue, Green is on the right and the bottom line is Orange. So the color of the number indicates the direction and the number tells how many tiles to move in that direction. The tile you end up on is the letter you need for the puzzle’s solution. Each number or numbers within parenthesis represents one letter. Multiple numbers means the player will move multiple spaces in more than one direction. The puzzle also contains “+” symbols. Each smaller one (unbolded) separates letters and each larger one (bolded) separates words.

The only question left is; Where do you start? That answer is provided in the form of a clue in the puzzle’s title at the top. “X marks the spot”. In other words, start with the letter X. Players would start there then, following the first number clue: Green 3 & Orange 1, they would move 3 tiles to the right and 1 tile down to land on the “T”. From there they would follow the next clue: Green 1, and go one tile right to the “H” and so on until they completed it.

The solution revealed to the players the location of the secret documents that they’ve been looking for the entire game. First though, they had to solve the last part of the tile message. This was perhaps the trickiest part for the players. The last sentence reads “Answer is total of tiles in puzzle X seven”. I had to design the message so that it couldn’t be solved without decoding the entire thing. That’s why I made it a math problem. I’m sure the players first thought was to add up all the numbers for each tile and multiply that number by 7. Doing so however would have given them an incorrect answer. I was quite clever with this part. The key to solving it is by reading the sentence a different way. If you place emphasis on a particular word in the sentence, say “puzzle” then you might understand what you need to do. I won’t tell you the solution in case some of you reading want to solve it on your own but I will make it available below if you want to unhide it.

Successfully solving the puzzle returned the players back to the office where this time they would find two links available. One was located on the bookshelf just beyond the arched doorway. What the players found there might have gotten their hearts pumping a little faster. It may have raised their level of excitement. Why? Because it showed them that the end was near. Their adventure was almost finished. But first, they would realize they need to follow the other link. The one that was the globe sitting on the desk. Finally, they were about to find out what all those pesky numbers they’ve been collecting with each solved puzzle were for. Yep, just one more puzzle. And it was a doozy.

Now, you try it. Solve the puzzle. See for yourself what got the players excited:

For those needing a little help, here is the answer to solving the puzzle:

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, 30,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.

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.

Today I was reading an article about the blu-ray release of the Star Wars saga. I am a fan of the Star Wars movies but I wouldn’t say I was obsessed with it or anything like that. I have yet to own a blu-ray player so news of this release didn’t fill me with any particular excitement. Especially since there is talk of some more changes that George Lucas has made that seems to have the Star Wars fans in an uproar. You can read more about that in this article.

This reminded me of my ongoing assertion that when I saw Star Wars for the first time in 1977 at the age of 7, I saw scenes that are not in the version everyone is familiar with today.

There are 3 specific scenes that I clearly remember. I have talked with people about this in the past and have even posted questions on the Star Wars website and other fan pages and no one seems to know what I’m talking about. So the puzzle for me for all these years has been:
1. Did these scenes ever exist?
2. If so, why did I see them in the movie when no one else seems to have?
This is a puzzle I’ve been trying to solve for more than 30 years.

I’ve grown tired of no one believing me so with fresh determination I began scouring the web today looking for the proof I needed. And I believe I have found it. Through my reseach I found the website Blueharvest.net. There I discovered the original Star Wars script. I scanned through it and was excited about what I found. Let me explain the scenes I remember and then show you the proof that I found. These are not listed in the order they appear in the movie.

Memory 1

Location: In a hangar bay on the 4th moon of Yavin.
Point in storyline: As they are getting ready to leave to battle the Death Star.
What I remember seeing: Luke sees Biggs, shouts his name and runs over to him. They excitedly talk to each other although I don’t remember what the dialogue was.
Current status: CONFIRMED! This scene was restored in the 1997 special edition version so I already knew this one existed.. At the time it filled me with great joy and a sense of victory to suddenly realize that my memory of that scene was correct. The script I found also proves it:

Leia gives Luke a little kiss, turns, and goes off. As Luke heads for his ship, another pilot rushes up to him and grabs his arm.

