There’s a card missing.

Today’s the deadline for the Army Of Zero competition, and I know you’re eager to have the solution revealed (unless you’ve worked it out already, in which case, clever you)!  I had planned to get the website updates finished today, ready to go online tomorrow.  So I went to turn on my computer this morning and…

Nothing happened.

It was, to all intents and purposes, dead.

I’ve been very happy with my computer, and it’s never let me down once in the three years that I’ve owned it.  It really picked its moment.

I fiddled about with it to the best of my ability, but eventually had to give in and take it to the shop (or “Store”, as they call it).  To my surprise and joy, the young man (or “Genius”, as they call him) behind the counter (or “Bar”) managed to work his mojo and, as you can see, I’m back on-line.

However, long story short, I’m way behind on getting to where I want to be for the big reveal, and, what with it being a bank holiday weekend here in the UK, realistically I’m not going to get the solution online until Tuesday.

I did say I was going to publish the answer tomorrow (Saturday), but there’s no way I’m going to be able to do that now.  I’m very, very sorry.

However, to try and rescue some fun from the situation I will take a slightly different approach (and I hope some of you might enjoy this).  Just after midnight tonight, as the competition deadline expires, I’ll publish a blog post that drops the mother of all clues, one which I think will help you tie up a lot of the loose ends that are you might have.  If you don’t have the solution yet, this clue might just take you there.  Obviously, it’s just for fun, as the competition deadline will have come and gone, but if you’re so inclined, you’ll have the long weekend to piece everything together.

Apologies again.  See you later, maybe.

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that there are just 22 days left to enter the Army Of Zero competition.  So, just a few things to look out for in the next few weeks…

We’ll be publishing the solution, together with explanations of as many of the clues as we can remember(!), on May 1st.  Probably we’ll put it on the main site, in the Army Of Zero section, together with a blog entry right here so that those of you following the blog via RSS readers will get a notification.  Also, you’ll be able to comment on that blog post, if you want to talk about the solution with us.

Within a couple of days of that, we’ll contact the competition winner, send them their hard-earned prize with our hearty congratulations and, all things being equal, we’ll congratulate them here on the website too.  (If the winner turns out to be a youngster, we’ll only name them with their parents’ permission.)

Good luck!