Puzzle #7: An Internet Puzzle Hunt (2021)

An internet puzzle hunt that was kicked off with a YouTube video on January 23, 2021, in which two lucky solvers were randomly chosen to win a $50 cash prize!

Before we get into the mechanics of the puzzle and solution, congrats go out to Darren H and Davo B who each scored $50 and were among 14 people who solved the puzzle correctly. Congrats to all 14 of you, really!

Now this puzzle is based on the popular puzzle known as Sudoku.

A lot of us know what it is, but for the uninitiated, Sudoku is played on a grid of 9 x 9 spaces. Within the rows and columns are 9 “squares” (made up of 3 x 3 spaces). Each row, column and square (9 spaces each) needs to be filled out with the numbers 1-9, without repeating any numbers within the row, column or square. (Credit to sudoku.com for this info.)

In most cases, some numbers are already pre-filled in for you. The fewer numbers that are given to you, the more difficult the sudoku is. In the case of what we’re using for Puzzle #7, it’s a fairly easy one.

The Truck Puzzles twist, however, comes in after solving the sudoku puzzle, and figuring out what to do with the numbers in the areas with the colored shapes inside.

Assuming you’ve done the work, here’s the sudoku solution.

What becomes pretty clear now is that we need to move these numbers over to the corresponding shapes that appear to correspond with another YouTube URL, and figuring out what the key is, with circles, triangles pointing up, and triangles pointing down. The string of numbers we have is: 365155256916715.

If you’re familiar with how YouTube formats the URLs for their videos, they are most commonly prefaced with “watch ? v =”, followed by eleven alphanumeric characters, numbers, with both upper case and lower case letters, with an occasional dash or underscore thrown in there. A few examples of such:

https://youtu.be/lUEuavimb08
https://youtu.be/L3e1HesKKMc
https://youtu.be/mAtuRIC-kcw
https://youtu.be/c_7qQkFFEGA

Now, the dilemma is this: how do we get a usable 11 character YouTube URL out of something that’s 15 characters long? Well, knowing we need to pare this down, let’s get to the work of figuring out the key.

If we know that the URL is very likely going to contain letters AND numbers, we’ll need to see which of these would translate, and the easiest way to do it is using our trusty A1-Z26 cipher, which has come into play in past puzzles.

Since some letters correspond to numbers that have double digits, it’s safe to assume that shapes and colors that are paired, would translate to a letter that’s at least J or later in the alphabet… so let’s translate those to letters.

All of these pairs also happen to be triangles, so one could also reason that ALL the triangles could be letters. So let’s translate those to letters too.

That leaves the circles. Since we are assuming the triangles are letters, then we can also assume the circles are numbers, so we don’t need to do anything with those…

365155256916715 has now become 36EO5Y69PGO, but this 11-character video ID still doesn’t pull anything up on YouTube.

We need to discern which of the letters are upper case and which are lower case, since we know most YT URLs contain both. If you’ve made it this far, it’s pretty easy to figure out that the triangles that point up are the upper case, and the ones that point down are lower case, which then gives us the correct URL:
https://youtu.be/36eo5Y69PGo

Plugging this one in to YouTube sends us to a thirty-second ad from a corporation known as Hornet Viking, a company with the same logo as previously seen on the stickers that have appeared in treasure chests from past hunts, and the devious entity we were warned about by our enigmatic friend Ken Thoriving after the last puzzle.

The ad itself also briefly appeared in previous puzzle videos as well. It’s creepy, isn’t it?

At the end of the ad, the company’s website pops up: hornetviking.com. (The following website actions are no longer active:) Heading over there, we’re treated to the company’s logo on its distinctive blue background. If you run your mouse or cursor over the eye, it glows bright green.

By clicking on the eye, we’re brought to a very antiquated looking directory with folders for each of the puzzles, including our current puzzle #7, and also one for puzzle #8, which doesn’t yet exist but we’ll get to that later.

Clicking on the links to earlier puzzles shows us a photo of something having to do with that particular puzzle, be it a treasure chest or a screen shot from the puzzle.

But clicking on the one for Puzzle #7 gets us to the finish line! A simple email and a security check (to make sure you weren’t cheating) put 14 of you on the list for potentially winning a $50 prize. One other bonus treat was being able to see the “Season One Finale” video before it was eventually made public two weeks later.

If you haven’t yet seen that one, the link to it is in the column to the right, and is a pretty tidy summation of our side story involving Ken Thoriving to this point, if you’ve been following along.

…and that about wraps it up… except for…

Inside the Puzzle #8 folder, a couple of you internet sleuths noticed that if you hover your mouse over the photo of the nondescript storefronts, a coded message pops up: YJSFVUSFWDGMAKASFS

One last puzzle to solve—this one was a simple Caesar cipher, that when decoded, reads “Grand Cane, Louisiana”. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions or theories as to what that means or why it’s relevant… but until then, Season One is a wrap, and the story continues soon with Puzzle #8—another Twin Cities physical treasure hunt.