unforum

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Looks like this idea may be dying on the vine.
Guess I'll take the first swing.
Not sure what the airbox and carburetors for a Skidoo (middle of picture) or a DOHC inline four cylinder engine (Upper right) have to do with it, but...
The hex on the left says, "First Step" and ends in a "Null" character. It points to the blocks and letters across the top that are grouped as follows (Numbers are number of blocks in that area noted by the letter):

[pancito]

[Rogi Ocnorb]

[magnet0]

[rose]

Don't give up on the thread Rogi. It is a good idea.

Maybe you could also try some easier puzzles? Or less complex puzzles? People may feel that they can't create good enough puzzles?

Either way, I'll keep following it and adding my comic relief and occasional pretty picture to the thread.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

I didn't mean to come off all defeatist.

It's just that I really enjoy watching the group dynamic at work and how one idea leads to another.
I wasn't expecting folks to not post if they couldn't fully solve a puzzle.
(Really hadn't considered how "winning" the right to post a new puzzle would affect that dynamic)
Even people's first impressions and how they differ are really interesting, most of the time.
And pictures are nice, too.

[sixsidedsquare]

I always find it so hard not to just jump straight in and try to direct people straight to the answer. I think there's an interesting thing here that you also see in small games, when you don't have huge numbers of people it's the drive of the individuals that push through into the solves. And this is so easy to fall off when there is no real driving motivation from behind, like the story in a normal ARG.

I think in these situations it's a great idea just brain dumping first impressions when you see a puzzle, along with everything you try with or without success. One of the many paths will be the right one, though in saying this you also have to remember to not hold onto any one thing too strongly, as there are more wrong paths than right ones. I try now when making puzzle to not have too long steps that have no indication you are on the right track with them.

For this puzzle though, you are so close, just missing one little bit. Look back at the first two sentences of the last two paragraphs in pancito's post.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Best guess is that the added step would be a binary conversion of the original hex, giving:

[sixsidedsquare]

You should be able to see what that word in the top set of squares should be, check your math on the incorrect letter.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Oops!

[sixsidedsquare]

Haha, you overestimate my former self, that's the answer alright. It was sort of 'made to order' where the dude I was making it for wanted it to come to that. I do feel this puzzle was rather rough around the edges like the stuff in the background is just fluff that I thought looked nice at the time, though very impressive identifying it all

I do really like the ideas of sharing thought processes on this thread. Not only does it help get others thinking, it also is a good way to share 'puzzle experience' as it were, as I find most of the whole puzzle solving thing is just having seen similar stuff before and adapting. Also like rose was saying mixing up the puzzles would be good, not everything needs to be super complex. Some normal classic ciphers would be good, as it's useful to learn how to identify them from looking at the cipher text, and I'd love to see some riddles (that aren't too easily googleable ). This thread is far from dead, and I think it has some great potential.

Anyway, your move Rogi.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

I'll give it over to someone else, again. (And this time, I'll stick to that.)

[pancito]

Ooooooh. So the better background would have been something like the chemical picture of LSD or something. Whatever you call those things.

I like to see the process going on as well. I think the incentive to post the next puzzle is sort of nil if you think about it. So far we have more 'Somebody else go' then 'Here, have a puzzle.' Given that, I can see this as a really interesting place to try ideas, both from the creation and the solve side. Like I said early on, (and demonstrated above) I'll throw out any crazy idea...

The other thing that might be interesting is for both creators and solvers to talk about their process. I think this would be particularly interesting and useful on the creation side. We don't ever get that as players, or get to do that as puzzle makers, in games, whereas it's pretty common to ask how someone got a solve.

[aninterloper]

This looks interesting. I'll try it; I'm never sure of how many clues to leave, so this might be a good testing/training ground for me. I guess if it's too hard I'll give you guys a nudge. Here goes:

[sixsidedsquare]

Ok, I'll go first. First thing I did this when I saw it was to eyeball it looking for any noticeable patterns and after some looking I have to say this looks a heck of a lot like.. well.. a normal game of Go.

Since the bottom of the board is cut off it can't really be something that involves the entire board and it also makes me look more at the rows rather than columns as they are complete. Having the two types of pieces (black and white) seems fitting for something with a binary nature. But looking for ASCII binary (checking groups of 8 and looking for a '01' pattern at the start of them) didn't seem to turn up anything and any sort of translation to Morse gets messy with the large groupings of pieces in a row and what would be lots of Morse characters starting with the same symbol. Since it does look rather nicely like a game of Go, I would think that whatever encoding has been used doesn't involve the pieces exact positions, as this would have made it easier to get such a nice arrangement.

The problem I'm personally hitting on is that there are lots and lots of different thing you can pull out of this and lots of paths you can take with them, but I've got no idea if just a little further down a path is a solution or a dead end. When you have enough people to search them all that's fine, but I know after searching enough paths with no luck I start to give up and try coming back to it later.