Welcome to the 2023 B&B Holiday Puzzle Hunt! This year we retire to the puzzle library for some much needed distraction.

Use the clues provided to solve the riddle and claim the prize! I did not have a lot of time to clean up this year so apologies that the place is a mess. If there are no correct answers the person who comes closest may be awarded the prize, so send detailed answer explanations. Hints may begin to appear under the hints tab at some point if needed, but who needs hints? They’re overrated. The solution will be enjoyed each week on the regular blog, but the answer may never be found …

For putting up with all of my rubes,

I’ll make you rich with a puzzle!

It’s one of the items on my library shelf -

but which will you nuzzle?

Compile what you know and rise with the task

Take time to think wiser so you don’t need to ask.

In case you were still wondering, the prize this year is a very nice final prototype copy of Oleg’s Wardrobe! It is a fantastic puzzle!

Jan 13 2024:

It seems that more hints are still required

After many days and brows have perspired

So here is a bit more explanation

To help guide your exploration:

The puzzles on the shelf are arranged with a measure

That may look as though I just stack and stand ‘em

Yet each puzzle placement is not at all random

You may even find that a few are misplaced?

But could that perhaps yield how the code is traced …

Or you might simply follow the additional clues

Provided in the hints for you to peruse

Which point to the code you need to use

a final note for the code you seek

use the one that is unique

Of course this won’t seem to help at all

Once you’ve cracked the code you’ll still hit a wall

Because you’ve only solved what is the start

And must pair the first with the second part

Remember the theme from last year’s hunt

And imagine I’d pull another stunt

With the central idea of the sequel’s game

Applied to puzzles this time but the same

Don’t overlook all that the code begets

Besides the results, it creates sets

Use these along with the second task

To complete the challenge - that’s all i ask!

Now send me your answer to claim Oleg’s treasure.

Prior hints:

The hidden message will need a start

First use all your senses to help you see

What’s masked by steganography

Perhaps it would come as a surprise

If Hawking were cap’n of the Enterprise

Or it might seem like more of a tease

If this hint were separated by six degrees

Now to find the second part

Pair the first with William’s sequel

(a place where animals reign the action

while here, puzzles are the main attraction)

But beware, all are not equal:

Only some will get you through!

That should be clear but let’s review:

Each set begins the final clue

And each set ends the pair for you

The prize riddle is simply a text rebus. The italicized words should draw attention. The first italicized word is “rubes” which is an anagram for “rebus”. The other italicized words are preceded by instructions to either “compile” or “take”. So compile the words “know”, “rise” and “with” and then take the words “think” and “wiser” and you are left with the letters OW. The prize riddle also mentions that the prize is one of the puzzles on the library shelf, which leads you to Oleg’s Wardrobe.

2023 Holiday Hunt SOLUTION:

This year’s hunt proved to be quite a challenge, and I thought last year’s hunt was hard! If you tried that one (or the one from the prior year as well) you might have recalled I like to embed two separate tasks in the challenge that each generate a series of letters, and the letters from each task are then paired together to reveal a riddle or statement. Once the hidden message was discovered it was quick work to send an answer. This was also the goal for this year’s hunt.

The two pictures provided on the hunt page can be clicked on, hopefully that wasn’t confusing. The armchair library takes you to a bookshelf full of puzzles, and the vintage Hoffman’s Puzzles Old and New opens to the back flap where an old library sign-out card pocket holds a hint meant to get you started, with a few more puzzles on the inside cover. Let’s begin there.

The names on the library sign-out card are just easter eggs, little shout outs to fellow bloggers and past winners of the hunt. The riddle there is all that you need to solve the challenge, but it’s not really enough info to be fair. I’ve learned that even if I spell out exactly what to do in clear language, my challenges are still too hard for most. Oh well! I did provide more and more hints over time, and those proved helpful to some people.

The first step in many puzzles like this with pictures of puzzles is to identify the puzzles. There were a few rare puzzles thrown in to make it interesting but many people at least were able to properly identify the majority of puzzles. This step was actually important, but not in the way most people expected. Most people, after identifying the puzzles on the shelves, took the first letter of each puzzle and got excited that a message was starting to appear here and there … if you have all the correct names, you will get this message from the first letter of each puzzle:

LOVE COLOR OR DANGER PUT FIRST AND OILY KIPPER TWO CLUPEA BITE AMAZING A COLD SMOKED PREP CAN SUGGEST THE BEST COLOR

Ok, what an odd message. You have to understand that I was limited by every fifth letter which was predetermined already (this will be explained in a bit) so with that in mind I think this was pretty impressive. What does it mean? Let’s see … “love color or danger” – the color of love? Or the color of danger? Hmmm – red? Ok red, put first, and “oily kipper” two – huh? Oily kipper, alright, that’s a herring! So red first, then herring second, red herring. Hmmph. What’s next? Clupea bite? Seriously? Now he’s using the Latin name for herring? That IS amazing! And you may not have known before, but cold smoking a herring turns it a nice pink color … so it’s another red herring! There was at least one person who was so disgusted with me at this point that he went about his business with better things to do and never looked back. A few other folks thought they had cracked it, and that the “Red Herring Box” by Doog Menzies was the answer to the challenge. To be fair, that puzzle was indeed one of the puzzles on the bookshelves, and I would have to be insane to embed such a complicated detour in an already complicated challenge, but there it is and nice to meet you.

Now on to the actual challenge.

