This puzzle is made of five fonts, as well as one extraction font. Each font is a minipuzzle that can be solved by installing the font and exploring it in a text editor like Notepad, TextEdit, Microsoft Word, or LibreOffice, although it is also possible to use a font editing program like FontForge to inspect the font directly.
CQenANwmYKnqYM
The uppercase and lowercase letters of this font have been replaced with jigsaw pieces. The uppercase letters are solid jigsaw pieces, and the lowercase letters are hollow jigsaw pieces. Below are the letters in A to Z order.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
Notably, in both sets, the I and J pieces are each half of a puzzle piece that connect together. We should assemble the jigsaw, keeping track of where each letter goes. One way to do so is to open an image editor, type the alphabet in the jigsaw font, type the alphabet again in a reasonable font, overlay the letters on top of the jigsaw pieces, then rearrange them. After assembly, each jigsaw forms a 5x5 grid.
The first grid spells out DECRYPT across the top, and the second grid spells out FONTAME, which is almost FONTNAME, with the remaining letters in order of the alphabet. This indicates we should decrypt the gibberish font name, using a cipher that
- Places the alphabet into a 5x5 grid, where
- A word is written across the top of the grid, and
- Letters I and J share a cell
This identifies the Playfair cipher. There is still some ambiguity between whether the jigsaws are independent Playfair grids, or if they form a two-square cipher. Both the Playfair and two-square cipher operate on bigrams, but the two-square cipher uses different squares for the 1st and 2nd letter of each bigram. Since the font name alternates two uppercase then two lowercase, it is a better fit for two independent Playfair ciphers, where each grid decrypts letters of the corresponding case. Doing the appropriate decryption gives ROboTOveRLorDS or ROBOT OVERLORDS.
Arrow Keys
This font is made of many arrows pointing in different directions, along with a circle and optionally a staircase. Some circles have numbers in them, but most are blank. The given numbers go up to 52.
After some exploration, we find that the uppercase and lowercase letters are arrows, and if a staircase appears on a capital letter, it also appears on the corresponding lowercase letter. The key a-ha (pun intended) is to notice that letters in the QWERTY top row never point up, while letters in the ZXCV bottom row never point down. In other words, these are arrow keys in a more literal sense - the arrows should be placed according to the keys of a QWERTY keyboard. Staircases act as transfer points between the "uppercase" floor and "lowercase" floor. Below is the uppercase grid and lowercase grid.
QWERTYUIOP
ASDFGHJKL
ZXCVBNM
qwertyuiop
asdfghjkl
zxcvbnm
We now need to find a path from 1 to 52. The arrows work according to an Arrow Maze logic puzzle. In this logic puzzle, every square must be visited exactly once, an arrow must be visited at the same time as its given number, and we are allowed to jump over cells. This can be done on the two-keyboard grid.
The extraction lies in the digit row of the keyboard. The keys 1-0, along with -, have been replaced with boxes.
1234567890-
For each glyph, find the letter that appears in the neighboring box on the keyboard, and read in order of the digit row to get the answer ADVERSARIAL.
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
One Hundred Fifty One
In this font, capital letters are unchanged, but lowercase letters have been transformed into many question marks. Each lowercase letter is a clue with exactly one exclamation mark. The dots of the ? and ! chars have been replaced with Poké ball symbols, some of which are filled in, and the font name "One Hundred Fifty One" indicates we only care about Generation I Pokémon. The intended break-in is on the W clue.
w
There are only two Gen 1 Pokémon with three letter names: MUK and MEW. Since we typed W, it's more likely it solves to MEW. From this, we can guess that if a circle is filled in, it matches the letter typed in the font. Checking this on uncommon letters like SQUIRTLE, ELECTABUZZ, or JOLTEON confirms this idea. The lengths and given letters are sufficient to uniquely identify each Pokémon.
