I honnestly noticed first night i played it but not being a puzzle guy did not seek more into it… The chase could have been started on canadian delivery but I missed my chance to contribute.
I'm most curious about the delay after the Morse code puzzle--what was going on behind the scenes there?
As I mentioned, I thought this would take a looooong time to solve, so for a lot of the first day, Adam and Christopher were frantically trying to keep ahead of you guys. On two or three separate occasions, you were literally solving the last clue that was drawn/written. (The puzzles had been put together awhile in advance, and Adam drew most of the covers back in August or September, but the in-between comics were basically being assembled as the puzzles were being solved).
Finally, after everyone solved the Morse Code puzzle(s) way faster than we expected, you overtook us. We put a "to be continued" post up, and didn't start the ARG up again until the rest of the puzzles were assembled.
was there any moment that stood out where we surprised you, either with our tangents or how we solved some of the steps?
I really thought that the semaphore/rail fence clue would take way longer to solve. Also, I genuinely have no idea how you found the (first) morse code video earlier. It was an unlisted video - it should not have been available without the link!
On the flip side, the Augustus clue took waaaaaaay longer than I was expecting. As soon as someone posted the number, I thought it'd be instantly recognized as an ISBN. (13 images/13 books in the image? Total coincidence.)
And I really, really, really thought that the presence of Tim Cosing 9 times in the rulebook would be spotted before anyone played 3 Mega Computers in Megalopolis. Why would you do that?? It makes no sense!
Are there things that we are still missing? (Or maybe you don't want to tell us!)
Nothing substantial, but by my count no one ever:
- Worked out what the other sound clips were
- Worked out what the coloring of "intervene" meant (hint: it's not an additional key - it was actually intended to point towards the eventual solution of that image)
- Noticed the logic of which characters were included in http://greaterthangames.com/445566778
- Spotted that the FT ADAMANT ascii art was exactly 128 characters on each line (thus the footnote in the comic)
Did you by chance keep records of the different URLs that were attempted (either directly on the site, or things we said we mentioned trying in the thread)? If so, what are some of your favorites?
I didn't keep records, but the one that made me laugh the most was when someone tried "http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.greaterthangames.com/adickmove"
I was enthralled by this and would love to hear about the behind-the-scenes, both in the planning and during the solving.
At some point (once I've caught up on work) I am thinking of doing some in-depth posts about this on my blog. It was so interesting to put together, and so much fun to watch the site explode with it.
What was the most fun/interesting puzzle for you to create? What was the most fun to watch us try to solve?
The one that I was proudest of - by far - was the Wager Master's riddle. I was just really happy with how it all came together - Adam was aware of how much I loved the riddle, so see if you can spot anything odd about Wager Master's face as he's spouting it...
The first puzzle that I came up with, back in July or September, was the Twisting Back Alleyways -> Combat Stance riddle. I thought that was really nifty, and alluding to the solution (#---) without giving it away was a fun challenge.
This is going to sound awful, but I really enjoyed the angry "How can anyone be expected to solve an 81-minute morse code video" posts...followed by the complete solution being posted (by several people) less than 2 hours later. Turns out that if you have a huge group of people working on something, it's not that hard to complete monotonous tasks!
My most burning question would be, how did you create the puzzles? Did you start with words >G said needed to be the clues or did they lay out the story and you picked the most appropriate ones and worked from there? Or was it that you started out with a puzzle and ask/told the >G crew what you needed to make the puzzle work?
This is a long story that I'll probably tell in detail in those blog posts, but basically: I approached GTG about running an ARG with them in February of last year. Christopher gave me a rough idea of Oblivaeon's story, so I could work out the best angle to write the puzzles from, and then in July/September I sat down with Christopher and Adam and pitched them a version of what ended up going ahead.
I made a big list of possible ways to hide clues (Morse code, card flavor text, the video game, the periodic table) and brought it to them. Some were vetoed, most of them were approved, and so I got to work putting it all together.
I really wanted the final solution (Oblivaeon) to be hidden in all the other clues, so it quickly became apparent that there would have to be 9 covers. We came up with a way of hiding each letter in a story-related word or phrase (Scion's Aid, Harbinger, Odd Allies).
Pretty quickly, the number 9 started to take over my life. You start to get really quick at counting when words/phrases have exactly 9 letters (although not with 100% accuracy...*COUGHflavortextCOUGH*) and so it didn't take me long to notice that Sentinels had 9 letters in it as well. What's more, weirdly enough, all of the places that the letters had been hidden (the "n" in Scion's Aid, the "b" in Oblivaeon) were in either the 4th or 5th position...
4 + 5 = 9.
But one of the strangest and most powerful moments of my life was when I noted down which words had the clue hidden in the 4th position and which had it hidden in the 5th position, and mapped it onto Sentinels...
SENTINELS
NINES
Christopher will confirm that I was literally speechless when I ran into his office to show him that. Blew my mind.
After that, I got obsessive about everything being 9 letters long. People noticed "morse code" was 9 letters long, but did you spot these?
- semaphore
- plus three
- comic book
- Augustus's (code) - bit of a stretch, but it was good enough for me
- Unity bots
- sound file
(That's obviously not all, but most of them I hid in the barcode or got Christopher to hide on the back of a comic.)
So most of the time I started with a puzzle and told them what I needed to make it work, but there was a lot more back-and-forth than that. Christopher and I spent a morning on it when he was in Australia for PAX, and I was regularly Skyping with both Adam and Christopher to get all the details right!
It was super, super fun. I got to learn a bunch about the Sentinels characters (past and future) and the thing that I was most excited about ("Puzzle Solvin' Legacy", as I called him) actually happened, and was way cooler than I had hoped for.