BIGGS: Sir, Luke is the best bushpilot in the outer rim territories.

Memory 2

Location: Tatooine
Point in storyline: Right near the beginning of the movie
What I remember seeing: Before Vader’s troops board the Tantive IV and capture Princess Leia we see Luke on the surface of Tatooine. I don’t remember what he’s doing but at one point he looks up into the sky and sees the explosions from the battle taking place in space above him.
Current status: POSSIBLY CONFIRMED! I watched a video today that advertised the deleted scenes included in the blu-ray set. I got excited because I think this particular scene is one of them. I say that because at the 23 second mark of the video you see Luke looking up at the sky with his binoculars.

Now, I don’t know for sure if that’s the scene but unlike our Star Wars heroes I don’t have “a bad feeling about this”.

I found this scene in the script and it does seem to coincide with my memory (I’ve added my own emphasis on the specific part I’m referring to):

EXTERIOR: TATOOINE — DESERT WASTELAND — DAY.

A death-white wasteland stretches from horizon to horizon. The tremendous heat of two huge twin suns settle on a lone figure, Luke Skywalker, a farm boy with heroic aspirations who looks much younger than his eighteen years. His shaggy hair and baggy tunic give him the air of a simple but lovable lad with a prize-winning smile.
A light wind whips at him as he adjusts several valves on a large battered moisture vaporator which sticks out of the desert floor much like an oil pipe with valves. He is aided by a beatup tread-robot with six claw arms. The little robot appears to be barely functioning and moves with jerky motions. A bright sparkle in the morning sky catches Luke’s eye and he instinctively grabs a pair of electrobinoculars from his utility belt. He stands transfixed for a few moments studying the heavens, then dashed toward his dented, crudely repaired Landspeeder (an auto-like transport that travels a few feet above the ground on a magnetic-field). He motions for the tiny robot to follow him.

As further support of this I did some research on Youtube and found some additional deleted scenes from the movie. One in particular showed Luke talking with Biggs and other friends on Tatooine about seeing a battle going on above them. They look in his binoculars and tell him he’s mistaken and Biggs says “I tell you Luke, the rebellion’s a long way from here”. Although this scene wasn’t in the movie the fact that it was filmed lends credibility to my belief that a scene with Luke looking up at the sky does, or did, exist. I guess we won’t know for sure until September 16th when the blu-ray edition is scheduled to be released. I’ll have to find a friend that has a blu-ray player.

Update: I’m glad I found that video when I did because it has since been removed from Youtube due to claims of copyright infringement by 20th Century Fox.

Memory 3

Location: Luke’s X-wing fighter
Point in storyline: During the Death Star battle. Biggs’ ship has just been blown up.
What I remember seeing: Not so much what I remember seeing as what I remember hearing. When Luke sees his friend’s ship has been destroyed and Biggs killed he pauses for a moment, pain on his face, and he says, “We were a couple of shooting stars”.
Current status: UNCONFIRMED! In the past I have asked several Star Wars fans and even the Star Wars website if Luke ever spoke that line. No one recalls it. They invariably say the same thing, that either my memories are false or I am remembering scenes from other movies.

In the script I located a scene that contained the phrase “shooting stars” but apparently my memory may actually be wrong. I thought it was Luke but it was in fact Biggs that referred to the two of them as shooting stars and it was during their reunion in the hangar bay before the Death Star battle. The script shows this:

BIGGS: I’ve got to get aboard. Listen, you’ll tell me your stories when we come back. All right?

Luke laughs and shakes his head in agreement. He heads for his ship.

So although I didn’t recall the exact phrasing, location in the movie, or speaker of the line I did remember that there was a shooting star reference to Luke and Biggs which is not in any version of the movie currently available.

