Happy New Year Puzzlers!
Traditionally I give everyone until the end of the year to submit their answers before I publish what I think the answers are, so I reckon it's about time...
First of all a massive thank you to everyone who had a bash at my puzzle this year – it hadn’t been play-tested and I wasn’t sure if anyone was going to get through it… but a few hours after it got published, I had my first correct entry, so I guess I needn’t have worried too much…
As I write this, I’ve had 7 correct entries, most of which came in on, or fairly soon after, Christmas Day – haven’t you folks got anything better to do!?
Here's what I thought the answers were:
First off you were presented with some rogue underlining in the opening text – if you noted all the underlined letters, you were rewarded with the wonderfully witty “this is not a secret message”… it goes downhill from here…
There were some random encoded phrases floating around the page which ended up saying silly things like “hamsters rule”, “ where is Chico” and “he’s behind you” – I was bored and figured I’d trot out some of the old MPP memes… none of that helped you solve the puzzle. The “lorem ipsum dolor” in pseudo-plaintext was also my idea of a laugh… I told you it was going downhill.
There were three puzzles numbered [a], [B] and [c] and then some crossword style clues that I’d wittily referred to as Angry-word(s) – did I mention it went downhill?
[a] was a simple set of semaphore letters that decoded to “habe yiu triet llowiny on it? – which is either really sloppy semaphore, or the spelling mistakes are what’s really interesting… hopefully you spotted the similarity to that oft-quoted really helpful phrase to throw at fellow puzzlers “have you tried blowing on it?” – and the spelling mistakes give you “bitly”… which is useful.
[c] is a simple optical trick – stand well back and it clearly says “2022” – look at it closely and it’s a table with bad formatting…
[B] was the puzzle I liked most
of all this year – you have some partly coloured-in wreaths (Yay, Christmas activities!) in a three by two arrangement
where the [B] is clearly lying on it’s side… so if you had the “B” upright, you’d
have a two by three arrangement, and the colours might give you some indication
of what was on and what was off … sort of like a Braille letter? Now if only
there was some way of knowing what order to read off the Braille letters, this
would be simple – and it is when you realise that everybody universally knows
the order of the colours on the rainbow – so the Braille decodes to “allard”,
e.g. in ROYGBIV, red is used only in top left-hand corner, which gives you an “a”... and so on.
Okay, so you have answers for [a], [B] & [c], now what – in case you hadn’t already figured that out, the Angry-words tell you what to do… the answers in order are: CON, Ca, TEN, eight, ABC – notice the full stop after line 5 – that indicated a break – 6 clued to PUNCTUATE – another full stop, and the final clue was Go For IT! … which then collapses into CONCATENATE ABC. Punctuate. Go For It!
Following those instructions you derive bit.ly/allard2022 which linked you to the familiar assortment of pictures and some instructions “I want a designer… (not the inspirer).” and “time and titles (at least initially!) are crucial, eh blogger boy?”
Final answer: Brian Young.
….and the first correct entry arrive in my inbox a little over 4 hours(!) after the puzzle was first published – massive congratulations to Brendan Perez for being the first across the line again this year!!
Not long after him came St Nick, Stefan and The Rammer and after a respectable break we also had correct entries from Mike Q, Chris P and Mike W – well done all of you – you’ve earned bragging rights!
I'll be reaching out to Brendan (our WINNA!) and Mike W (my random draw) very shortly.
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