To be fair...many a hint was provided on Twitter, haha. And who KNOWS how long it would have taken anyone to realize about Tim Cosing showing up so many times in the rulebook...certainly people have had it for a few weeks and hadn't pointed that out yet...
I mostly gave hints when the clues weren't entirely fair. Atbash, for example - if you don't know much about puzzles, you're not going to go straight to that as a way of decrypting things. Barcodes that scanned fine on my computer stopped working when they were uploaded, and I hadn't even considered that DD Classes looks waaaaaay more like D&D Classes than it does Dewey Decimal Classes.
Despite that, man! Everything was figured out So. Fast.
Heck I read the forums a lot and I had trouble keeping pace with people unlocking puzzles. I was glad to deduce that Corncakes was a fake account or at least directly linked to TimCosing
Awesome work, Peter! Thanks for all the work you did – it really is appreciated, as is everything everyone else did in creating and solving it! 
So, is there a back for cleverest legacy, or is that just a vicious tease there?
I wrote suggestions for an ability and incap powers (I was really excited by the idea of an ARG-only promo card) but Christopher's ability was far better than the ability that I came up with (which, uh, makes sense), so I don't really want to post what I had - Christopher almost certainly has better ideas for what he could have.
I probably shouldn't post too much of the behind-the-scenes discussions we had, but I can't resist sharing a few little snippets - attached!
(#1 - I was based in England when the first puzzles started getting solved, and so I found myself staying up until 2 or 3am each night, just because that's when the forums were most active.
#2 - You can see how dang excited I was by Puzzle-Solvin' Legacy. Originally his power was called "Puzzle Solver", but at my request Christopher renamed it.
#3 - This was months and months ago - I was considering some kind of tattoo-based puzzle, and asked the lads which characters had tattoos.)
So does this mean Christopher will have to kill us all per the third screenshot?
He already has. Villains shipped out radioactive. Even for those who are reading this and haven't received their copy yet, you won't be able to resist playing even though you doom yourself in the process.
The cards may contain explosive devices...
Radioactive boardgame expansion, huh? That sounds like an origin story in the making to me.
Tom Cosing was in my country while this was going on and I didn't kidnap and ransom him for answers!?!
I am getting old.
Wager Master's blue hair are a nice match with his light-blue skin tone…! 
Seriously, EXCELLENT work with this puzzle hunt/ARG. Truly a masterpiece. I honestly had dreams about it…!
Great job on the ARG Peter! Definitely very interesting to see it all unfold.
I place the blame on squarely MigrantP who programmed a random seed that gave Wraith nothing else to play in my game other than 3 Mega computers! (other cards were duplicates of Limited Equipment already in play). And yeah I was playing in Megalopolis because I like the Megalopolis theme song. So you can blame Jean-Marc for that!
Seriously, it was quite a shock to see that Intervene screen popup out of the blue with no idea why.
Edit: Follow-up question: was Intervene enabled in the Digital game since its last version release? (about 3-4 weeks prior with the introduction of the Weekly One-Shots?). What if I played three Mega Computers back then?!?!
Wow, so much awesomeness here.
And here I was assuming that you had everything posted already, and had something clever to prevent us from skipping ahead (like when someone tried "endofdays" prematurely).
Here's one question: there was a number hidden in the comments of the "replaceme" page, which someone thought they had looked through earlier. Was that in fact added during the contest?
Wow, and I thought that was a really great clue!
New thread time!This blog, right? Peter C. Hayward's Blog | Feminism. Board Games. Writing. Updated Sporadically.
I think it was a race there between the "crowd-sourcing" option and the computerized option.
Wow, that was so perfect. I assumed that you started there and worked backwards, but you're saying that it just fell out? Awesome.
One thing I learned from this contest is that there are a lot of really lousy encryption systems out there. But I'm not actually sure which puzzle/tweet you're referring to here.
I think the issue here was the resolution - the lines in a bar code are pretty closely spaced, and then you rotated them. If you had provided higher-resolution images (maybe through an extra click), it would have been fine.
there was a meta-joke we just had about this [i.e. the crossword behind Cleverest Legacy) that those [freedom, equality, etc.] aren't the right words, but he writes what he wants in crosswords
Oh wow, this had me in stitches! You folks are the funniest! Just imagining being the smartest puzzler from a family of puzzlers, yet being such a big fan of justice et al as to disregard the actual answers...
I need Cleverest Legacy in my game. If Christopher doesn't suggest incap powers, I am sure someone(s) in the community will come up with something. Or I'll just make sure never to incap him... It's an amazing power on the front, plus he just looks so cheerful. :)
I mean, we could just take one incap power from each of the other 3 Legacy cards…
I feel like there should be at least one that squarely fits his theme. His base power is so perfect.
(But we shouldn't get specific about possibilities on this forum.)
Follow-up question: was Intervene enabled in the Digital game since its last version release? (about 3-4 weeks prior with the introduction of the Weekly One-Shots?). What if I played three Mega Computers back then?!?!It was set to go live on January 1st, which was the earliest GTG predicted people would start receiving Villains!
Here's one question: there was a number hidden in the comments of the "replaceme" page, which someone thought they had looked through earlier. Was that in fact added during the contest?Nope! That was there from the start. That went online at the end of December, in fact.
Although now that I look, the reason no one worked out the reasoning behind the XXX characters ( 
) is, uh, because it didn’t upload properly. So now that should be extraordinarily solveable.
This blog, right? http://www.peterchayward.com/blog/Nope! This blog: http://beard.blue
I’ll post a link when it goes live.
You're saying that the comment that I now see at http://greaterthangames.com/445566778 is new? That is quite an excellent addition.
It is! It got lost when the page was first created (and replaced by a paragraph break, for some reason)
Peter…what have you done?!