Puzzle Party
Solve This
On the first ten pages of puzzles in the test booklet were some symbols running up the left side of the page. Every team correctly deduced that they were part of some cryptogram, but solving it was slightly more difficult than normal.
Firstly, there were no punctuation marks throughout the script. Secondly, the script could be oriented in many different ways. So, the participants first had to figure out in which direction their message ran.
The two other landmines in the puzzle were the fact that dipthongs were represented by just one glyph, and that a silent E had a different symbol from a normal E. I really wish I had seen the moment of samsara for the solvers when they figured out these key points.
Once the booklets were passed out, I started having doubts that anyone would be able to solve this problem. But, my friends did not let me down, as two teams completely solved it, and another was very close. The last team had a few letters, but hadn't worked on it much yet. The Armadillos got done impressively early, within 30 minutes of getting the test packet.
An unexpected side effect was that every team just turned the pages sideways to translate the symbols, rather than reading from top to bottom. As a result, the translated title, 'Solve This made no sense, because everyone was reading the letters 90° off from what I expected. Thus, the two complete teams ended up with "Kashre Chuk".