I believe it can be conclusively stated that for the most part my memories of those scenes were accurate (although memory 3 is not exactly as I remembered it). Since today is the first time I ever saw the original script I think it’s safe to say that I did actually see those scenes in the movie in 1977.

So question # 1 has been answered. This leaves us with the question of how it was that I saw a different version of the movie? That is the puzzle that remains to be solved. Perhaps I saw a pre-release version or maybe I was part of a test screening audience or possibly I’m unknowingly part of some conspiracy. I don’t know. I asked my parents about it and they don’t recall. My hope is that one day it will be solved and I can finally put my mind at ease. I just hope it’s not a long, long time from now.

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.

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:

Players got here by clicking on the blue piece of paper taped to the bookshelf behind the desk in the office photo which was now an active link once the second puzzle was successfully solved.

The puzzle is a message, scrawled on a piece of memo paper by “Iggy”. At this point not much is known about Iggy other than he is a friend of E’s and likely a fellow scientist. The players first learned of Iggy at the beginning of the game. His was the voice heard in the voicemail message. Apparently E had previously asked him to do some analysis for him of which this memo is the result. How Iggy figures into this mystery is at this point unclear.

On the outside this is quite a strange puzzle. It’s clear that the elements mentioned by E’s friend are a clue.
Another clue that seemed to go largely unnoticed, or at least unmentioned in the message board discussion, is the picture. I’m not sure of the exact title but I believe it’s called The “Betsy Ross” flag. The key to the picture is the 13 stars.

As you know, the stars represent the original 13 colonies of the United States. Those states in alphabetical order are:

Connecticut
Delaware
Georgia
Maryland
Massachusetts
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New York
North Carolina
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
Virginia

If you take the first letter of each state you have CDGMMNNNNPRSV. There was no clue to indicate this but if I gave a clue for every step then the puzzles wouldn’t be that difficult. My hope was that someone would come up with this in the message boards.

Iggy’s memo lists the elements contained in the sample E gave him. I’m not sure what the correct scientific way is to write that but the way Iggy did it revealed an important clue. If you write out the symbols for the elements listed you have:

CD for Cadmium
MN and MN for two Maganese
N and N for two Nitrogen
P for Phosphorus
S for Sulfur

The next step is a biggy. If you take the letters from the elements and apply them to the letters from the 13 states you will be left with 3 letters, G R, and V. Iggy refers to these as the three he wasn’t able to identify. He gives the clue to the next step when he writes,
“… if we get these in the correct order by date, their atomic numbers will reveal which elements they are.”
Here is the part of the puzzle that just amazes me the most. While creating this puzzle I had no idea if the end result would produce anything usable. I was quite surprised when it did.

Following Iggys clue, if you put the left over letters that represent the states of Georgia, Rhode Island, and Virginia in order by the date they joined the union you get G, V, R. When compared to the other states you learn that Georgia was the 4th state to join, Virginia the 10th, and Rhode Island the 13th.

Going back to the periodic table and looking at the 4th, 10th and 13th elements you find BE for Beryllium, NE for Neon, and AL for Aluminum. Iggy’s next clue says,
“Perhaps we can combine them together in some way and see what they become.”
This is another way to say “ANAGRAM”. Rearranging the 6 letters reveals the answer to the puzzle.

Now see if you can solve it yourself:

Of the 10 puzzles in the game this is the only one that took longer than 1 day to solve. In fact it took 1 day, 3 hours, and 44 minutes. Successfully solving it gave the players the next number in the series, which is 72 ]]> http://www.cluechaser.com/game-1-puzzle-3-iggys-memo/feed/ 0 http://www.cluechaser.com/introducing-cowpatty-bill-productions/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=introducing-cowpatty-bill-productions http://www.cluechaser.com/introducing-cowpatty-bill-productions/#comments Sat, 02 Jul 2011 13:00:23 +0000 cowpattybill http://www.cluechaser.com/?p=1254 I love movies. A lot. I even like commercials when they’re humorous and original. One of my favorite places in the world to be is sitting in the middle seat of the middle row of a large darkened movie theater. …

