The doctrines of the Church of Scientology come from a revelation L. Ron Hubbard had about a universe- wide empire. It normally costs thousands of dollars to get “clear” enough to learn the details, but we’re offering them for free. However, you must move each noun phrase forward a certain number of positions in the alphabet. For instance, HAL shifted forward one letter would be IBM. Is that clear?

If you find yourself at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles over the next few weeks, keep an eye out for a QR code hidden in the store. Scanning the code will send you on the path to explore time/trip LA, a time travel themed multimedia experience that takes you through eight local shops in the Hollywood area. But act fast, the installment is wrapping up at the end of August.

By Jane Doh, originally posted at ARGNet

For the next few weeks, Los Angeles residents have a chance to do something many of us can only dream about: a little time traveling, courtesy of Superfreako Productions.

Participants in time/trip LA are tasked with finding strategically placed QR codes located in eight shops and stores around the Hollywood area, starting at Meltdown Comics on West Sunset Boulevard. The QR codes unlock a series of videos revolving around time travel. The time/trip LA experience follows Katie and Kelly as they travel through time and space, guiding participants through short films keyed to each location.

As part of the experience, time/trippers can submit five pictures of themselves with the QR codes for a chance to win swag from some of the participating retailers. Spoiler-ridden details about the sweepstakes explain the rules and prizes, but players in the LA area are advised to get moving: The contest ends at 11:59 p.m. on August 31.

It’s worth noting that time/trip LA is not Superfreako’s first foray into the cross-media storytelling arena. One of its earliest attempts is the Last Days Journal, a social-media storytelling site for survivors of a zombie apocalypse that launched in 2007. While Last Days Journal was created to support a project that was never developed, the survivor site still “lives” on.

Between 2008 and 2009, Superfreako worked with Benji Schneider to create The Society for Linian Studies, an art project with alternate-reality gaming elements including a live lecture event at the Velaslavasay Panorama and an exhibition of related artifacts at San Diego State University. Having followed along with The Society for Linian Studies, I was impressed with the high production value of the artifacts, acting and other assets for the project.

According to Chad Kukahiko, Creative Director of the superfreakos, “it was fun as hell working on a piece of art so ridiculously original.”

The idea of dueling institutes that permeated the narrative, along with the characters and story elements surrounding the Linian Society, was the brainchild of his friend and former coworker Benji Schneider. For the The Society for Linian Studies, ”the plan was to was continue to do mini-ARG installments perhaps two to three times a year,” but Schneider’s growing commitments to his band Lord Huron forced the team to modify the game’s plans.

The planning process for The Society for Linian Studies provided the inspiration for time/trip LA, not in terms of story world or plot, but in terms of techniques and technology. As Kukahiko explained to me: “The initial concept from which time/trip grew was a vague QR code wild posting dystopian-themed ARG off-shoot I was tooling around with in my head — something I was actually hoping to bring into the Linian Society fold.”

Continue Reading “Time Is Running Out for Los Angeles Time Trip” »

The 2012 London Olympics committee has issued this revised map of the Tube system and event venues. Sadly, it didn’t label the stations. Each stop is a letter, and each colored line spells a word that ends with the letters at the terminus. So the letters that would fit on a line ending in EKMY would be S-T-O-R (forming STORE, STORK, STORM, and STORY).

Puzzle: Matt Jones

Thomas Snyder (aka Dr. Sudoku) is a two-time world sudoku champion and five-time U.S. puzzle champion, as well as the author of several books of puzzles. His puzzles are hand-crafted, with artistic themes, serving as a kind of “cure for the common sudoku.” Each week he posts a new puzzle on his blog, The Art of Puzzles. This week’s prescription may look like a standard word search, but there are a bunch of twists to figure out before you’ll find any stars in these skies.

The United States Puzzle Championship, which will be on Saturday, Aug. 27, contains a wealth of logic and math puzzles. But it also has its share of observational puzzles and word fill-in puzzles to trick solvers too. This week’s puzzle, a word search where the words are hidden in four unusual ways, is meant to challenge your observation and thinking skills to their fullest. There are two parts, and finishing the first is required to complete the second.

Rules:

A) In the first part of this puzzle, the names of 8 different stars are hidden in the grid, each associated with a star symbol. However, none of the names appear exactly as you’d expect for a word search. There are four types of stars and each has a slight twist in how the name is hidden in the grid. Figure out the rules for locating each kind of star, and identify which of 1/2/3/4 is blue/red/green/yellow.

B) The names of 12 different stars are hidden in the second grid, with exactly three stars obeying each of the four different rules used in the first part. However the star symbols are not labeled this time and their locations must be discovered. Replace 12 of the letters in the grid with stars so that the rules used in the first part can be followed to find all of the hidden stars. The 12 letters replaced by stars, in order from left to right and top to bottom, will spell a phrase that is the answer to part two.

