I mentioned in an earlier post that the flyer we’ve been giving out at various shows has a clue in it, and we’ve been asked about it by people who can’t make the events.  So here it is.

Click either side for a bigger version.

It’s true that there’s a clue here, but it’s not a crucial clue.  You certainly don’t need this to solve the puzzle: everything you need to solve Army Of Zero is in the box.  What you can divine from the flyer doesn’t do much more than confirm something that’s significant.

Gah, sorry to be mysterious. “Isn’t that bizarre? Aren’t you just going, ooo?”

Ciphers, codes, hidden messages and so on are close to my heart, as I’m sure you’ve already realised. Having spent quite a considerable time creating the puzzles in Army Of Zero, you might think I’d have had enough of them. Even now, though, I still come across clever stuff that I would like to make use of, if only I had the chance to publish it somewhere. My copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter, for example, still gets flipped through occasionally. I still find some chapters hard work, but it’s great for just dipping into, particularly the cleverly-constructed chapters of dialogue, where Hofstadter is playing games with the reader. Chapter 4 is a case in point. Although on the face of it, it’s simply a conversation between two characters, the dialogue is constructed so as to conceal a message. Look closely, and you’ll see that the first letter of each paragraph spells out a message.

Such constructions are called acrostics. You can find examples in a surprising amount of literature, including such familiar sources as the Bible, Edgar Allan Poe and Lewis Carroll. Many acrostics, as in the Hofstadter example, use the initial letter of each paragraph to spell out the message. But there are alternative constructions as well. Often the first character of each sentence is used. (Lots of acrostic enthusiasts like hiding one letter per sentence rather than a letter per paragraph, because you can hide more letters this way.) Sometimes you might come across an acrostic which uses the last character of each sentence or paragraph, but these are more difficult to construct because the human mind finds it easier to think of words that start with a given character, rather than words that end with it.

Maybe you’re wondering why I’m bringing up the subject of acrostics at all. Are they relevant to solving Army Of Zero’s puzzles in some way? Kind of. Evasive answer, I know, I’m sorry.

All right, let me try to be a bit more helpful, hopefully without giving too much away.

Some of the puzzles are word puzzles, and for those puzzles, as you might expect, using particular letters (or groups of letters) from the game cards is the way to go. Obviously, a significant part of the trick is to uncover what – and where - those particular letters are. Rearranging the cards in an appropriate order should then be possible. (The number of ways in which you reorder the cards might surprise you!)

Oh dear, I hope I haven’t been too obtuse. Really, I’m just trying to give you a bit of a nudge in the right direction. Don’t worry if you get stuck. Everyone does, from time to time, but if you do, a good strategy might be to think about different ways you would set about hiding information in the card designs. Revealing the secrets of Army Of Zero is supposed to be somewhat challenging, but there are hints to be found, if you know where to look!

There’s exactly one year to go until the deadline for the Army Of Zero competition!  It sounds like a long time, doesn’t it?  But if the last 12 months are anything to go by, the time will rocket by and before long we’ll be selecting our winner and awarding the £1,000 prize.

We’ve been having a few people ask recently about the method that we’re going to use to pick a winner, so I thought I’d take the chance to write a blog post on the subject.  It’s potentially tricky to write this post, because although we have a set of criteria for making sure that we pick a winner fairly, stating those criteria would give the answers away.  So instead, I’m going for some general pointers.

First of all, apart from the closing date (30th April 2010), time isn’t a factor.  The first correct solution is not necessarily going to be the winner, and there’s no advantage to getting your solution in early.  A good solution sent to us this month (April 2009) will lose out to a very good solution sent to us in April 2010.

We’re looking for a single answer.  The answer is more than one word, but not enough to fill a postcard.

That said, the “better” solutions are going to indicate how the answer was reached.  It’s possible to get close to the final answer without solving all the puzzles.  If you guess, it’s even possible to get exactly the right answer without solving all the puzzles.  So we’ll be giving credit to contestants who explain where their answer came from.  We’ve got a checklist of all the puzzles, and we’ll be checking each entry against that list.

