Happy 2024

I hope you’re all enjoying a festive break with family and friends!

Thanks a stack to those of you that played along with my Christmas 2023 puzzle… 

I’m sure that everyone noticed the morse code around the edges of my “Christmas card”… and some of you decoded it and followed the trail… the morse decoded to “sorry no time to make a nice puzzle this year, head over to bit dot ly slash allard231225” – although the pesky comma (--..--) confused at least one person along the way.

If you headed over to “bit.ly/allard231225” you were redirected to a PDF file on my Google drive with a simple puzzle on it in the form of crossword clues without a grid… answering those clues gave you the following:

• Think © Sticks
• Rosebud
• Andy  (he’s mentioned in my second blog post…)
• Yuu Asaka
• Box with a Key (recognise the Karakuri numbering?)
• IRMO
• Eric Fuller
• Nova Plexus

…which is interesting, so now what?

You might try and find some more clues of what to do in the pics below, but you’d be well advised to decode the semaphore script – “just some nice pics of puzzles / nothing more / i promise” – and heed its advice – they literally were just a few of my favourite pics from this year… I wasn’t trying to mislead anyone… this time.

So back to those answers above, if you don’t have a grid, then the only thing you can do is put them in a list, right? … and if you read down the left-hand side it says “TRAYBIEN” - which sounds a bit French, but clearly it’s mis-spelled – or it’s someone playing a little on words… and then there’s my request for a three-digit answer to be emailed to me – know anything that might link a three-digit number to some wordplay via a fiendish puzzle?

It turns out that Stewart Coffin was fond of using the occasional bit of wordplay in naming his puzzles and one of his tray-packers was in fact called Tray Bien – it was #196.

Nick submitted his correct response 48 minutes after the blog post went up on Christmas eve which sort of surprised me as I hadn’t really announced that there was a puzzle… what really blew my mind was when Bill submitted his correct answer a minute later…

Mike popped in a (remarkably close!) random guess of 200 based on the pictures I told you all to ignore and then Georg came in third spot on Christmas morning… there was a bit of a flurry of discorders with Tamsin, Dan and then Mike showing up with the right answers – Dan pipping Mike due to the latter’s typo going unnoticed for a few minutes! It’s amazing what people will do for bragging rights! :-)

Nigel dropped in a correct solution a few days later, as did Steve, in spite of a couple of folks suggesting he knew what the answer was well before that… I guess he was just giving others a chance… a couple of others had some pretty decent partial solutions too.

Thanks to all for playing along – a copy of Yuu Asaka’s Pond 12 will be winging its way to Nick and to Bill in due course… (given there was literally only a minute between them - excellent effort!)

I hope you all have a wonderful 2024 with friends, family, and of course puzzles!