Britain’s Government Communications HQ’s festival puzzle comes with a twist for budding spies. The GCHQ 2022 challenge features seven fiendish puzzles based on the seven disciplines of languages, engineering, codebreaking, analysis, maths, coding, and cyber security - all key skills for sigint experts.
There’s more, however. Once you solve all seven puzzles, you'll need to think outside the box, using the design on the front of the card to assemble the answers, forming three separate what3words locations. Joining the three place names together will reveal the festive answer.
“This year’s GCHQ Christmas Card Challenge gives an insight into the skills we need every day as part of our mission from languages to coding,” said GCHQ director Sir Jeremy Fleming. “But skills alone won’t be enough to crack this one. Puzzlers need to combine a mix of minds to solve the seemingly impossible."
We've added a few hints below as well as the solution, but no peeking until you've given it a go!
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Britain’s Government Communications HQ’s festival puzzle comes with a twist for budding spies. The GCHQ 2022 challenge features seven fiendish puzzles based on the seven disciplines of languages, engineering, codebreaking, analysis, maths, coding, and cyber security - all key skills for sigint experts.
There’s more, however. Once you solve all seven puzzles, you'll need to think outside the box, using the design on the front of the card to assemble the answers, forming three separate what3words locations. Joining the three place names together will reveal the festive answer.
“This year’s GCHQ Christmas Card Challenge gives an insight into the skills we need every day as part of our mission from languages to coding,” said GCHQ director Sir Jeremy Fleming. “But skills alone won’t be enough to crack this one. Puzzlers need to combine a mix of minds to solve the seemingly impossible."
We've added a few hints below as well as the solution, but no peeking until you've given it a go!
Recognizing the type of puzzle you’re looking at will help you determine how best to solve it.
Cryptic crossword clues - A cryptic clue leads to its answer as long as it is read in the right way. What the clue appears to say when read normally is a distraction and usually has nothing to do with the answer. The challenge is to find the way of reading the clue that leads to the solution.
HINT: Look out for indicators that an anagram is included. Or perhaps there are hidden codes within the words. Could the letters be substituted for numbers? For example, ‘A’ could equal 1, ‘B’ could equal 2, and so on. Or it could be more complex - letters could be represented by their subsequent Scrabble score, or their corresponding atomic number in the periodic table. _____________________________________________________________
Rebus - A rebus is the combination of letters, words and pictures to produce a word or phrase. For example, the below shows the word ‘SECRET’ repeated a number of times:
SECRET SECRET SECRET
ANSWER: The TOP word is highlighted. The solution is therefore TOP SECRET. _____________________________________________________________
Sayings/Phrases - Think about how the words in a puzzle might be used in other common sayings phrases. Maybe they have alternate meanings, or opposites? Or perhaps they share a common property with other words and can precede or follow the same word. For example, in this brainteaser the words can be divided into two sets:ALLEY, BOB, BULL, HANG, HOT, POLE, THUNDER, WATCH ANSWER: While the words may seem somewhat random and not linked, they can all precede one of two words:
ALLEY, BOB, POLE and THUNDER all precede CAT BULL, HANG, HOT and WATCH all precede DOG
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