Follow a number sequence like 2, 4, 6, 8, which you can give to players as a clue. In this sentence, that would be OWECWIAC (again, you’ll need to do some wordsmithing)
Add extra letters into the sequence. Fyoyr yeyxyaymypylyey.
There are endless combinations which allow you to include several in the one escape room game. For example, use an easy version for one of the 1st puzzles and a harder, but similar, one towards the end. This gives players a sense of learning and progression which are major parts of what makes solving puzzles fun.
Lesson 23:
Starting from Responding: oeogmi
Starting from Lesson, skip number: oeopma (wow, 4/6 happened to get same, lol!)
Starting from lesson, include number: seoett
Quite. Now what do we do? Devote our attention back to the previous puzzle, see if that includes some vital piece of information? Keep playing around with the books to see if we can get something more sensible?
Ive been wondering, have people been trying the hiragana input equivalents of some of the japanese text we have been getting? Like a の would be a ‘k’ and so on. One of the articles was about IME setup iirc which sparked my suspicion. Sorry if this has already been done, but I havent fully read through the thread cuz lazy.
I‘m currently going again through the articles, particularly those with lots of text, starting from different places. Or maybe we have been looking at the wrong pages. Maybe it‘s not the first number that indicates the page number, but the biggest?
While I do see where you’re coming from here - the three books we’re most confident on each have the largest number as the page number - except that Japanese: The Spoken Language also matches that requirement, and it’s one of the one’s we’re least confident on.
So, Minna no Nihongo is the most problematic in this regard, because it’s entirely numbers and Japanese characters. Counting now (skipping all numbers and symbols), I’m getting 毎晩休し勉す… which is different to both what I had before and to what @sumsum worked out here… which is kinda curious.
Anyway, if we just type the first romaji letter for each character, we get “MBYSBS”.
If I try it kana keyboard style, it’s まばやしべす, so I’m getting… um… JF7D=R. I… don’t think that’s it.
Question is, what else can I try?
Counting furigana rather than kanji gives, uh…
いょんいいす (= IYNIIS, or E9YEER)
What next? Include the numbers in the count? Render them as furigana?
That’s a good thought - forgot about that option. I tried writing out Minna no Nihongo entirely in romaji and then counting it, and got EBAOMS. Tried omitting the initial 例 as well, and got AKBIBM, which is amusingly coincidental, if nothing else (AKB48 + IBM, you see).
I’m thinking maybe “nurikabe” both because it has 8 letters and the following pattern which I’m starting to think isn’t correct:
The above cipher starts with two of the same characters: AA. So if I take the difference between “h” and “o” (assuming A = 1, B =2, etc) I get 7. So lets assume matching characters means +7.
Out of the 22 eight letter articles found, only “nurikabe” meets this pattern where the cipher starts with two of the same characters “00” and “n” + 7 = “u”.
But I looked into that article and couldn’t find anything, so I’m probably just overthinking it.
I was thinking maybe the cipher isn’t linear, which is why the other double character’s don’t match the same pattern. Maybe the “key” to the cipher shifts with each subsequent character which is why I was only looking at double characters at the start of a cipher.
I’ll probably find out I’m way over thinking it once we discover the key
