The winner of this puzzle was the first reader to email the correct answer to Nate, and he received a box of JLA for his efforts. The next puzzle is coming at midnight EST, and we have more prizes to give away!- TW
This puzzle was intended as a warm-up for all of you true puzzlers out there. This was the type of puzzle that you can expect to see in the future. There wasn’t a word in the body that didn’t belong there. It was a carefully crafted puzzle in its own right. These big meta-puzzles are my favorite kind of puzzle. In order to solve the puzzle with which you are presented, you must first solve the puzzle of what the puzzle is.
The body had a multitude of clues that were intended to lead you in the right direction. The first major clue with which you were presented was the reference to National Treasure. For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, I really think you should, as it was a shortcut of sorts to solving this puzzle. This puzzle’s code is based on a code presented in that movie. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, have no fear. I gave plenty of clues in the remainder of the body to point you in the right direction.
The many references to codes and encryptions before your eyes were also intended to draw your attention to the wording of the puzzle presented to you. Hopefully, if you read through the body a few times, you realized that there were numerous references to this being a website, featuring articles, which I hoped you read. This was another clue. I was trying to hint that the code had something to do with the articles listed here at Metagame.com.
Actually, this was to be the first major leap in your deciphering of the code—the names in the parentheses had something to do with the articles here. In fact, if you examine the archives, you would see that each of the words and phrases in parentheses appears in only a single article. Interesting. So, you found a possible link to the words in the parentheses, but what about the numbers?
This becomes a problem for your deductive reasoning skills. You’ve figured out that I’m hinting you toward articles. What could the numbers mean? To answer this, the first thing to do would be to recognize that all articles really are collections of words on a page. Once you come to terms with this, you must ask how the numbers could relate to them. The best answer to that is that they are a sort of spatial organization system. The first number could represent a line in the text. The second number could therefore represent a character in that row. When you put them all together, if they form a coherent word or phrase, you’ve probably stumbled upon the answer.
I’m not going to give you the answer here. That would ruin all of the work I put into making the puzzle. All I’m going to do is show you how to solve this one, as well as demonstrate the line of thinking that goes into a good puzzle. Once you understand how you have to think and the things you need to look at, you can begin to understand how to break the puzzles down yourselves. They will get harder from here. I want to make them all doable by anyone, so a couple of them might just have a bit more legwork than others. In any case, I hope you guys enjoy agonizing over the puzzles as much as I agonized over making them. Keep checking back for more puzzles, and happy puzzling in the future.