Codes & Ciphers/Usborne Superpuzzles, Advanced Level

Usborne Superpuzzles

by Mark Fowler

Perplexing superpuzzles for serious puzzle fanatics and super-solvers everywhere

48 pages, Library Binding

First published September 1, 1992

Reviews

[Capn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great rained-out-holiday trick to pull out of your sleeve. A proper paper diversion. Got a smart ass kid in your class in desperate need of enrichment and distraction? Here's your answer! TOP TIP: print out multiple photocopies of each (unadultered) page, to scale. A pen, ruler, scissors* and a graph/grid-lined notepad on standby will make you much happier. Would look extra fetching in a battered manila envelope. *only if you printed out copies, of course..!

Recommended age: middle school and up, but maybe a super brainy primary school over-achiever would relish this. I'm middle-aged and found this a delightful holiday challenge. A good one to do as a family, perhaps!

Spoiler tags exist at end of review - I'm going to give my own HINTS for every puzzle, because the two hints ('Clues') I flipped to were so utterly useless that I feel society is owed something by them. I'll do my best to augment, because seriously, those tips I saw were so unhelpful I knocked a star off this books' rating. If you don't need a hint, you'll be fine - the puzzles are lovely (except for one - read on!).

You can pick out a puzzle to solve at random - if you dare. But if you tackle them in order, you will be able to follow the story of five intrepid adventurers as they grapple with a series of exciting challenges.
The adventure begins when a strange notice appears in the Global Herald. Out of thousands of replies, five individuals are selected to take part in an intriguing mission. They each receive instructions summoning them to Almaro City in the States of Enigma. Clutching packed suitcases and proof of their identity, they report to room 501 of the Rialto Hotel. Here, a mysterious figure in dark glasses checks their credentials...

I have recently reacquired this book after 30-something years - and weirdly, I recognize very little of it, apart from the fictional five adventurers and a few of the characters and art from the puzzles... but not the associated ciphers. Which is good - after (mostly) finishing this year's GCHQ Christmas challenge (the cat cover has me stymied), I now have another diversion while I groan and stuff myself on turkey leftovers in sweatpants. I reserve the right to spectacularly slob my way through the end of the year.

I'll be adding this to my Primary School Puzzlers list (https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/2... - please vote in any missing titles or vote for your favourites already listed), though I do think it'll be on the upper end of the age range. This is the "Advanced Level" of the Usbourne Superpuzzles range.

Contents:
2. Before You Start
4. Coded Telegrams
6. Ben Pierce's Book Cipher
8. The Playing Card Cipher
10. The Ancient Symbols of Takosu
12. Lo Chi's Cryptic Board Game
14. Scrambled Symbols
16. Joe Gough's Coded Diary
18. The Montero Meeting
20. The Mystery of the Tiki Inscriptions
22. The Grids of Go
24. Morse Transmission
26. Cut Out Letters
27. The Fencing Master's Papers
28. The Jumbled Symbols of Guana
30. The Secret of the Chart
32. The Dingbat File
34. Sam Hayley's Cipher
36. Clocktower Communication
38. Pavilion Puzzle
40. Thomas Hudson's Final Challenge
42. Clues
44. Answers

I've finally reached the final problem (mostly done solving it, but hit a decoding snag late last night and decided to finish it later. Seeing as I have a window to write the review now, I'm taking it. If the ultimate answer is a total let-down, I'll amend my review!).

Two puzzles had me totally stuck. The first turned out to be a classic case of over-thinking that my partner proudly solved (Cut Out Letters, Kate Jonson and the Maryville Train Robbery, page 26). Immediately preceding this puzzle was one of the Mat Smith and the Red Panther Spy Ring puzzles, Morse Transmission, which involved multiple keywords and a newspaper plus the sheet of morse code. It was enjoyable. Next came what looked much simpler (spoiler: it was. And I missed it): a ransom-note style letter with text in various fonts and sizes, a simple A-Z (plus '?') 27 letter decoding disk (you have to fill in the missing numeric and alphabetic characters first - pleasing), and a smaller disk showing an acute angle with 3 vertical lines dividing the angle. The smallest cell created is labelled 1, the medium sized labelled 2, and the largest labelled 3. The sticking point for me was this line:

Each digit corresponds to a different letter height in the coded message, as shown on the small disk

Now it may be the fact that I've been poorly all Christmas vacation (and not eating a balanced diet.. or exercising..), but for some reason this completely threw me. I was running 3 parallel strands of code across open reading frames, overlapping triplet codons (yes, I know this isn't DNA - my brain's been conditioned this way, can't help it, apparently. Old dog, what?!), reading code backwards, reading code forward, trying to encode a codon to a single digit on that small disk.. in the end, I had to ask my partner, who not only solved it fairly quickly, but did it with an audience at the dinner table. (Huge boost to the self-esteem, "Wow! Dad's the cleverest man in the world!" This book has all sorts of unexpected perks! It's not often Dad upstages Mum on that front (says Mum)..!). Anyway, I had turned to the 'Clues' section for this one after 4 hours of utter frustration, and this is all it said:

The size of the letters is the key to this puzzle. But you will need to fill in the large disk as well.

