Solution to Red Herrings

LUCKY GUESS

We generally try to avoid red herrings in our puzzles, and while we can anticipate and design around most potential alternate solve paths, the occasional red herring still slips in. This puzzle was a playful response to all the red herrings that solvers found, or creatively extrapolated, from the previous puzzles.

We also generally avoid overusing common ciphers in our puzzles, but when we finally made a cipher-based puzzle, we really leaned in. (It should be noted, the humor of this puzzle is quite tongue-in-cheek and particularly targeted at those familiar with puzzle conventions.)

The puzzle starts off pretty straightforward. Each of the 10 images, including the title image, includes each of 6 ciphers:

• semaphore (red herring fish positions)

• NATO letters (extra images)

• maritime signal flags (backgrounds)

• Morse code (short and long utensils)

• ternary / base 3 (#s of carrot stem shoots)

• pigpen cipher (plate borders)

However, some of these cipher letters are fake! Invalid Morse or Semaphore, images which aren’t real NATO letters, made-up signal flags, ternary carrots with more than 2 shoots. Taking only the valid letters, each cipher spells out a red herring message across the 10 slides. (This references a common puzzle trope where a “dead end”-type message is hidden in noise or unused information to indicate that isn’t important. For instance, see the acrostic embedded in the small-type bands in Foodstock.)

Once you’ve found these 6 messages, it’s not immediately clear what’s next… but as solvers learned with the 26x26 grid in Sandwich Castle, dimensions are important! The 6 ciphers can be ordered using the title slide, and 10 images are displayed horizontally, leading to a 10x6 matrix of data.

As hinted in the flavor text with “It’s not hard to see why”, the final step uses Braille - an alphabet which has 2x3 letters. So, our 10x6 grid can be parsed as 2 rows of 5 Braille letters, and using the red herring message letters (the valid cipher letters) as the dots, we get the answer LUCKY GUESS.

Notes

• This puzzle got 2,572 correct entries in the 5 days the submission window was open.

• It was a surprisingly difficult and interesting challenge to come up with some of the “fake” ciphers. For NATO letters or maritime flags, it was easy enough to devise an image that just didn’t exist in the alphabet. But for the others, we spent a long time deliberating what it would signal to include bits that are out-of-bounds or could be alternatively interpreted as valid letters (for instance, interpreting the carrots ternary as a higher base.)

• The idea for this came after many hours of tossing ideas around and going down dead ends for our 9th puzzle, and Matthew said, jokingly, “What if we just call the pop-up Red Herrings?” And Sandy said, “Hold on, that’s not such a bad idea…” And we went from there.

• The basis of this puzzle is the idea that the red herrings are the puzzle. But since we included multiple layers of “red herrings”, one would certainly be justified in flipping how the the final step works. In the puzzle as written, you use the codes which resolve as the Braille dots. But since the theme is red-herrings-that-are-actually-not, the opposite is equally valid logic: i.e. interpret the tables that don’t resolve as where you mark the dots for Braille.

• An alternate title considered for this puzzle: Cherry Herring (a riff on the Dutch liqueur Cherry Heering!)

Notes from solvers

• Keeping with the vibe of this puzzle, we chose the answer LUCKY GUESS to be trollingly anti-autological. If you solve the puzzle, then LUCKY GUESS is not just a lucky guess. But if you do correctly guess the answer, as a few solvers reported doing, then the answer describes itself.

• Many solvers sent us messages along the lines of “How do you come up with this stuff?!?!?!?” The answer: spreadsheets, exposure to thousands of puzzle hunt puzzles, and a slightly cruel sense of humor ;)

• Andrew C. reported: “We were totally stumped on this one. I felt we were nearly there, but were missing the final step. But then, going over the puzzle with my 9-year old (who's very into spy stuff right now), HE came up with the final idea that allowed us to crack the case! We were blind to the solution, but somehow he saw it.”