@JeremyDover If that's it, I think there must be some kind of hint in the story that points towards it, since the basic things we can do with ROT-N don't seem to work, and things like ROT(N + 6) and the like seem like it would be clued somewhere, since it's basically a Vigenere cipher with unintuitive rotations
I think it's time for some meta, to see how Stiv usually clues things in their puzzles :P
@LukasRotter Stiv has stated before that he would never use a cipher more complex than a Caesar cipher with cluing it in some manner. I thought using the K as the Scrabble tile might be indicating key, and tried Vignere with SCRABBLE as the key with some permutations, but no love.
Well, several of the pieces are supposed to move. The train cars don't move in-game (right?) but they're train cars; and some of the others move in-game. And then some more move in real life, so to speak: ships, the dog.
The blue Qwirkle piece looks like a compass rose.
(Just some random thoughts.)
"move a few pieces about" sounds like specifically not all of them.
work backwards from 10-letter games? I see Quarantine was mentioned above
By the way -- the 10-letter word need not be a game name. "TASK: Decipher the image to find the name of the game which I'll be playing tonight. The answer is 1 word" -- it could be something unique to a game that's not the game's name . (We must find the name of the game, after first finding the 1-word answer.) I doubt this is the case, but it's possible.
I guess so - if someone wanted to construct a puzzle using one of those I don't think there'd be any complaints
'and the like' in my rough summary of the theme is basically supposed to indicate that we're not just restricting to games with an actual board, so a tile game like Carcassone, a card game like Exploding Kittens, or something like dominos would all be 'on-theme' (just examples)
I'll be honest, I thought this puzzle would fall within the first hour - I'm quite surprised it's still going after 2 days. Just shows you can't always judge the difficulty of your own puzzles! Hopefully it doesn't kill the momentum for the chain - falling at the first hurdle...!
@PrinceNorthLæraðr The 3 sticks are used to divide the table into a 3x2 grid. Each game then clues one Braille letter: if it has a piece in a cell, that cell has a dot.
Remember the next puzzle in the chain just needs to incorporate the answer of this one somehow. I picked this particular answer because it lends itself to guessing something visual (like a rebus, for example), which gives you one option immediately, although I'm sure once you start thinking you'll think of others :)