Well no poop, bud. Frustrated, I decided to flip to the 'Answers':

First, Kate fills in the missing numbers on the large disk. The completed disk is shown on the right. [image]
Next, she follows Pierce's directions to discover that the hideaway is in [redacted]. This is marked [redacted] the map

HOW did she follow Pierce's directions?! HOW did she discover the information?! If someone has come to the Clues or the Answers, it's because they need to get on the track - some information to get them started is what is needed!

So I'm going to give my own hints to supplement the truly awful 'Clues' and often less-than-fulsome Answers given. Please note that I am expanding upon what is already given in the Clues section of the book and giving you the info I'd personally want if I was desperate enough to admit defeat. Before I do that, though, I'll just tell you that I am STILL stumped by the Pavilion Puzzle (the penultimate before 'Thomas Hudson's Final Challenge') on pages 38 and 39. I have looked at the solution and tried to reverse engineer it, and I STILL can't make it work. It had the MOST frustrating 'Clue' of them all:

Look carefully at the explanation on Lo Chi's scroll. It may be simpler than it seems. Squared paper will help you to draw the plan. You should be able to plot a route to the smallest room - and remember to look out for the booby traps.

LOOK CAREFULLY?! Bud, I've been examining this thing more minutely than a suspected melanoma mole. It is NOT more simple than it seems. I can't make headway, and you're telling me to look again?! I've looked a dozen times! Hours, man! Not helpful!

So in the spirit of community, here are MY ADDITIONAL HINTS for each puzzle. I would find these supplemental hints helpful - I hope someone else does too. Because the whole joy of these books is the satisfaction of suddenly being able to work it out, even if that requires a nudge or two for inertia's sake. (Note: I can see now why I owned this book but have no memory of the puzzles - I'm almost certain I started and ran out of attention span. Which is a shame, especially when a good nudge would have got me on track and gaining confidence! So here you go, past self - extra nudges.):

