My NINTH cake day is in a couple weeks. Insane.

Enjoy some presents on me!

If you wanna thank me send some cat pics or tell me your fav SG memory.

Lvl 3, ends May 21st.

EDIT:

Hey all! At least 166 of you got the puzzle, congrats :)

The puzzle was a substitution cipher with the key being the "Dancing Men Cipher." All that was needed was to match the dancing man to the corresponding letter. If you hovered over the dancing men code picture, it said "sub cipher capitalized" to help indicate that all the letters needed to be capital. The flag is apart of the cipher and represents the end of the word - not a capital letter or otherwise. The capital letters were the five letters needed for the giveaway url.

Here is some info from boxentriq about the cipher:

  • The Dancing Men cipher originated from the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
    In the story, Sherlock Holmes examines the occurrences of the dancing figures, and realizes that it is a substitution cipher. He then cracks the code by frequency analysis.
  • Not all letters appear in the book. Sherlock Holmes fans have tried to find a pattern for many years. A Danish scholar, Aage Rieck Sørensen, found a hidden pattern in the cipher and added the missing letters (and numerals).
  • Text is written without spaces. Instead, each man at the end of a word holds a flag.
  • Dancing men code is a simple form of monoalphabetic substitution cipher.

Thanks everyone and see you at the next puzzle!

View attached image.
2 years ago*

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Happy Early Cakeday!

2 years ago
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Happy cake day!

2 years ago
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Happy early cake day!

View attached image.
2 years ago
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Happy cake day!

2 years ago
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Happy cake day! 👍

2 years ago
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Thank you and happy cake day!

2 years ago
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Have an early bumpy cakeday!

2 years ago
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View attached image.
2 years ago
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2 years ago
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First of all, happy cakeday!
I was checking out the puzzle, but after 5 minutes staring and trying "things" I have no idea... 😅 Maybe I will check back later...

edit: omg, i figured it out... 🤦‍♂️ not bad :D

2 years ago*
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Why not use capitals in the cipher? confusing...

2 years ago*
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Perhaps the cipher does not have capitals?

2 years ago
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I used a generator that did it for me. I also do say somewhere in the puzzle that it needs to be capitalized.

2 years ago
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Weird, most versions of the cipher use the flag to denote capitalization

2 years ago
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Happy cakeday.

2 years ago
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Happy Cakeday!

2 years ago
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Happy Cakeday

2 years ago
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Happy cakeday!
Super nice puzzle, and the train was a nice one as well!

2 years ago
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Happy cakeday!

2 years ago
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Happy Cakeday 🎂
=)

2 years ago
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Happy cakeday!
Apparently there's more to this puzzle than just this cipher.
Tried shift but still no luck. Hopefully I'm not chasing red herring :D

2 years ago
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Hey thanks for giving this a shot! There is not more to the puzzle, don't overthink it! :)

2 years ago
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Happy Cakeday

2 years ago
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All these puzzles are starting to make me feel like the stupidest person on the planet.

edit: Never mind, I figured it out.

2 years ago*
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same. i used to think i was good at puzzles until i started reading the forums here 🥴

edit: apparently not same, haha

2 years ago
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It was more by accident than by design. The first trick is recognizing that it's a cipher, and what sort of cipher (the hint is in the title). Also, a quick peek at the source of the cipher gives another clue.

This post has helped immensely, and I still only seem to get about 1 in 8: https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/TLR8m/zelgh-magic-guide-to-basic-sg-puzzling-update-october-2017

2 years ago
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Thanks, I still don't get it. It's easy to find the cipher, but I don't get what do you mean by the "source of the cipher"?
Also the image tags seem to suggest some sort of rot should be used (?), but I can't get this part.

2 years ago
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I'm trying not to give too much away, since OP isn't giving any world-shattering clues yet... but one of the things mentioned in the "guide to puzzles" link I provided is to "View Source". I discovered that if you highlight something, say just the image that contains the cipher, and then click View Source, it'll only show the source code for whatever you highlighted. Alternative text, which is what would show up when you can't get images to load, and is represented by the code "img alt=", has an additional clue.

2 years ago
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Yes, but it's not very helpful :) Looking at the code it seems to me that one character is already marked as uppercase, but my decoded string doesn't match. Anyways thanks. I don't want to push you any further, to not spoil too much :D

2 years ago
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All you need is the decoded string of five letters. They're the giveaway link. If you hover over the image it should show you the clue that BlaiddGwyn is talking about.

2 years ago
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Thanks. Solved xD The solution was pretty straightforward. I just didn't expect that. First time I see the key in such combination. 😅

2 years ago*
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2 years ago
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Glad you persevered!

2 years ago
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Happy cakeday!

2 years ago
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Happy Cake Day!
Thanks :)

2 years ago
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Bumf for solved

2 years ago
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🎂 Happy Cake Day 🎂

2 years ago
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Happy early cakeday!

2 years ago
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