My family has a tradition of presenting puzzles to each other at Christmas. Typically the way this works is:
* There's a set of small gifts (often candy), with either no labels, or labels that don't have intrinsic meaning (e.g. just numbers)
* There's some extra material -- a sheet of paper with some text on it, for example.
The family has to figure out, first, what the text (or other provided material) means, and second, how to use that information to determine who gets which gift. The goal isn't to get the family to do mindless busywork, in other words; part of the puzzle is figuring out the rules.
For example, one year my sister provided a numbered set of sequences of numbers, which mapped to keys on a piano. These then created simple tunes which we could associate with different family members. I got the SMB1 main theme; go figure.
I'd like to do one this year, and what I was thinking was that I could provide a set of images and diagrams that individually made little sense, but if you could figure one of them out, it would provide a clue to help decode another; once you understood each image you could use them to "decrypt" other images/diagrams that were on the actual gifts.
Thus far all I have, though, is:
1) An image of some text, but taken at an extreme angle. Thus to have the image make sense, you have to tilt the paper it's printed on and look at it at the same extreme angle.
2) A substitution cipher in ternary (i.e. 000 = 'a', 222 = 'z'). But instead of using numbers, each character is represented by a sequence of three lines (low/middle/high), with the entire text looking like the output of an oscilloscope.
3) A text where the strokes for the individual characters have been broken out into multiple sub-images, which have to be overlaid on top of each other to reconstruct the original message. E.g. if the text were "apple" then the top stroke of the 'a', the upright of one 'p' and the curve of the second, half the 'l', and a bit of the 'e would go in one image, and the other image would have the other components.
(So, for example, if you looked at the first image at an angle, it might say "overlay", a hint for the third image. That image in turn might say "ternary" or "cipher" as a hint for the second image)
I'd love to get more suggestions from you all for other neat tricks along these lines that could be done. The overall puzzle, ideally, shouldn't take more than a few hours' work from several reasonably smart people with diverse backgrounds. I also encourage those of you whose families consist of gigantic nerds to try doing this yourselves; it's honestly a lot of fun.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
They should definitely be solvable without using a computer, calculator, or other "tool assistance". If such were allowed, then there would practically have to be some rules stated at the beginning to guide the players; otherwise there's too many possible interpretations for the clues. E.g. is an image of static a QR code? An array of binary data? A jumbled image? Just a hint to turn on the radio?
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I really like your first idea, it's an anamorphosis (the link is here if someone wants to learn more about it, since you obviously already know about it). You can also hide this distorted text on a "normal" picture.
that individually made little sense, but if you could figure one of them out, it would provide a clue to help decode another
Not that I've gotten the idea from another recent thread in this forum, but you could use a variation of the logic puzzle. Wrap each present in a different color, one for each person. Assign each person a few hidden attributes ("secret number", "soul animal" etc).
Start with a few of the usual hints like "The person with the secret number 8 gets the yellow present". Include a few personal traits like "The person with the largest secret number has long hair", possibly including some of last year's notable events ("The owl is the soul animal of the person who gave birth").
Give just enough hints to deduce one assignment of person to present. Inside the present is an additional hint (or additional hints) to solve the next, etc.
Of course you don't just give out the hints, but you make them do little puzzles to determine the hint. From math puzzles to figure out a secret number, to someone's very own quest to find their soul animal, go nuts.
It's not the most interesting overarching theme, but it'll give you a lot of freedom with the individual puzzles, and every now and then someone gets to open a present and share their treats.