Once identified, sort the Pokémon by Pokedex number (slightly suggested by the font name), then read the letters on the exclamation marks to get THE FIRST EVOLUTION OF LETTER M.
| Pokédex Number | Pokemon | Typed Letter | Rendered As | Extracted Letter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7 | SQUIRTLE | Q | q | T |
| 25 | PIKACHU | U | u | H |
| 27 | SANDSHREW | R | r | E |
| 36 | CLEFABLE | L | l | F |
| 37 | VULPIX | V | v | I |
| 46 | PARAS | P | p | R |
| 54 | PSYDUCK | S | s | S |
| 58 | GROWLITHE | I | i | T |
| 67 | MACHOKE | K | k | E |
| 71 | VICTREEBEL | B | b | V |
| 72 | TENTACOOL | E | e | O |
| 73 | TENTACRUEL | C | c | L |
| 74 | GEODUDE | D | d | U |
| 81 | MAGNEMITE | M | m | T |
| 84 | DODRIO | O | o | I |
| 87 | DEWGONG | G | g | O |
| 95 | ONIX | N | n | N |
| 104 | MAROWAK | A | a | O |
| 109 | KOFFING | F | f | F |
| 114 | TANGELA | T | t | L |
| 117 | HORSEA | H | h | E |
| 121 | STARYU | Y | y | T |
| 125 | ELECTABUZZ | Z | z | T |
| 135 | JOLTEON | J | j | E |
| 143 | SNORLAX | X | x | R |
| 151 | MEW | W | w | M |
The Pokémon for letter M is MAGNEMITE, so the answer is MAGNETON.
Do You Have Ligatures Enabled
In typography, a ligature is a way to replace two adjacent glyphs into a single glyph. This is commonly used to make characters look better, such as ligaturing an adjacent "f" and "i" into a single "fi" character. They are usually enabled by default - the font is named "Do You Have Ligatures Enabled" to both hint at how to start, and to make sure we enable ligatures if they were disabled for some reason.
This puzzle replaces the 52 uppercase and lowercase letters with state abbreviations, assigned to letters alphabetically by state abbreviation. Below we type A-Z then a-z in order.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
Lowercase y and z go to U and S characters. Typing "yz" gives a US flag and a grid.
Adjacent states in the US sometimes (but don't always) ligature together into circles connected by a line, with state abbreviation inside the circles. The ligatures are undirected (ON = NO = the IL-IN ligature), and arrangement of the circles does not correspond to their geographical arrangement in the US. We need to map out all adjacencies that ligature together, then arrange them into a grid. (There are about 100 edges in the full US graph, of which about 50 are used in this puzzle.)
The fully defined diagram draws out the answer SHRIMP ACT.
What is This A Font for Ants
At normal size, the font looks fine, but a close examination of the capital letters reveals why this is a font for ants. The uppercase letters are actually made of excessively verbose crossword clues arranged in a capital letterform. Below we display the font at size 512.
Crossword clues for A-M have (n) at the end, and clues for N-Z have (±m) at the end, with the latter ordered alphabetically. After solving some of both, we find that all answers to A-M clues are words ending in ANT, and they can be paired to N-Z clue answers. Figuring this out early can help with IDing the more obtuse clues.
| Typed Letter | Clue | Answer |
|---|---|---|
| A | This word could describe present day people, but it usually refers to workers in the Middle Ages under feudalism. These people farmed the land. raised animals, and paid taxes to a landlord. You could technically call them tenants, but that wouldn't be 100% correct. The word carries a poor connotation. (1) | PEASANT |
| B | Before you get upset after solving this clue, let me promise you, this is a real word, it's just an uncommon one. It is used in heraldry, which is filled with similarly weird words. Imagine an animal. Now imagine it lying down, with its body resting on its legs. Hold up, there's one more thing. While lying down, the animal lifts its head. Channel your inner coat of arms design skills! (6) | COUCHANT |
| C | Some things, like these letters, are small. Other things are big. The answer to this clue is definitely big. It is enormous, and it is titanic. But this does not disambiguate the synonym to use. Hopefully this helps - the answer is five letters long and is the name of a mythical creature. (6) | GIANT |
| D | A common tool in home improvement, this substance is usually applied from something akin to a toothpaste tube. It can be made of many different materials, although silicone is the most popular. It is applied around pipes and other leaky structures to help close up any gaps. They may or may not be adhesive (4) | SEALANT |
| E | Historically, this has been a person. They teach in schools, do administrative tasks, work at the dentist, and help executives. However, there are a few virtual versions, powered by improvements in speech recognition. These virtual versions default to female voices, which raises questions about their effect on societal gender roles. (2) | ASSISTANT |
| F | Pay attention! It's crucial! It is paramount that you understand what word this is. Doing so is paramount, vital, and of great significance. You might say it's the opposite of something irrelevant, or the opposite of the opposite of essential. Good luck with this! (2) | IMPORTANT |
| G | "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills" - these are the words of one of Winston Churchill's most famous speeches during the Second World War. They are a good example of someone with this character trait, indicating a high level of stubborness or obstinance. (2) | DEFIANT |
| H | This is nowhere close to the oldest religion. Even ignoring smaller tribal religions, Buddhism was founded over 1000 years before this one. A form of Christianity, this has its roots in complaints that drove people up the wall! Or rather, up the door. Note you want a practitioner of this religion, not the religion itself. (3) | PROTESTANT |
