Just before Christmas every year, a small box is buried somewhere in England.
Elaborate and often cryptic puzzles and clues that reveal the hiding place are then posted on this website. Who will be first to find the treasure? Assemble your team and get hunting!
First time hunter? Read all about it.
If you want to keep playing the game without seeing the full solution, we have also released a "partial solution" which allows you to reveal hints for the game one at a time. If you want to do this, don't click on the solution or marking sheet below!
The game marking spreadsheet also contains space for suggestions for five bonus points for your team. These bonuses cover the main hunt and the adventure game. As before, copy and paste all of the cells into your favourite spreadsheet app, tick the items you got right and send us the result before 23 March. If any teams have close scores, we will double check marking.
The Setters' Notes are nearly complete and will be released soon.
In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this short film of the setters hiding the treasure!
Accordingly, we've removed the "extra" crossword answers from this Universe's solution document, and indicated them in strikethrough in the marking sheet.
We've also been asked how to indicate if you got a question right or wrong - if you're using Google Sheets, a tick suffices; but we can also accept TRUE/FALSE or 0/1 in that column (n.b. we will be applying weights to the scores before working out the winners!)
The solution for the adventure game CATastrophe! will be released soon, along with our Setters' Notes.
This year's hunt is self-marked. We have made a marking spreadsheet available which we hope will make this straightforward. Simply copy and paste all of the cells into your favourite spreadsheet app, tick the items you got right and send us the result before 19 February. If any teams have close scores, we will double check marking.
"They shall not grow old, as we who are left grow old" [2].
In other news, it appears that a website that DaphneHQ hosts as part of its wildly generous social responsibility programme [3] has been hacked! Clement, our Sys Admin Intern, ran out of the server room shouting something about "a ghost in the machine". Very strange. Anyway, a quantity of new text has appeared on The Godstow Witch website. It looks like a load of stuff and nonsense to us!
Several players of our award-winning [4] game CATastrophe! have been struggling variously with herbs and woods. Hopefully the images below will help you a little.
[2] Rigorous data analysis suggests that actually only Senior Executives at DaphneHQ survive long enough to "grow old".
[3] Our lawyers have instructed us to note that technically this programme is a community pay-back scheme that was part of the settlement in a class-action lawsuit relating to the wrongful deaths of a number, okay, lots, of interns.
[4] Best Game by DaphneHQ (not involving squirrels) 1987!
Please note we are also accepting "virtual finds" this year due to strikes/weather etc. As per ATH rules, these are subject to a 24 hour time penalty, and must include very specific directions to the treasure. Also, a team can only make 3 attempts, and each must be at least 24 hours apart.
After our intern Franklin's recent hospital stay, new recruits Antoni and Betty will be helping out with game reviews in the new year.
Our thanks to Edith's Ethereal Peripherals who recently sent us a new product for this season, “Glass Inside” 16K RAM Pack (£20.23) for a review. Our resident art intern lost the instruction book, but luckily we worked out how to use it from the catalogue description, while they were undergoing corrective treatment.
ERRATUM: We would also like to apologise for the various stray lower case letters, typos and white text on white background in the PDF. Almost all of these are totally accidental. Henry, our Typesetting Intern, has since been fired. In a kiln.
RUN!!
We hope that this helps. Remember, you don't have to run faster than the squirrel (that would clearly be impossible) you simply have to run faster than the slowest member of your party. Or slowest two members of your party if there are two squirrels. Or slowest...oh, you'll figure it out. At DaphneHQ your safety is our priority. As one of our many mottos states "A dead customer is a lost revenue opportunity!"
Additionally, our two history interns, Alex and Hannah, had a massive argument about which battle had the highest single-day loss of life - they were totally livid! We asked out in-house AI to help out (the Squirreltron 2001) and it suggested asking them which was the bloodiest battle before the year 0. They could both agree on that, and peace was restored! We have sent them out into the squirrel park to test their survival, evasion, resistance and escape skills which should give them the opportunity to bond even more. Albeit possibly not for very long…
ERRATUM: We have discovered a small error in some of the data in the most recent issue of Computering Magazine. The magazine PDF has been updated and you can find the correct version here. The intern responsible, Carol, has been re-assigned to the squirrel trapping team and has already been sent to the wilds of the Isle of Wight. Her mission is partly to capture more squirrels, but is mostly to find out what happened to the previous trapping expedition. The last pager message we received from them simply read “The horror! The horror!“. Very strange - the Isle of Wight isn’t that bad…
Before we go we would like to share with you a poem from our poetry intern, Adrian. I am sure you will all agree it is a lovely piece, it’s called “The Sourpuss and the Raconteur”. We hope you like it.
- Which king danced in front of a bonfire of cats? (5,3)
- Which parasite do you probably share with cats? (10,6)
- Where did a Russian Queen source her cats from? (5)
To coincide with this, at the same time we will be releasing the full version of the game! Just refresh your browser to get the update (you can tell you are on the full version because it will mention the magazine being "out now").
- A certain command, if repeated, was causing the game to lock up and not respond on some browsers.
- You needed to restart the whole game in order to retry a certain puzzle. This is now fixed so you do not need to restart the game. Just restart the puzzle from where you would expect.
- A few minor issues and typos have been corrected.
This year's hunt consists of two parts - an adventure game and a more traditional puzzle.
You don't have to solve (or even play) the game to solve the main hunt - however doing so will reveal hints, and earn you points based upon how well you do and the thematic links you identify. There is also a separate prize for the team that is first to complete the game! Newcomers to Pablo's ATH may want to start with the game, as it is more user-friendly than the main puzzle.
We recommend playing the game on a desktop/laptop, although it will also work on mobile devices.
We do ask that the more technically minded hunters DO NOT attempt to brute force or reverse engineer the game, as this may overload our server or break the game for everyone else. Thank you for understanding. Enjoy!