The riddle goes:

use all your senses to help you see

what’s masked in steganography

now pair this with William’s sequel

but beware all are not equal

each set begins the final clue

and each set ends the pair for you

The start of the riddle tells you right off that the bookshelf is hiding an encoded message of some sort (steganography - masking a message within a picture or objects), and your first task is to decode it. Take a quick look at the bookshelf and you will notice puzzles are resting either upright or at an angle. This is not random! The riddle also says to use all your senses. Most people have five senses – this was a hint that the number five would be helpful, but no one understood that part. If you could determine that the puzzles are arranged in groups of five, and the upright and angled positions represented binary positions of a code, you can seriously narrow down the possibilities for ciphers here. Careful observation of the puzzles also reveals that a very few of them are “backwards” – that is, they are angled in the opposite direction from all the others and one is upside down. Some people noticed this, but no one realized that taking the first letter of each of these five “backwards” puzzles gives you N C A O B. Rearrange those letters and you get BACON. The puzzles on the bookshelf are arranged in a Baconian Cipher.

Additional hints were provided over time to help figure this out. I had once written about the Baconian Cipher in a post about Stephen Kirk’s Mysterious Box with Drawer puzzle, and I even created a bookshelf Baconian Cipher puzzle in that post which uses the same method as this current challenge. One hint led people to that old post as a clue. Another hint mentioned the “six degrees of separation” which is a game where anyone is theoretically related to the actor Kevin Bacon by no more than six relationships. A number of people made the connections and deduced the Bacon Cipher.

IF you realize my typical method of embedding two tasks to find letter pairs, you can understand that solving the embedded Bacon Cipher in the puzzles only yields one set of letters. This makes the challenge really hard, because you have no idea if you have actually solved the cipher properly yet. You need another set of letters too. Let’s get back to the original riddle, which continues, “Now pair this with William’s sequel”. The intro to the hunt mentions this as well. Last year’s hunt was an homage to Kit William’s Masquerade puzzle treasure hunt, a favorite book of many of us from years ago. Kit Williams wrote a sequel with “no name”. Like Masquerade, the book was full of gorgeous paintings.

In the very first painting of that book there was a famous picture hint – a set of “hybrid” animals. One had the head of a mouse and the body of a horse, while the other had the head of a cat and the body of a toad. It was a clever way to tell readers they needed to search for the “M-ORSE C-OAD” which was hidden in the border of one of the paintings. The code reads:

.- / .-.. / .-.. / .- / -. / .. / -- / .- / .-.. / ... / .- / .-. / . / . / --.- / ..- / .- / .-.. / .. / -. / .- / - / .- / .-.. / . / --- / ..-. / - / .- / .. / .-.. / - / --- / - / .- / .. / .-.. / . / -. / -.. / - / --- / . / -. / -.. / - / --- / . / -. / -..

ALL ANIMALS ~ ARE EQUAL IN A TALE ~ OF TAIL TO TAIL ~ END TO END TO END

(This same phrase was also present in one of the paintings from Masquerade, which might have confused some people.) In each illustration were hidden many animals. Taking the last letter (the tail) of each formed an anagram of the title of the book, “The Bee on the Comb”.

On the inside cover of the Hoffman book I placed a few extra animal puzzles which might make more sense now – a mouse, a horse, a cat and a toad. Many people deduced this one. It was meant to confirm the central concept from the Bee on the Comb book was at play here as well, and to lead you to see the hidden morse code in the book fold if you had missed it. Which is the same message as from the William’s book, again just confirming what needs to be done.

All of this sets the stage for what to do next in the challenge here. Take the last letter of the animals – in this case, puzzles – and use them to pair with the first set of letters derived from the Baconian Cipher. But there is a problem, there are far too many puzzles compared to the first set of letters, because using the Baconian Cipher requires making sets of five puzzles for every one letter. Many people thought they must need to use last letters from only the ANIMAL type puzzles, which was a really good idea based on the clue, so I had to clarify that with an added hint later explaining that while in the William’s book it was animals, here it is puzzles.

Let’s go back to the original riddle one more time. It continues, “but beware, all are not equal” – this means that you do not need to use the ends from all of the puzzles as is the case in the William’s book. The riddle continues, “each set begins the final clue and each set ends the pair for you”. Each set refers to the sets of five puzzles created by the Baconian Cipher, and each set therefore begins the puzzle by generating the first letter in each letter pair. Each set ends the pair as well, in other words, each set provides the second letter of the pair. You only need the last letter from the fifth puzzle of each set – the very end of each set. Additional clues were provided over time to help people get this.

If you deduce the Baconian Cipher properly, and then pair those letters with the last letter of each puzzle set (the Williams sequel solution method), you get a final message:

“This jokes on you send the best Dad worthy joke”

Like I said, there was no mistaking it if you finally solved the challenge!

I actually got a few good ones sent to me in the end:

“Did you hear about the claustrophobic astronaut? He just needs a little space.”

“Have you ever had a bad sausage? It’s the wurst …”

“I’ve decided to sell my Hoover … well, it was just collecting dust.”

“When does a joke become a ‘Dad joke’? When it becomes apparent.”

“I tried to finish a puzzle but realized the dog had eaten a part of it. Excuse me while I try to find my inner piece.”

A random drawing was performed amongst the very impressive few people who managed to properly solve this one, and the grand prize of Dee Dixon’s Oleg’s Wardrobe puzzle goes to: Shady Hollow!

Many thanks to all who participated and put up with my shenanigans again. One of these days I’ll learn how to design a fair puzzle hunt, right? At least I’ll keep trying! Cheers!