| I | Joy from Inside Out is a good example of this. She is bubbly, cheerful, and optimistic, and someone with this quality is usually carefree and lighthearted. However, if we use a different definition, then many depressed people could also be described this way, depending on their body (1) | BUOYANT |
| J | This term describes the relationship someone has with their ancestor. Normally not used for parental relationships. It is more commonly used when describing plant and animal relations (1) | DESCENDANT |
| K | A weapon or tool with a sharp edge could be described like this, but this is an archaic usage. In modern English, this is used to describe a sharp tone of speech. A clear, cutting remark would meet this definition. Vigorous oration or caustic criticism would also work (2) | TRENCHANT |
| L | An animal enters this state after hibernating. Someone who hasn't exercised in a while, but plans to later, might be this. Connotes a deeper pause than sleeping. An inactive volcano is this, scientifically (6) | DORMANT |
| M | It's a mandate, it's a document, it's a glam metal band - it's all those and more! Generally, this legal term describes when an authority has grounds to violate an individual's right to freedom or privacy. Requirements vary by country, but in the United States the fourth Amendment requires police to obtain probable cause (4) | WARRANT |
| N | League of Legends was first released as a free-to-play game in 2009, and still receives periodic updates. It is often cited as the world's current largest esport, with leagues around the world that funnel into a yearly World Championship. It's the source of K/DA, a virtual K-pop group named after the game term KDA that correlates with wins. You want what A is. (+2) | ASSIST |
| O | These floating objects are never found in bathtubs. They exist in lakes and the ocean. These man-made floats serve many purposes, and although they don't have to be anchored, they often are to signify important locations, like parts of a race track, or dangerous rocks. Part of tsunami warning systems (+3) | BUOY |
| P | The Simpsons are a cultural institution in America. They've gotten worse - opinions are divided on when exactly episodes declined in quality. But they're still going and it's a huge entertainment empire. This gag, found at the end of every Simpsons opening, changes every episode. (-1) | COUCH |
| W | Whatever your opinions on the greenhouse gas emissions of blockchain-based currency, it's clear that cryptocoins have captured worldwide attention. This four letter abbreviation of blockchain based finance aims to remove the need for central authorities, using smart contracts commonly implemented on Ethereum (+1) | DEFI |
| R | This is the name of a pivotal pre-ACT 5 animation in the web...comic named Homestuck. (Look, it's complicated.) It has the same name as its background music, composed by Radiation, now more well known as Toby Fox. Interestingly, while most of Homestuck is about characters rising to loftier heights, this animation focuses on the opposite (+2) | DESCEND |
| S | Most colleges have several, although their quality heavily depends on the university, and in many colleges it's expected that students move out after their first two years. Often named after famous people, although MIT's East Campus (the home of Floor Pi) is not named after anyone (-4) | DORM |
| T | Having its origins in judo from Japan, Brazilian jiu-jitsu was developed around 1920 by Helio Gracie and his brothers. Its practitioners often wear this cotton uniform, which is sometimes called a kimono (-4) | GI |
| U | This international trade concept is also a programming keyword. For millennia, people have traded goods and services with each other in increasingly complex relationships. Politics further increase the difficulty of negotiating trade partnerships. The answer is six letters (+1) | IMPORT |
| V | As your parents might have told you, eat your vegetables! These vegetables (plural) are no exception. In one folk tale, one of these was placed under a mattress to test if a woman was who she claimed to be. All things considered that folk tale sucks (+0) | PEAS |
| W | Someone who really likes the SATs might be this, but only if you are fond of bad puns. Otherwise, this noun or verb is a better descriptor of what people do when they disapprove of something, and want to be heard. This is usually the first part of a revolution, although most don't reach that point. People often bring banners. (-1) | PROTEST |
| X | One of many marine mammal species, this animal has many variations. They are carnivorous, semiaquatic, and very, very fat. Like, wow. Wow wow wow. In pop culture, they are known for balancing a beach ball on their nose, especially at the circus. (+0) | SEAL |
| Y | Appearing in both farming and warfare, this is a long, narrow ditch. Their use in warfare is limited these days. Changes in tactics, battle sites, and weaponry have made them ineffective (+4) | TRENCH |
| Z | Antarctica is cold and icy, but at least there are penguins. It is filled with glaciers, and the one of interest was named after a certain mate. An Aviation Machinist's Mate, to be precise. On December 30, 1946, he and five men survived a seaplane crash on the nearby Noville Peninsula. (-3) | WARR |
After pairing up the clues, add the two numbers in each pair together, then index it into the A-M clue or N-Z clue to extract the cluephrase PHILIP FRY SHOW. The answer is FUTURAMA.
