Andrea Blumberg

Brian is my teammate for Puzzled Pint and loves a mental challenge, so I wanted to make him a smash-hit puzzle to remember.

Luckily I had an accomplice in Brian's wife, who is an excellent artist (see below). She said that the present he really wanted most was time. So she made up a little package complete with some "time coupons" (good for one sleep-late-Saturday, etc.), a gift certificate for a massage, and some graphic novels, and we put the label "Free-Time Machine" on it, and buried it in their back yard.

Then I wrote this little comic book with puzzles in it, and she illustrated it. The solution to the comic is directly below the images, so open them first if you want to try to solve it (warning: the last step isn't solvable.  See solution below for explanation) 

Click pictures to enlarge.

The Solution:

If you look at the sloth's cape, you'll notice that it has a different letter in each panel.  Reading those letters in order spells "Morse backwards." 

Looking carefully at the "zoom" lines on the top of page 2, you'll notice that they are in Morse code.  Reading that code backwards says "Last two words/ Each bubble by/ Girl in purple."

Reading the last two bubbles by the girl in the purple cape gives "Play fair/ Code key/ Word lettering/ No queue."  This means to use the Playfair code, with the keyword "lettering" and no "Q" (the Playfair code uses a 5x5 grid, and the alphabet has 26 letters.  So sometimes people omit the "J" and use "I" instead, and sometimes they omit the "Q" altogether.  If you don't know which encoding system was used, your answer will be gibberish).  I didn't expect Brian to know about the Playfair code beforehand, but I know he likes learning new things, especially puzzle-related things, so I knew he'd look it up.

The Playfair code was used to decipher the letters at the bottom of page 6, which gave the answer "Grid is a battleship puzzle.  Use the numbers in the water, in order, as the missing GPS coordinates."

The grid on that same page was a puzzle specially constructed for me by Wei-Hwa Huang (thanks, Wei-Hwa!) because I tried and failed at making a battleship puzzle with a unique solution.  The "fleet" has to fit into the grid according to the rules of battleship solitaire (no boat may touch another boat, numbers on the edges give clues to how many "ship pieces" are in that row or column).  When all the boats were placed, the numbers remaining uncovered were placed into the blanks in the GPS coordinates on the paper in the bear's claw on page 3. (Because those GPS locations led to peoples backyards, and because this is the internet and all, I deleted those numbers to preserve their privacy).

The clues on page 4 gave riddles as to where to look once he got to each location.  In each place he found two things: a piece of a strange bit of electronic equipment – parts of a "Time Field Sensor" – and a small see-through square of plastic with a quarter of a QR code on it.  When he overlapped the pieces of plastic in the right way so that his phone could read the QR code, it said: "Assemble Time Field Sensor.  Go to [GPS coordinates for his own back yard].  Use TFS to locate buried Time Machine.”

The "Time Field Sensor" was actually a metal detector, and we had wrapped the present in tin foil and put some large nails on top of it.  Even then, it needed some coaching from us for him to find the exact spot, but in the end he found it, dug it up, and had a great time.

Copyright © Andrea Blumberg 2016