Treasure Hunt 2021 (part 2)

This was my second treasure hunt of 2021, created quickly in the days before New Year’s Eve when we had my brother to stay.

This time I searched for new ideas, and found this excellent page on Hobby Lark which led me to this Caesar cipher code creator and this maze code creator.

You can read about my previous treasure hunts here.

Constraints

To keep things simple, the treasure was in a single location (in a basket underneath our television). To make things trickier, I used lots of codes.

The overall structure of the hunt looked like this:

1. I gave the hunters their first code to decipher.
2. This lead to four other clues, hidden around the house.
3. Solving those clues led to final treasure.

The first code

The first code was a letter-replacement code. I created four letters from me to the hunters, with their code. They first had to break the code.

The four letters looked like this:

This says:

DEAR JACK

YOUR CLUE IS IN HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN WHICH IS OUTSIDE THE UPSTAIRS BATHROOM

LOVE UNCLE STEVE

Each  of the four letters started with ‘Dear …’ and ended ‘Love Uncle Steve’ (or ‘Love Daddy’ or ‘Love Steve’ depending on how I addressed it).

To create the code, I wrote the letter in MS Word and changed the font to a heiroglyphic font.

The clues themselves were slightly wordier than I would normally use to make them easier to decode.

The four clues—mazes 

The four clues led to four maze clues, each created using this online maze code creator. As the final maze was in a Caesar cipher, the other mazes explained how to crack the cipher. (Tip for using the maze creator—it works best with a long sentence, and you may need to refresh the maze a few times to get one that isn’t too easy.)

The first maze explained the basic principles:

(The final clue is in code.)

The next two codes explained how to crack the codes.

(The first words are “THE TREASURE”)

(The final clue is a Caesar cipher with a shift = 1)

And the last code read uif usfbtvsf jt jo uif cbtlfu voefs uif ufmfwjtjpo which means the treasure is in the basket under the television (in a Caesar cipher).

And with that we were done!