| Typed | Answer | Typed | Answer | Total Index | Extracted |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | PEASANT | V | PEAS | 1 + 0 = 1 | P |
| B | COUCHANT | P | COUCH | 6 - 1 = 5 | H |
| C | GIANT | T | GI | 6 - 4 = 2 | I |
| D | SEALANT | X | SEAL | 4 + 0 = 4 | L |
| E | ASSISTANT | N | ASSIST | 2 + 2 = 4 | I |
| F | IMPORTANT | U | IMPORT | 2 + 1 = 3 | P |
| G | DEFIANT | Q | DEFI | 2 + 1 = 3 | F |
| H | PROTESTANT | W | PROTEST | 3 - 1 = 2 | R |
| I | BUOYANT | O | BUOY | 1 + 3 = 4 | Y |
| J | DESCENDANT | R | DESCEND | 1 + 2 = 3 | S |
| K | TRENCHANT | Y | TRENCH | 2 + 4 = 6 | H |
| L | DORMANT | S | DORM | 6 - 4 = 2 | O |
| M | WARRANT | Z | WARR | 4 - 3 = 1 | W |
Extraction
The extraction font is made of 26 different fonts. The font used for the uppercase and lowercase versions of a letter are the same.
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz
Each minipuzzle answer has a font name as a prefix or suffix.
(ROBOT O)VERLORDS
ADVERS(ARIAL)
(MAGNETO)N
SHR(IMP ACT)
(FUTURA)MA
The final step of the puzzle is to take each minipuzzle, and identify the letter in the Extraction font that comes from the prefix/suffix font. The intended solution is to only identify the five fonts used in the minipuzzle answers, by comparing letters of that font to the Extraction font. This gives the answer SWORD.
It is also possible to use tools like WhatTheFont to ID all the fonts without the help of the minipuzzles, as long as we're willing to grind through the tiny variations between sans serif fonts and knockoff clones of more famous fonts. The full list of fonts used is listed below for completeness.
| Letter | Rendered As | Source Font |
|---|---|---|
| A | Aa | ONYX |
| B | Bb | COMIC SANS |
| C | Cc | PAPYRUS |
| D | Dd | FUTURA |
| E | Ee | CALISTO |
| F | Ff | CHILLER |
| G | Gg | FORTE |
| H | Hh | GIGI |
| I | Ii | VERDANA |
| J | Jj | TIMES NEW ROMAN |
| K | Kk | PACIFICO |
| L | Ll | COMFORTAA |
| M | Mm | CENTURY |
| N | Nn | HARLOW |
| O | Oo | MAGNETO |
| P | Pp | OSWALD |
| Q | MONOTYPE CORSIVA | |
| R | Rr | IMPACT |
| S | Ss | ROBOTO |
| T | Tt | OLD ENGLISH TEXT |
| U | Uu | BROADWAY |
| V | Vv | MV BOLI |
| W | Ww | ARIAL |
| X | Xx | COURIER NEW |
| Y | Yy | CALIBRI |
| Z | Zz | ROCKWELL |
Author's Notes
The fonts were created with FontForge, augmented with Inkscape for vector graphics, and the fontTools library to decompile fonts and assemble the more programmatic ones. We tried a few other tools and found FontForge worked the best. It also came with pretty good documentation for typography novices like ourselves. Other documentation we found useful: Simon Cozens's explanation of OpenType, and Microsoft's documentation of the OpenType spec, both of which were helpful even though we only used features supported by TrueType.