As season 2 of USA Network’s drama Covert Affairs ramps up, fans can assist CIA operatives led by Auggie Anderson in an online mission in Budapest. This online “tweetcast” is setting the stage for the show’s July 12th episode.

By Celina Beach, originally posted at ARGNet

Image courtesy USA Network

USA Network is running a “tweetcast“ called Mission: Budapest to promote its show, Covert Affairs, where players are recruited as remote CIA operatives and tasked with assisting operatives on the ground in Budapest. Players can follow one or all of four CIA agents as they work the mission in Budapest by viewing photos, files and videos uncovered by the agents. The lead character, Auggie Anderson, is also a main character on the TV series, and acts as the main conduit between users and the other agents. Auggie poses questions to the players about how the agents on the ground in Budapest should proceed, or poses questions they should ask of suspects or CIA “assets” (usually foreign civilians providing information to the CIA) in order to further the mission.

The tweetcast is not an entirely new idea: ABC’s Castle has run a “summer mystery” tweetcast during the hiatuses between seasons 1 and 2 through the @WriteRCastle twitter account … due to the “tragic events” in the Castle season 3 finale, there will be no Castle summer mystery tweetcast during the current hiatus. While players are more spectator than participant in these experiences, the content is entertaining and there is just enough interaction to give the players that warm fuzzy feeling when their suggestion or information is used and called out on Auggie’s twitter account.
Continue Reading “Getting Involved in Covert Affairs on Twitter” »

BBC is launching its new miniseries The Code, hosted by Professor Marcus du Sautoy, in late July. The program will be complemented by an interactive treasure hunt that integrates puzzles into the show’s content. If you live in the United Kingdom, send your address to code@bbc.co.uk for a chance at receiving one of 2¹⁰ (1,024) items in the mail that will kick off the experience.

By Kris Nordgren, originally posted at ARGNet

Images courtesy of the BBC

Six to Start and the BBC have teamed up to create a transmedia experience tied in with BBC Two documentary The Code, expected to air at the end of July. The Code is presented by Professor of Mathematics Marcus du Sautoy (Horizon on BBC2, The Beauty of Diagrams on BBC4) and explores how the world around us conforms to and can be explained by mathematical codes. Six to Start are next-generation storytellers with plenty of experience creating storytelling projects for different clients, often in the form of alternate reality games or treasure hunts. They’ve worked with the BBC before on projects like Spooks: Code 9 and Seven Ages Quest. As a first for the BBC and possibly a world first, an interactive experience called The Code Challenge has been seamlessly integrated in the writing and filming of The Code since inception. Viewers can participate in an engaging treasure hunt which will take place before, during and after the series that will extend their understanding of basic mathematical principles.

The Code Challenge begins well before the airing of the actual show. Soon, 1000 people in the UK will receive a secret message with one of the first puzzles of the challenge. For a chance to be one of those 1,000, keep an eye on Twitter @bbccode and apply via Twitter or e-mail. A few weeks before the show airs, several Flash games containing clues, puzzles and more information about the Code will also appear online.  The series itself is expected to air at the end of July and will be split into three 60-minute episodes: Magic Numbers, Nature’s Building Blocks and Predicting the Future. Six clues are connected to each episode. Three will be hidden in the programme itself, which can be watched live on BBC Two or on BBC iPlayer. One community clue can only be solved by working together with a group of players. Two further clues will be revealed on the blog and through a Flash game. Players can then enter the six answers they found for each episode into the ‘codebreaker’ to receive three passwords with which they can unlock the ultimate challenge.

The Code Challenge is conceived so everyone can play, even those with no prior understanding of maths or ARG experience, although the final stages of the treasure hunt will be increasingly challenging. The puzzles are presented through syndicated Flash games, the TV series itself, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and iPlayer, and the entire experience is designed to be fun and collaborative. Adrian Hon at Six to Start hopes the more dedicated gamers participating in The Code Challenge will develop their own community resources such as forums and wikis as they work together to uncover the clues leading up to the final decoding. To encourage interaction, players will be invited to upload video messages and videos of themselves solving the Code, using the tag ‘bbccode.’ Their footage, combined with BBC footage of the finalists competing to win, will form an aggregated online documentary culminating in the reveal of the ultimate winner.

To participate in The Code Challenge, check out the BBC The Code website, the@bbccode Twitter account and hashtag, Facebook, and ‘bbccode’ tagged videos on YouTube.