Capn's Additional Hints for the 'Clues', by puzzle:
Pages 4 and 5: There are 6 telegrams and 6 different ciphers described. One of them, Backgammon, is basically just the text in reverse. Try to read each of the telegrams backwards until you find one you can make out. Next, look for the least legible telegram - the Deadly Nightshade cipher scrambles the letters in such a way that you can have full groups of consonants together and other 5-letter groupings that are vowel-rich. The Lobster Pot cipher has the word SPOOK inserted - have a look for a telegram rich in S, P, O and Ks. The Oranges and Lemon cipher has some backwards content - if you almost applied Backgammon to a telegram but it didn't work, I'd try this one. That leaves just 'Mustard and Cress' and 'Laughing Demons' - now just apply 'Trial and Error', as the original hint suggests.
Pages 6 and 7:If you have access to a photocopier, I'd scan this page (or scan and print), so you can annotate the line numbers. This is quite an easy puzzle, as you will see - the tedious part is the counting of lines of text, then counting along the line to find the numbered word. If you can mark the lines 1- 20, you won't have to count down and over each time.
Pages 8 and 9:Thankfully, I didn't look at this clue, because it would have confused me terribly! It DOES matter which side of the card you use! A short side and a long side give different symbols! What the author means is that the two long sides are clones, and that the two short sides are clones. So you don't have to rotate the page to read the upside-down symbols. I don't know why anyone would try that, so that was a terrible clue. My tip is to use tracing paper and make a copy (or photocopy or scan and print, again) and carry a scale card right up to the parchment (make sure the scale is the same, that the boxes and lines correspond well!) if you find it difficult to envisage. Otherwise, count left to right. The first line on the parchment requires the LONG SIDES of first the King of Hearts and then the Jack of Clubs. The second line on the parchment requires the SHORT SIDES of the Queen of Spades and then the King of Hearts.
Pages 10 and 11:In this case, I don't have anything to add! It's time consuming.
Pages 12 and 13:Again, a scaled photocopy or a scan and print or traced puzzle pieces would help. I just wrote the whole grid out myself and then used coloured pencils to overlay the Tetris-like pieces where they could go, beginning with the two crosses (one only fits in one place, I seem to recall). When I was sure I had the placements right, I started to colour in those Tetris pieces to fix them, and then sort out where the others had to go (no overlaps, no repeats - one piece, one spot)
Pages 14 and 15: "Scramber" typo on step 3 of the 4DX instructions. Oh yeah, this one. Unfortunately, I have nothing to add to the hint - it is trial and error, and you need a lot of patience. My only tip is to mention that the blocks of 6 symbols are scrambled as a set, and then the next set of 6 are scrambled as a set, and then the next.
Pages 16 and 17:I didn't imagine sliding the stupid ruler thing. I made one. I just lined up a piece of paper and marked it, and then did for the other half, and then I had my own slider. I kept it, and paperclipped it into the book. Ain't nobody have time for the mental gymnastics here!
Pages 18 and 19:You can cheese this one. Look at the top of the message on page 19: what word could D5C*V?R be? Or L? C4P!&!N?, given the context of the 'Ben Harvey and Le Capitaine' puzzle?!
Pages 20 and 21:Not that you need it, but if you glance along the text at the bottom of page 20, you can see that the moon symbol must equal 'magician' (which isn't in the snake text you need to decode). If you look at all the translations given which contain the word 'the', you'll soon see which symbol that is (III). The trick is to find translations that have only one word in common, to work out which that word is. You'll have to come up with a fair chunk of the known language before you can apply it to the snake bit, but do start translating the snake as you go so you can see which symbols you need to worry about and which you don't need.
Pages 22 and 23:I liked this one. But it's tedious - back and forth and back and forth.
Pages 24 and 25:Ooh, proper spy territory! HINT: 'Columns' in the instructions refers to vertical columns of text not 'newspaper columns' in that an article = a column, even when it spills into a new physical 'column' of text within the article. If I remember correctly, one of the lines of next you need is in column 1 and that allegedly corresponds to the "Regatta Returns" article, which is underneath the "Red Panther Strikes Balaika City" article - the text of column 1 is therefore part of both of these articles - it's a physical division, not a story division. For example, column 2 would include the Red Panther Strikes Balaika City article and the first half of the Mystery Heir Sought article. Maybe you have to be old like me to equate "a newspaper column" with a recurrent section of a paper... nevermind.
Page 26:I think I've bitched about this enough above, but - THE MOON SHINES BRIGHTLY OVER MUSTANG PRAIRIE - all the encoded info in this letter has NOTHING to do with the big wheel and the 3 digit-alphabet part. That part comes AFTER. All you need to see is that the first T is BIG and therefore =3, as shown on the little disk. The next letter, H, is small, and therefore = 1. The E is also small, so =1. The M is BIG and is =3, the o is small and =1, the next O is medium and = 2. Continue on, and then apply the info from the large disk to read the hidden message.
Page 27:The only real risk here is that you'll get sloppy and forget to change between the coding jetons or counters or whatever (they'd be 'jetons' irl -it's French, after all!). Beginning at the top, the first two letters are C and L, then a blank to fill in later, then C and a K again. The next line uses the other counter.
Pages 20 and 29:Note that the symbol from the previous Hapu puzzle which represented "Hapu" no longer has that meaning, which I find VERY SUSPECT in the linguistics of a closed society like this one, but urgh, nevermind! Minor annoyance.
The bugger here is the encoded part, and I'm not sure I can give a helpful tip. I replaced the symbols in the orange part at the top with the numbers 1 through 20, and then tried to visually see how they were arranged into that first square. The trouble is that some of those symbols are repeated, which is quite annoying. Going to the next square is also tricky - my hint is to look at the vertical columns and see if you can see where each went. Then look at the righthand string to see how they carefully flattened that second square into a line (it's not the same as the first strand to square set-up). This one takes time, AND, there's a further important riddle to solve using the info you decode and the painting, too!
Pages 30 and 31:I used tracing paper, but you don't need to. Chopsticks would work, actually! I like this one - elegant. You're just needing to find the symbol between the intersection of two straight lines. For the wheel, I just looked at the letter below, then counted 2 more to the right to have the correct frame as described, rather than write out all the complicated characters.
Pages 32 and 33:I think this is quite obvious, except that in this case there are FOUR grids to use, not just the 3 the code book gives as examples. The codewords are on the map. Sadly, once you start to solve the location name, you'll be able to guess it straightaway.
Pages 34 and 35: I still can't believe he is happy enough with the nickname given to him by the press to use it to encode a cipher. It seems like a sloppy password situation to me. Ah well. If you look at the already decoded message using Mustang as a nickname (not the one you need to use, but hang on), you'll see that M-U-S-T-A-N-G preceeds the coded B-Y-X-D-Y-F-F letters. Looking at the lefthand side of the large grid of letters, select M, then travel across until you hit your coded letter (B). Look up that column to see the letter at the top (C). So if you use T-U-R-N-C-O-A-T on the B-B-C-E-H-X letter (TURNCOATTURNCOAT in total), you'd see that the T on the left intersects with B in the V column. That's your first letter decoded.
Pages 36 and 37:Again, there's a terrible temptation to write in this book - paper copies are a must! I used tracing paper and made my own fan. Put the letter N in where the # and the wavy horizontal line intersect. It's that easy. T where the backward F staff-thingy and the two-step ladder thingy intersect on the fan. Once you fill in all the letters, you have to find the reading path to make a sentence containing a name. It's a wiggly path.
Pages 38 and 39: NOPE. I've got NOTHING. I do NOT get this puzzle, and I even cheated and tried to do it backwards from the solution, and STILL I can't figure this one out and I'm mildly enraged. I would like to be able to tell you where to start, but I can't. Even seeing the final plan, I can't tell you how to read this. I was surprised to see that the ladders are inside the rooms and I still can't make sense of it. All I could figure out was that you can make out where the floors are because there are no communicating doors between those lines.But I can't tell you anything else. Except that maybe the pagoda pictured is helpful in showing the number of floors and their relative widths. But I only know that from looking up the answer. Which still hasn't enabled me to solve this puzzle. Please help if you can - it's driving me nuts!!!
Page 40: Not hard. Just many moving parts. You got this.