We considered giving a text box for solvers to try the font on the website, but we thought that made the puzzle feel like an interactive blackbox puzzle that relied on server resources, rather than a font puzzle. We wanted it to be very clear that the puzzleyness was coming from the font and nothing else, so that's why we asked solvers to install the font themselves. Our hope was that solving puzzles by typing in your text editor would be a novel experience. (Alex: I also liked the idea of polluting solvers' font libraries with complete garbage. Feel free to blame me.) The main consequence was that our minipuzzles needed to be interesting even if solvers decompiled the font, which killed some of our ideas like hiding content in Cyrillic letters or katakana.
Another consequence of making people download the fonts as actual artifacts was that we had to work around the many different ways in which various text editors deal with fonts. For example, the overt font name for Do You Have Ligatures Enabled was necessitated by the fact that most text editors, such as Microsoft Word, have ligatures off by default, and thus the core feature of this minipuzzle would have been extremely difficult to discover. Other minipuzzle ideas had to die entirely, because it was too difficult to ensure consistent and functional behavior of unusual font features. Making people download dumb fonts was absolutely worth it, but there’s still a treasure trove of weird font quirks that’s been left unexplored!
Alex: I got the idea for this puzzle from the ARG Arcane Game. One of their puzzles had ciphertext that became readable when copy-pasted off their page. I was curious how it worked, expecting some crazy JavaScript based solution. Imagine my surprise when I discovered it was all from a custom font! They only used it for a substitution cipher, but once I knew custom fonts could be used for puzzles I was certain we could do more for Teammate Hunt. OpenType fonts let you do crazy things (see Fontemon), so maybe there will be more next year...
Rachel: My font hot take is that Comic Sans isn’t that bad and that, like pineapple on pizza, this is simply a thing that people like to hate for the sake of hating things. It’s a little goofy. You’re a little goofy. Deal with it.
Specific font commentary:
CQenANwmYKnqYM: This font was one of the first proposed in brainstorming and went through testing unchanged. It acted as our free answer to assign last when constructing other fonts with more constraints.
Arrow Keys: For much of testing, the name of the font hinted towards the Arrow Maze, rather than laying them out according to a keyboard. We found that testsolvers were less familiar with Arrow Maze than we thought. Groups that solved the minipuzzle often inferred the rules on their own once they had the grid, so the font name was revised towards hinting the keyboard.
One Hundred Fifty One: This was constructed backwards from the desired answer MAGNETON. We wanted to stick EEVEE into the puzzle, due to its crazy letter pattern, but it didn't give letters that worked for the cluephrase. We had just enough slack to make the cluephrase work while forcing MAGNEMITE onto the M.
Do You Have Ligatures Enabled: This was also one of the first ideas proposed in brainstorming, to exploit the font presentation. However, as we built out the puzzle, we realized IDing ligatures with no constraints wasn't very fun or interesting. The US states were added to make it possible to find all pairs without trying all pairs (it was a lucky coincidence that our desired diagram had 48 nodes). Apologies for using the incredibly jank New Jersey - Delaware border from the Twelve-Mile Circle. We tried to remove it, but it changed the runtime of the subgraph isomorphism solver from "1 minute" to "did not finish after 30 minutes".
What is This A Font for Ants: The original plan for this font was We're Gonna Need a Bigger Screen, and would have worked in the opposite direction of requiring a really small font size to get something readable. After some research, we weren't sure how well different programs would support glyphs taller than a "normal" font height, so we switched strategies. The font has enough granularity to make the letters about 3x smaller, but it caused rendering slowdowns in local testing. (Alex: I wrote all the clues, and had a lot of trouble writing clues with exact character lengths. To make it easier on myself, I was deliberately inconsistent on whether clues ended in a period or not, to enable off-by-one tweaking. If you see this, it means none of the fact-checkers complained.)
Extraction: During construction, we learned that Papyrus differs between Windows and Mac. We considered removing Papyrus from the extraction font, but 1) Papyrus was distinctive enough that we thought the ID would be okay, 2) it didn't appear in the answer word, and 3) were we really going to separate Sans and Papyrus? As for W. D. Gaster, it seemed more thematic to not include his font.