]]> I love movies. A lot. I even like commercials when they’re humorous and original. One of my favorite places in the world to be is sitting in the middle seat of the middle row of a large darkened movie theater. I get excited when the lights dim and previews begin. I remember when I was young my friend Steve once went to the movies with me “just to see the previews”. At the time I thought to myself how strange it was to spend 3 bucks (or whatever it cost back then) to watch previews and not really care about the actual movie playing. Now I understand why. Previews get you excited about what’s coming. You get that sneak peak at whatever tale of adventure or intrigue or action or comedy will soon be playing out before your eyes. Assuming of course that it’s a movie that you WANT to see. So far I’m a pretty good judge of whether a movie will be any good based solely from the preview. I’ve only been wrong a couple times. And I rarely read reviews because I typically don’t agree with what a critic has to say about a particular film.

I even like to play a little game while I’m sitting there.

I try to guess the production company based on their logo clip. You know what I mean. The easy ones are 20th Century Fox with it’s search lights, or MGM Studios with it’s lion, or Paramount Pictures with it’s flying stars and mountain.

There are others that are not so easy unless you’ve seen them and memorized them. For example, which production company has the rock skipping across the water? Give up? Walden Media. How about the one where you see a kid from behind as he leaps off the end of a dock? That’s Lakeshore. It’s a fun little game for me because there are new production companies all the time so there’s always a challenge.

Where am I going with all this? Well, it’s no secret that I enjoy making videos. I long for the day when I can afford some top notch editing software so I can really see what I am able to create. In the meantime I’m happy fiddling around with Windows Movie Maker. I decided that it was time for me to make my own production company logo clip. I can then attach it to the end of the videos I make. So I began the process. First by hunting down some 10 or 15 second long music that was original and memorable. Some production companies use music, like Disney, while others are silent, like Amblin Entertainment.

I lean more towards having the memorable music. I mean as soon as you hear that snare drum begin you know it’s 20th Century Fox.

So I picked out a few different tunes. One I liked a lot because it included whistling and few things stick in your head like a good whistling song. How many of you can whistle the theme to The Andy Griffith Show? If you’ve seen it more than once you probably have the tune memorized. It’s that catchy. My second favorite had a more western sound.

Next I needed to figure out what the clip would look like. I started by looking at add-on clips that you can download for Windows Movie Maker but none of them appealed to me. So then I searched for free clips. I wanted something that invoked a sense of nostalgia. Something that would harken back to the old days. Like the 60′s or 70′s. Back when things were less complicated and more pure. I found one of a young kid running up a grassy yard toward a window that had home-made pies cooling on the sill. I thought it would work very nicely until I discovered that it cost $40 to purchase it. Back to the drawing board I went. I then decided to go back even further in time. Since I go by the name Cowpatty Bill I reasoned that maybe the clip should be about cowboys.

I dug deeper into the bowels of the internet and found a website that contained royalty free movies. One of the oldest movies they had was called “The Great Train Robbery”, a 1903 American action Western film by Edwin S. Porter. The entire movie is 12 minutes long. I watched it, looking for something I could use. I was just about to give up when, at the very end, there’s a scene of an old cowboy staring directly into the camera and slowly firing all 6 rounds from his gun. Aha!! That was it. I downloaded the clip, converted it to a .wmv file and imported it into my editing software. I selected just the scene with that old cowboy. I added some after effects, like making it a little more grainier than it already was, I sped it up 2 or 3 times so he fired his gun faster, and had it fade out. I then added the western themed music I had found earlier and finally the production company name at the end and ta-da… it was done.

I also created a variation where I used the whistling music but it just doesn’t fit as well as the western one.

So now, for your viewing pleasure, here is the production company clip for Cowpatty Bill….

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