Month: February 2011 (Page 2 of 2)

Lone Shark Games and Wired Want You to Join Their Ring of Dishonor

In this month’s Wired, Lone Shark Games is presenting a unique challenge to puzzlers, techies, and . . . thugs? Promising “A Guided Tour of the Dark Side,” this special “Underworld Exposed” issue includes fascinating articles about real-world crime and other things hidden from plain sight. Along these lines, the magazine, available both in print and for the iPad, contains secret codes that, when deciphered, will provide an email address. When contacted at a certain time and date, Decode will confer upon you a most dubious honor and a place in the ultra-secret puzzling society, the Ring of Dishonor.

The Ring of Dishonor is a darker, scarier version of Decode’s regularly featured Ring of Honor puzzles. How do you get started on your criminal puzzle-solving career? Check out this trailhead puzzle, involving the now-extinct language used by Chinese women to communicate without being watched. Using this puzzle as a launching pad, nine other secret languages are being revealed in quiz form at Decode to supplement the print magazine (iPad readers have all the secret languages available already). Somehow, through the magazine, these secret languages will bring enthusiastic seekers “behind the door,” so to speak, if they’ve got the puzzle-solving chops to figure it all out.

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Odd Jobs for Old Soldiers

While going through his company’s archives, an employee using the moniker “LOKI” discovered evidence of a conspiracy. After contacting the FBI, Loki took his typewriter out of storage, drafted a cover letter explaining his situation, and sent a package of information to me and others as security. Unfortunately, he “forgot” to load the typewriter ribbon, leaving his explanatory message embossed on an otherwise blank sheet of paper. Risking a headache that still hasn’t gone away, I transcribed the message’s contents here.

The package I received sets the stage for Old Soldiers, a new media comic book by Big House Comics, which aims to deliver comics that let you “[s]tep into an immersive world, where you become a part of the story online.” The first comic in the seven issue mini-series is set to debut in March, but it appears as though the alternate reality game has launched earlier.

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