Anatomy of a puzzle: Great Scott, Lanyard!
(Kudos to me for the punny headline)
The mission of a puzzle maker is to try and get a player to an answer in as enjoyable a way as possible. This is done essentially by putting in place gates, riddles, barriers and small leaps of thinking, allowing them to realise what they have to do ,and then to carry that out.
This is part of the Escape Key Project, and the simple task was to have one letter from the alphabet identified. There are essentially two ways of doing this; you can either put all the puzzles in place to point out one letter, or put the puzzles in place to actually exclude a letter from the alphabet. It is commonly recognised that the alphabet has 26 characters, so any puzzle which has 26 spaces with one of them 'blocked up' is likely to be an alphabet puzzle.
I wanted to make this slightly harder, so I experimented with a digital font and mirroring the letters with a small overlap on each letter, thereby creating a wonderful new symbol. Some of these letters are far more easily identifiable than others, as the examples below show.
So stage one was disguising the alphabet, so it was a little less easy to see it as being an alphabet.
The next stage: mixing up the order. When you see something that looks similar to A and similar to B, then you are likely, intuitively, to go, this is the alphabet, and because we know it automatically by adulthood, it's very easy to run through this in your mind. So I wanted to slow that aspect of the process down too.
I did this by mixing up the alphabet order.
One last thing I could have done would be to reverse the angles of these shapes as well, so I could flip them upside down, reverse them, although I realised afterwards that I had already reversed them by mirroring them, as the overlap shows. And playing around with the general challenge of this, I also recognise that the missing letter in this particular puzzle is too close to the start of the puzzle to make it a real challenge for someone.
If the letter that was missing was deeper in the alphabet, there’d be more chance of someone having to work harder on this puzzle itself. The fact that the answer is C is very easy to obtain very quickly. If the letter had been Q, R or S, for example, there would have been more time searching for each of the letters going up to the missing letter, thereby taking more time for the puzzle.
I tested this one out online with some followers using Bluesky and two separate tests, and in each case, it took between 30 seconds and five minutes for people to recognise what the puzzles were.
Interestingly, the missed order of the symbols appeared to be more of a challenge for players than simply having all the letters in the right order and flipping the order so it was upside down and back to front. My thinking behind this is that as soon as you recognise it's the alphabet and see the alphabetical points, you are more likely to be able to identify where the mistake lies.
Below is an image of the finished result:
This is a lanyard, which is also known as a collar—something attached to a lead in a puzzle, but perhaps superfluous to it. The lanyard will have a card attached to it, which is used in the escape room, and more often than not, people will go straight for the card, ignoring the lanyard and thus missing out on a very essential clue for this puzzle.
I'm really pleased with how this came out, and I'm delighted with the samples which were printed on both sides. I think it's something that will sit well in the escape room and only be realised as a puzzle in the very closing stages when there are a few letters still to collect.
Please let me know your thoughts regarding this little challenge!
Massive thanks to the play testers, including: Laura Baxter, Beth G, Stephen Connor, Lisa C, Mrs Moz, Laura McInerney, Lisa, Drew Thomson-Jones, Laura E Hall, Rachel Rossi, David GSG, Millie, Dan Atomic, Brett Handley, Tom Oakley, Dan Stucke and Barbara Tate. Below are some of their methodologies:
"I am not great at puzzles, so probably not your prime audience, but it took me about 30 seconds to work out it was letters with reflections, then double checked all letters were there - c missing. Q was hard to see."
"First iteration of the puzzle was far too straightforward, the double A leaps out at you because we read left to right and it's on the far left. Also as it's vertically symmetrical it's easily identified. Once recgonised as a letter and with a quick count revealing there are 25 of them, you tick them off one by one and after B it's very quick to see they are reflections and that C is the missing letter, no need to check them all. Does it help to be a 60something retired IT professional used to playing text adventures in green on back? Probably!"
"Back to back Cs. Took under 10secs."
"I think I figured out what was missing in 53 secs. Assuming I'm right that it's the alphabet, upside down. To be fair, I think I figured it out in half that time and spent the rest of the time double-checking."
(In many ways, dream answer - part of the aim in this one is to create a sense of pressure by ensuring every key bar one is discounted, which will be obvious in some, and less so in others)
"Took just over a minute because my lucky first instinct was to count the number of symbols and realise it was one less than the number of letters in the alphabet."
"The first thing I thought was it's going to be one of those 'what symbol comes next' puzzles, like in an IQ test. Dropped that pretty quickly when I didn't pick up any repeating patterns. Next I honed in on the transformed 'W' because I saw it matched the transformed 'M', just flipped. That made me think it was going to be a pairing exercise where one symbol didn't have a counterpart. I spent probably 60 seconds pursuing that until I realised there was no way all of these would pair up. While I'd been doing that I'd noticed that a few of the symbols looked like letters but chalked it up to dev lazyness. Z and Q don't look anything like Z and Q so it didn't immediately occur to me that all the symbols were transformations of the English alphabet. I flipped my phone upside down to get a better look at the symbols, at which point it became really obvious what I was looking at and what was missing. It would have been harder if the alphabet was jumbled up, or otherwise changed so that it couldn't be read in a linear way. Easier if Z and Q looked more like Z and Q."
(Full, fascinating, analysis!)
"56 seconds. Thought process: something mirrored…letters? Upside down and/or backwards? Count em, ah, 25. Oh right, here’s B and A, so that’s the orientation. Then checking to see if D was C or not."
"I was confused by the thing that looks a bit like an exclamation mark (maybe it’s a Q! Second from right, top row). Think it took about 2 mins overall to figure it out and then check (my initial thought wasn’t alphabet but some kind of pattern)"
"The letter C reflected is missing. Took me 27 seconds to go to J and decide I was right (hopefully!)"
"I’m punting for C and Y missing. It’s taken me about 5 mins of going slightly cross eyed. 😆"
"So took me about 5 seconds to figure out that it’s mirrored letters of the alphabet. Then another 10 to find the missing one because once I had that figured out I tried to go through it in alphabetical order til I found the missing one."
(Some people can just see letters like this, very quickly. There's sometimes a desire to disguise them in more detail.)
"C is missing - took about 13 seconds to find that but about 43 to run through the whole alphabet and chect it was just that."
(I love the double-checking- that is key for this puzzle. I want there to be an element of self-imposed pressure/doubt).