This code's a perfectly boss-level puzzle for the Master Challenge in your escape room. It's not easy to understand, but your crew will never forget cracking it.
We're going to use a grid of 26
different Caesar Ciphers and look up XY coordinates on that grid to encode our text. It's kind of like playing that board game
Battleships where you destroy your opponent's ships by guessing X and Y coordinates.
How To Encode Your Message: • Open the
Vigenere Square template.
• Enter your plaintext message in the top row. Each letter here is the column to check the table for (X coordinate).
• Choose a Keyword and enter it in the 2nd row (just repeat until the whole row is full). Each letter here is the row to check the table for (Y coordinate).
• Make your ciphertext by taking the first letter of your message and highlighting that column. Then get the first letter of the keyword and highlight that row. Whichever letter is at the intersection is the first character in the ciphertext.
How To Design It Into Your Escape Room Game: • Since this is a mega-hard code, you'll need to give players some solid clues for how to solve it. After all, it's an escape game, not international espionage!
• The
Vigenere Square template has sections labeled
Key and Message to give players a head start.
• Embed the keyword somewhere into the puzzle. For example, a hidden message written in invisible ink or the result of solving an earlier puzzle.
• Give a hint that this is a coordinate-based problem by writing the first few message-key combinates in a way that people are familiar with like:
○ A list of coordinates for a game of battleships.
○ List of moves in chess. This stands out because there's obviously no RV square on a chess board.
○ A map with a series of directions that don't make sense but show a 'Grid lookup' strategy.
This cipher's no walk in the park but makes for a riveting super-challenge for an experienced
Heist Crew!
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