It’s Enigmarch again! If you’re not familiar with Enigmarch, it’s a monthlong challenge of daily puzzle prompts. Puzzle designers get to play and make puzzles and puzzle lovers are flooded with a huge variety of free puzzles to solve.

One of the main goals is to make, not to worry about perfection, but just to get in there and get it done. I love this freedom! I can create any type of puzzle at any difficulty level. It might be bad or good, but I exercised my brain and stretched creatively. The process is very different than the approach we take with Society of Curiosities, where we extensively play-test and beautifully design our puzzles.

This is my puzzle for Staff. I immediately got the idea for the title, and what it would look like but figuring out an actual puzzle took a little longer, but I’m happy with it. This one does take a little more puzzling knowledge to jump in. Hope you enjoy! (Hints and solution are below.)

Click image to see larger.

HINTS

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  1. Each square of writing refers to a specific puzzle mechanism.

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2. Each square is a type of cipher (the title and the first sentence should help you figure out what it is)

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3. Each square has a bold section in the title. What should you do with this?

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4. Try writing the solution down. It might help.

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5. The order of the drawn staffs is the order of your letters.

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SOLUTION:

  • The Roman XIII is roman numerals – it can convert to a number. In this case it is 13. But you’re looking for a letter – this is sneaky. No more conversion is needed as all the other ciphers are one step. So, taking a look at this, do you see a letter? Scrunch the number together.

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The Roman number 13 is B .

– Pig Slim refers to pig pen cipher. If you look up E, you will see a square. If you’re looking for letters, what letter could a square be?

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o! The Pig Slim Solution is OO.

– The Pocket Flag refers to semaphore. Look up J in semaphore. What letter does it look like?

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L! The answer for pocket flag is L.

-Norse Magic refers to Runes. Look up E in Runes.

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Most runes will put an e as M. (a few have two E’s, so you’d have to figure out which works if you came across that rune.)

NOW…put it in the order of the staffs listed and you get BLOOM.

The new staff will make things bloom!

Behind the scenes….and a peek into my crazy, unorganized head.

A few other Enigmarch puzzles here:

Island

Presents

Lock

Shadow