Thomas Snyder (aka Dr. Sudoku) is a two-time world sudoku champion and five-time U.S. puzzle champion, as well as the author of several books of puzzles. His puzzles are hand-crafted, with artistic themes, serving as a kind of “cure for the common sudoku.” Each week he posts a new puzzle on his blog, The Art of Puzzles. This week’s prescription deals with Corral puzzles, a mainstay on the United States Puzzle Championship.

The next United States Puzzle Championship will occur later this summer. It is a 2 hour, 30 minute online test that hundreds of American solvers compete in, featuring all sorts of puzzles including observational challenges, loop puzzles and number placement puzzles like sudoku. It has always been a highlight of the puzzle year for me, and I strongly encourage you to check it out when it occurs in August.

For the next several weeks I’ll be showcasing puzzle types that might occur on this year’s USPC. I’ll give a longer write-up, including strategies, on my blog, but will share the puzzle challenges here for practice. This week’s topic is Corral, a loop/region-division puzzle that shows up almost every year. This example showcases a few different kinds of logic that you’ll need to solve the harder Corral puzzles.

Rules: Draw a single closed loop along the grid lines so that all the numbered squares are inside the loop. Additionally, each number equals the count of interior squares that are directly in line — horizontally or vertically — with that number’s square, including the square itself.

Once George Lucas showed that a hand can be replaced in the Star Wars universe, he went amputation-happy. Endless limb-loppings and beheadings ensued. Match the characters to the clinical descriptions of their “terminal separations,” noted by episode number.

• 1_Bisection of the midsection by Obi-Wan Kenobi (I)
• 2_Terminal separation to the right arm by Patient C (V)
• 3_Terminal separation to the right arm by Patient C (III)
• 4_Terminal separations to the top left and top right arms by Obi-Wan Kenobi (III)
• 5_Terminal separations to the right arm, left arm, and neck by Patient C (III)
• 6_Terminal separation to the neck by Patient B (II)
• 7_Terminal separations to the right arm by Patient D (II), to the left arm, left leg, and right leg by Obi-Wan Kenobi (III), and to the right arm by Patient F (VI)
• 8_Terminal separations to the neck by an assembly line (II), to the left arm by a Tusken Raider (IV), to the left arm, left leg, right arm, right leg, and neck by a Stormtrooper (V), and to the right eye by some sort of hideous, cackling lizard-monkey (VI)

Illustration: Andy Rash

Thomas Snyder (aka Dr. Sudoku) is a two-time World Sudoku Champion and five-time US Puzzle Champion, as well as the author of several books of puzzles. His puzzles are hand-crafted, with artistic themes, serving as a kind of “cure for the common sudoku.” Each week he posts a new puzzle on his blog, The Art of Puzzles. This week’s prescription consists of two Digit Battleships puzzles written for the Indian Puzzle Championship.

The approach of summer marks the start of the national puzzle championship season. Father’s Day weekend has traditionally been the home of the United States Puzzle Championship but it looks like that qualifier will be held in mid-August this year. Still, over the next several weeks I’ll be offering up examples of puzzles commonly seen on the USPC as practice for potential competitors. The two puzzles this week (an easy, and a medium) are Digit Battleships puzzles that were originally written for the Indian Puzzle Championship. While these are variants of the classic Battleships type, the first puzzle of the USPC is almost always a Battleships so getting used to placing ships in a grid is how I’ll start out these practice puzzles.

Rules: Locate the indicated fleet in the grid; each segment of a ship occupies a single cell and ships are oriented vertically or horizontally. Ships may not touch each other, not even diagonally. Each segment of each ship is labeled with a number as in the fleet diagram, and the numbers on the right/bottom of the grid indicate the sum of all the numbers present in that row/column.

Thomas Snyder (aka Dr. Sudoku) is a two-time World Sudoku Champion and five-time US Puzzle Champion, as well as the author of several books of puzzles. His puzzles are hand-crafted, with artistic themes, serving as a kind of “cure for the common sudoku.” Each week he posts a new puzzle on his blog, The Art of Puzzles. This week’s prescription is a themed calcu-doku puzzle where the numbers to enter are unknown.

I’ve played around with calcu-doku puzzles in all sorts of ways (some of which I’ve featured here, others in my book TomTom Puzzles). One of my favorite changes to the standard format is to not always use the digits 1 to N, as new arithmetic combinations and challenges can arise if you don’t limit yourself to small numbers all the time. In this puzzle, six different positive integers have been used to form all the 6 and 10 cages. You need to determine these integers, and then complete the puzzle. Enjoy!

Rules: Place one member of an unknown set of six different positive integers into each cell so that no integer repeats in any row or column. The clues in the upper-left of each bold region indicate the value of the indicated mathematical operation applied to all the numbers in that region. For division and subtraction, start with whichever cell contains the largest number (ie, a region with cells containing 1, 5, and 2 with subtraction would be evaluated as 5-1-2 = 2).