The Dispersal
In September 2020, I had the idea to send handwritten letters to some of my friends who didn’t live in Baltimore. We were six months into a pandemic that didn’t look like it was ending anytime soon (it wasn’t...) and I’d lost contact with a handful of people I used to see more often in college. I'd recently ordered some stickers online and figured it would be kinda cute to physically mail someone a letter with a nice little sticker letting them know I missed them.
I’ve always been interested in deciphering secret codes and decoding hidden messages and somewhere along the way I decided to include a small spy-themed puzzle along with the letter. It gave me a fun project to create alongside actually writing the letters and, knowing my friends, I thought some of them would find it pretty neat and get really into solving it. At the very worst I figured people would just ignore the puzzle and enjoy the letter and sticker.
The puzzle came with the following pieces: a letter from HQ, a picture of a pink frog, two playing cards, a code book, a transmission log, and a loop of paper with symbols on the inside. The letter from HQ sets up the entire experience for the player, it reads:
Agent,
The Coronavirus pandemic has forced many of our agents into hiding. We need to reestablish contact to continue our covert operations.
Enclosed in this envelope are the pieces of a key that confirms your status. Agent Smith’s response should serve as an example. You must transmit the correct response at the right time of day or else the key may be intercepted.
We need each other now more than ever.
Best of luck.
- HQ
Agent Smith’s response is the picture of the pink frog I mentioned earlier. It’s a screenshot of that picture sent as a text at 18:29. This was supposed to help the player understand three things: 1) their answer was probably going to be some weirdly colored animal, 2) they should message me their answer in some way, and 3) not only was the time important, it was in 24 hour time.
So let’s cover the three pieces of the solution: the animal, the color, and the time.
The Animal
Hopefully when people pull all these different pieces out of the envelope they notice the sequence of arrows hiding on the inside. They probably see it, make a note to come back to it later, and then dig in to read the letter first, so it’s quite possible some people forget about it. In either case, they’re going to need it to make any sense of the code book.
The code book’s pretty sparse, and only contains one thing: a letter grid. Nothing really of note on its own, except for the fact that one of the letters is a bit bolder than the others. And that’s not random! If people make the connection that those arrows could guide them on the grid they’ll need to start at some letter, and what better letter than the only one that’s bold.
I figured making one letter slightly different was enough to get across the point that it was the start, but I acknowledge it’s not entirely obvious. And honestly there’s nothing really connecting the arrows to this grid, no colors or shapes like the other pieces of this puzzle, so I hoped this wouldn’t stump people.
Regardless, starting at the bolded letter, and following the directions of the arrows from inside the envelope, should spell out a word that at first probably doesn’t look like anything. But a simple Google search should help anyone who’s stumped see that the word is the Latin name of some sort of animal species.
For the letter pictured, following the arrows reveals Loxodonta, the genus for elephants!
The Color
I’m a big fan of playing cards and pretty early into designing these puzzles I knew one of them was going to use playing cards in some way. And I think once people looked at all the pieces, it was clear that the cards were necessary to make sense of this weird loop of paper.
The loop had the same thing written on it repeatedly, but with blanks in the pattern. On two of the blanks were playing card suits, conveniently matching the suits on the cards in the envelope. So I think this part of the puzzle is pretty easy, just take the number of the card matching the suit and fill in the blank.
What’s left now is a #xxxxxx string that to some people might not make any sense. But if the other puzzles had been solved, and the format of the solution (animal, color, time) was apparent, I hoped that people would make the jump that this is a hexadecimal color code.
I think that’s part of the difficulty of these kinds of puzzles. I wanted to make it difficult enough that it felt like they’d accomplished something, but not too hard that no one solved it. Anyways, for the example letter I’ve got here the 9 of spades and 2 of diamonds fill in to make #19d62b, the hexadecimal color code for lime green.
So we’re sending a lime green elephant, but when?
The Time
The first thing most people notice is the colored letters in their name on the front of the envelope. At face value it doesn’t mean anything, until hopefully they notice the back of the transmission log card.
The colors of the letters match the colors of the parentheses of this math equation looking scribble. That equation’s got some blanks in it and the color coded letters fit right in.
Translating the letters to their numerical equivalent and slotting them into the correctly colored expressions produces a four digit number. Which with the times on the transmission log, and the example solution included in the envelope, should lead people to believe that this is the time they should send their answer.
I’ll admit this is probably the biggest leap of logic necessary for this puzzle. Taking that number and interpreting it as a time isn’t necessarily obvious, but I figured if I beat people over the head with how important it was to send their answer at the exact right time it would be relatively apparent that deciphering a time was required. And the other two puzzles definitely don’t produce a time.
For the curious, I’ll work out the math for the example letter I made for this post:
Mary Johnson
95 Tomato Lane
Beverly Hills, CA 90210
(R+N) * (O+T)
R = 18, N = 14
O = 15, T = 20
(18+14) * (15+20) = 32* 35 = 1120
11:20
So that’s pretty much it, three little puzzles, all combining to imply a secret message at a specific time. I hope everyone who received one at least enjoyed the letter! And if you didn’t solve the puzzle, you can blame me, it was my first try at something like this.
Special thanks to Collin Clark for prototyping the first iteration of this puzzle, and to Colby Banbury for being the only person to solve it without any help. I appreciate y'all.
- Zach