Ready to match wits with me? Dive into this year’s array of Holiday Hullabaloo — Festive Frivolity — Seasonal Silliness…

Canon’s Christmas Conundrums

Canon's Confusing, Confounding, Concerning, Conniving, Condescending, Christmas Conundrums

Canon's Confusing, Confounding, Concerning, Conniving, Condescending, Christmas Conundrums

Perplex Me!

Past Puzzles

See what you’re up against:

This puzzle, from 2020, had the title “The Bard’s Music.”

Yes, that’s all you get to go on.

Canon’s Difficulty Rating: 7/10

A pinkish-red background with black and red text. The top reads, 'For our first puzzle, we'll keep it simple.' The center features, 'Give unto Caesar...' and below that, 'DylGcub (Q:K)' with an upward pointing arrow labeled 'This is your password.'

  • ASYOULIKEIT

    If you watched this video muted, you’re probably pretty lost. You’ll notice a musical sequence within that, while not exactly catchy, does spell

    B-A-G, B-A-G-G-A-G-E

    Baggage is one of the longest common English words that can be spelled entirely with musical notes. Can you think of another one that ties?

    “Bag and baggage,” as one would likely only know if they spent some time Googling on this puzzle (or were often last picks for dodgeball in high school) is an idiomatic phrase coined in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” There’s also some Morse code at the end to nudge you along in the right direction.

A cipher containing characters of various origin with the seed word 'W' at the top and a password below reading 'KRQPKPQPBNP'.

  • JEREMIAH

    This one might be straightforward, but it still contains a fun little Easter Egg. Or… Christmas… stocking.

    “Give unto Caesar” is of course a truncated quote from Jesus Christ in the Bible, but here it functions as a hint for the type of encryption at play. A caesar cipher, in which letters are shifted up or down the alphabet to become different letters, turns

    DYLYGCUB

    into

    JEREMIAH.

    As a little extra, a letter-to-number exchange of Q and K gives you the chapter and verse 17:11, taking you to a verse which compares wealthy people to partridges.

As an example for an entry-level enigma, here’s the opener, “Partridge,” in my “12 Conundrums of Christmas” series from 2022.

Canon’s Difficulty Rating: 1/10

This is another entry from 2022, “Maids-a-Milking.” If there is a takeaway to be had in this puzzle, it is the importance of breaking a complex problem down into its component pieces, and tackling them one by one. I really enjoy this puzzle also because the cipher grid, in effect, transforms before your eyes when you discover my devious trick.

Canon’s Difficulty Rating: 8/10

  • DULCEDELECHE

    One thing you’ll notice about the most difficult of my puzzles is that you often must complete multiple steps to solve them.

    I’m going to hit the highlights on this one, step-by-step.

    1.) Solve the ciphertext. If you have nothing else to go on (like a key, for example,) but have quite a large text sample to work with (like the 64 symbols in this puzzle,) you can cross your fingers and hope that one “letter” in the ciphertext (in this case, a symbol) becomes a single letter in the English alphabet. If this is the case, you can crack the cipher with frequency analysis (E is the most common letter of the English language, etc. etc.) Or, if you’re in a hurry, you can just use an online tool.

    2.) USE EACH PIECE TO REPLACE THOSE AT THE BOTTOM AND SOLVE THE PASSWORD GOOD LUCK

    Here is the translated text. Here is where noticing unusual things is helpful. When first noticing the W at the top of the puzzle, for example, you might have thought “West?”

    This isn’t a compass, but the thought is good. The shape of the grid is a hint here. As is the use of the word “piece” in the cipher. We’re not just looking at a cipher… We’re looking at a chessboard. With this in mind, the password at the bottom will come readily to some, and less so to others. It is written entirely with chess piece shorthand notation (K=King, R=Rook, etc. Note that N=Knight, because K is already taken.) Now, we just use the circled letters and starting positions for pieces to solve the password. How do we differentiate between the queen and king’s location on the board? Knowing that (W)hite is at the top.

    The first circled letter, a (R)ook, translated to E, the next, a (B)ishop, translated to C, and so on. The password is DULCEDELECHE— At least a tentative connection to the “Maids-a-Milking” title.

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I have a whole page on the website for this, but if you’re eager, you can do it here. Why not?