UPDATE: There's a TYPO in the final answer in the back, ha ha! However, it won't matter - if you successfully complete it, you will know on the puzzle page that you have solved it. You don't need to look at the answer box on the last page - I was just curious.

AND THEN?! What about our 5 adventurers? Do they set off together? Do they split the treasure equally? Why didn't the guy just go and get the treasure himself if he knows where it is (could be a good story there!). Fan fiction? :)

The final puzzle was not the most difficult (maybe the most moving parts, but you're well trained by then). That Pavilion Puzzle, though!

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is value for money - I have owned it for 7 years only been able to do half the puzzles (mainly due to lack of patience admittedly) so has lasted me a long time. add that to a brilliant multi-layered overall story, and some fantastic illustrations and you've got one of the best puzzle books around!

[Capn · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can pick out a puzzle to solve at random - if you dare. But if you tackle them in order, you will be able to follow the story of five intrepid adventurers as they grapple with a series of exciting challenges.
The adventure begins when a strange notice appears in the Global Herald. Out of thousands of replies, five individuals are selected to take part in an intriguing mission. They each receive instructions summoning them to Almaro City in the States of Enigma. Clutching packed suitcases and proof of their identity, they report to room 501 of the Rialto Hotel. Here, a mysterious figure in dark glasses checks their credentials...

I have recently reacquired this book after 30-something years - and weirdly, I recognize very little of it, apart from the fictional five adventurers and a few of the characters and art from the puzzles... but not the associated ciphers. Which is good - after (mostly) finishing this year's GCHQ Christmas challenge (the cat cover has me stymied), I now have another diversion while I groan and stuff myself on turkey leftovers in sweatpants. I reserve the right to spectacularly slob my way through the end of the year.

I'll be adding this to my Primary School Puzzlers list (https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/2... - please vote in any missing titles or vote for your favourites already listed), though I do think it'll be on the upper end of the age range. This is the "Advanced Level" of the Usbourne Superpuzzles range.

Contents:
2. Before You Start
4. Coded Telegrams
6. Ben Pierce's Book Cipher
8. The Playing Card Cipher
10. The Ancient Symbols of Takosu
12. Lo Chi's Cryptic Board Game
14. Scrambled Symbols
16. Joe Gough's Coded Diary
18. The Montero Meeting
20. The Mystery of the Tiki Inscriptions
22. The Grids of Go
24. Morse Transmission
26. Cut Out Letters
27. The Fencing Master's Papers
28. The Jumbled Symbols of Guana
30. The Secret of the Chart
32. The Dingbat File
34. Sam Hayley's Cipher
36. Clocktower Communication
38. Pavilion Puzzle
40. Thomas Hudson's Final Challenge
42. Clues
44. Answers

I'll update this review if and when I decide to tackle the full mystery, which I'm fairly confident I never bothered to solve in the 90s. :)

[Eryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun stuff.