Reply To: Puzzles
[Warning: Long post alert!]
Here’s something a little different…
A Puzzle Hunt is a series of puzzles, normally without instructions, so that working out how the puzzles work is itself part of the puzzles! Almost always, there are a bunch of standalone puzzles (called ‘feeders’), and then a puzzle that relies on the answers to the feeders (called ‘metas’). Metameta puzzles can also exist, which rely on the meta answers, and so on, but my Puzzle Hunt doesn’t go this far (thankfully!).
Over the next few weeks, I will post four feeder puzzles and a final meta for you to solve at your own peril. For each puzzle, I will also post an MD5 checksum, so you can check your answer without needing to post to the forums. All answers should be treated as a series of capital letters from the Latin alphabet with no punctuation or spaces – so if the answer was ‘THIS IS AN EXAMPLE ANSWER’, then the MD5 would be:
324c70d3f078e87bec400b3c1b698ad1
(Please check you can recreate this.) You can then confirm in the forums that you have solved the puzzle, by doing something like MD5(Name + Answer).
I will not post guidance here on how to solve Puzzle Hunts (that sort of thing can be found using your search engine of choice), but I will mention a few quirks about my Hunt:
– You might notice that the answers will seem a bit arbitrary. Sorry. I didn’t have much time to create this Hunt, so you will have to deal with any weird side-effects of this by yourself!
– I also didn’t have time to create a background story to my Hunt. Maybe that is something you could think about in-between puzzles…
– For each puzzle, I have put in the number of letters in each word of the answer (because I am not a completely evil puzzle-setter!).
– As of writing this introduction, I technically haven’t completed all details of my puzzles, hence why I am releasing them in a staggered manner. I will try to finish them quickly, though!
Have fun, and good luck! I will (try to) post the first puzzle shortly.