How many items are on the checklist?  Well, I’m not going to say exactly, partly because I don’t want to give anything away, and partly because a straight answer might actually be a bit confusing.  The number of puzzles in Army Of Zero depends on how you count them: they intersect a bit, you see.  If pushed, I normally tell people that there are “12 or 13″ puzzles to solve, but it’s possible to count them differently.  But you will get credit for any of the items on our checklist as long as they’re included in your competition entry, no matter how you classify or group them.

Puzzle site tweleve.org has a thread going about Army Of Zero, where I’ve posted a couple of messages about solving the riddle.

Toy News Magazine is running a feature article about games and puzzles (on the rise in these difficult times, because staying in is the new going out, apparently) in which Point Zero Games gets a section.  Read it here.

The latest (US) edition of Wired Magazine is a “mystery issue“, with lots of stuff about brain teasers, codes, mazes and loads of the stuff that puzzle fanatics love.  Here’s an excerpt which is in the print edition, but isn’t on the Wired website (at least, I couldn’t find it).

Feeling stuck?  Dvora K. Klaviatura, head of the Belarus Enigmatology Institute (www.typein.by.pyacbm.by), offers these tips. 1. LOOK FOR PATTERNS. Puzzles are logical systems.  They follow rules.  Once you know the governing principles, watch for telling patterns or anomalies.  2. FIND THE WAY IN. Though it may seem counterintuitive, puzzlesare designed to be solved, not to stump you.  Look for the entry point, like the first number you can nail down [in a Sudoku].  3. BUILD ON YOUR SUCCESS. Puzzle solving is progressive.  Take advantage of the information you provide yourself.  For example, identifying and decoding one [clue] will make finding the rest - and solving the overall mystery - a bit easier.

I’m quoting this here because it’s perfect advice for you if you ‘re looking for a way into the Army Of Zero puzzles.  Oh, and for your entertainment: it looks like a puzzle in itself.  (Dvora K. Klaviatura?  Um, OK…)

A few days ago we added something new to the site.  We now have a pair of treasure hunts available.  Go and have a look.

Both the treasure hunts are based in Manchester, and offer a series of clues based on interesting stuff lying around in the city.  They’re aimed at families, as all our stuff is, and available as downloads in PDF format.  We actually wrote them about a year ago, and we were selling them through our other site clooz.co.uk, but we thought it would be nice to have everything in one place.  So they’ve been rebranded under the Point Zero Games and added to our site.

It’s pretty amazing what’s around in Manchester.  The connections with the rest of the world start to fly thick and fast when you’re looking for them, and the number of hidden meanings and allusions in buildings and sculpture is a joy: here at Point Zero Games, we love hidden messages, as you’ll know if you’re an Army Of Zero fan.  But the nice thing about our treasure hunts is that you’re not expected to know this stuff before you start.  The puzzles are easy, and they guide you through the stories of Manchester and its history, so rather than needing to come equipped with lots of useless information, you actually pick up the useless fascinating information as you solve the clues.

Incidentally, if anyone out there wants us to create a treasure hunt for their own location, let us know.  It’s a great thing to include in any local publication, such as a newspaper or regional children’s magazine.

So… we’re a month into Army Of Zero, and so far no-one’s cracked the puzzles.  I think one or two people have figured out what the notches around the edges are for, but so far, that’s about it.  But it’s early days, so keep on keeping on.  There are some (very vague) hints over in the FAQ, if you’re completely bamboozled.

In response to one person’s question: you don’t need any special equipment to decode the messages, nothing like colour filters or anything like that.  All the information is in plain sight, but you might need to refer to books or the internet to make sense of what you find.

Army Of Zero has a very straightforward set of game mechanics, which makes the testing of the game system itself relatively simple. But Army Of Zero is, I suggest, unusual in that there is more to think about than just the gameplay.

It’s intricate in that there are elements of the puzzles that drive certain things about the game, which I’m not going to go into because I don’t want to give too much away about the puzzles.  But there’s a requirement that the game plays well and there’s a requirement that the puzzles work, and during the design it sometimes worked out that one got in the way of the other.  But on the other hand, there were other occasions when we made a change that not only made the gameplay better but also improved the puzzle in some way - maybe it made it more elegant, or, for the want of a better word, plainer.

I won’t kid you: the puzzles are ticklish, more so because we’re not going to tell you what you’re supposed to do, exactly. You have to figure that out. But we can tell you that we’re not out to deceive or trick you: there’s nothing unfair about the puzzles.