Hint for Sage Sanctum Scramble

Hrm. That doesn’t sound familiar for 52. Did you look at all three HINTs? More strongly, all three of them are things you do with the letters.

Solution: I intersected the letter sets from the first one, which was fairly obvious, then the tricky bit was realizing to subtract the letters from the third hint and then anagramming them according to the second which, again, was pretty clear.

For 59, I was thinking that possibly translating to numbers as you tried but then using them as skips through the alphabet instead of direct letter numbers. But then again, I tend to overthing DiBianca puzzles and they’re simpler than the baroque things I want to try, so that’s probably wrong. Edit: yeah, that doesn’t work at all. Also, they’re very long for words: what kind of sentence has two 14-letter (?) words and nothing shorter than eight?

Edit edit: Oooh. The lengths are a palindrome, though they don’t seem to be letter numbers that spell anything. Oops. Not quite: I just can’t read.

1 Like

For 59:

  1. You are right that a sentence with 14-letters words seems unlikely.

  2. Notice that each word contains an even number of glyphs.

  3. Group the glyphs into digraphs and solve the cryptogram.

  4. There is a pattern to the mapping between digraphs and letters. But you can also solve the cryptogram the old-fashioned way without noticing the pattern (like I did the first time I solved this puzzles) by focusing, as usual, on short words and repeated letters.

  5. To get you started, %& = T.

2 Likes

Hah. I just came here to post this. Thanks!

1 Like

Currently stuck on #15, #32, and #34. I have solved every other puzzle from 1 to 61. There is no puzzle 69105.

Re: #15, I got past the helium balloon, finally, only to get stuck with the kindly witch and stringless candle. Neither item really suggests any obvious property to me. At least not yet.

Re: #32, Stuck at the end with military personnel. Tried so many guesses.

Re: #34, I’m stuck right from the beginning. I can’t stand mimes in text games. I can’t see them, so it’s very difficult to visualize what action is being performed. Is the swinging arm going upward where the other hand was, or swinging outward and away from the side, or is it swinging in front of the mime’s face or chest? And if this is a particular sports move, I’m at a severe disadvantage in guessing it.

Some nudges which hopefully don’t give things too much away, since some of these I thought were fun:

15: maybe think about some other kinds of witch?

32: have you tried working your way up through the ranks?

34: ugh, this one I had to just find the answer, I also found it super hard. The motion involves the first arm going straight up, then the other swinging up from the back through where the first arm had been and then down their front.

Thanks. #15 is now solved. I’ll have to research your suggestions for the other two.

Now #34 is solved. After both looking at baseball terms and basketball terms for ball throwing (alley-oop seemed like what was described but unacceptable), I finally thought to look up volleyball terms. I had long tried spike and strike, but finally another word was suggested, and I was able to finally work through the rest of the mime’s gauntlet. Thankfully, I did not have to research soccer, football, cricket, or lacrosse.

Oh, I thought it was a tennis serve? Volleyball might be a better match, actually. But who knows – that was an annoying puzzle because I think it would be easy if you could actually see what’s being described.

No, no, you’re right. Tennis is a better match. I never even considered tennis, either. And I finally solved #32 as well. I don’t know how I kept overlooking the answer. Maybe I misspelt it one time and didn’t retry it. Thanks again.

1 Like

I resorted to the walkthrough for puzzle #37, but don’t understand why the keyword is flinch. Could someone explain it to me?

I can’t say I really understood it, but I was able to get this one. Floyd’s dialogue is all rhyming – one regular clause, then another where he says the keyword isn’t [some word starting with FL- and rhyming with the first clause]. When he shows the rope-and-crank apparatus, that’s a winch, so the pattern gets you FLINCH. I couldn’t figure out what was going on with the worm, though – snake/FLAKE, maybe? Except it says it’s a worm and it’s tiny, and I can’t figure out any potentially-rhyming words that generate a different one with an FL- added.

w/r/t the logic behind #37: I think it’s supposed to be an INCH-worm, though that still feels a bit slanty. I got a clue where he grabbed his ear between his thumb and index finger, which was where things clicked for me.

1 Like

Still #37: In addition to the apparatus, the worm, and the ear grabbing, he also tightened his belt. Until I saw the worm, I was sure it had to be some kind of synonym for PULL, but could not think of any that started with FL. It did not occur to me that the apparatus could be a winch. How did you interpret the hint with the ear grabbing, Thomas?

1 Like

Still 37: PINCH, and now that you bring up the belt, I’m realizing it must be CINCH. I only got pinch by physically doing it myself, which was sort of fun.

2 Likes

Ah, yes, of course. Now it’s falling into place. Thanks!

1 Like

OK, I give up: does someone want to just answer 60 for me? I’ve read all the hints here, kicked it around off and on for over two weeks, and I still have no idea.

You’ll kick yourself. RIDDLE

Ah, ok, I feel better now: I would never in a million years have seen that. I mean, I can see it now, but it would never have occurred to me that anyone would say those “sound uncanny or absurd.”