Perplex City Updates

by Guy Parsons

Welcome to this brief guide to the Perplex City mystery, now slightly longer than 60 Seconds long. Sorry, false advertising, I know.

What is this Perplex City thing?

The ‘Perplex City’ mystery is fundamentally a treasure hunt.

Perplex City is a city that we can communicate with - it’s a bit like a huge Earth city, but with fancier gadgets and with puzzles as an important part of their culture. Their sacred artefact, the Receda Cube, has been stolen and buried somewhere on Earth. If you find it, there’s a reward of £100,000 (and roughly equivalent figures in other currencies.)

To find the cube, you’ll need to solve the puzzles on the Perplex City cards (or at least find out the answers…) and investigate the story behind the Cube Theft by following a cryptic trail of websites, emails, and other cool stuff. On the other hand, the puzzle cards themselves are challenging, beautifully designed and great fun to solve (especially with friends!) so if it all sounds a bit too much then they’re still worth investing in.

Sounds good! How do I start?

There’s nowhere to ‘register’ and nothing to download, much as a real-life detective doesn’t have to do those things to start working on a case. It isn’t like spending £40 on a computer game or setting up an Xbox Live account. However, there are some sharp first moves you could make to get yourself started:

• The main Perplex City website has a whole bunch of awesome stuff to get you up to speed. You should really check out The Guide, which is a thorough retelling of our quest for the Cube. Not only does it describe what’s been discovered so far and some of the characters we’ve been introduced to, it’ll also give you a flavour of how the game works and how puzzles feature in it. Take a long lunch and go through it - your boss said I should tell you that’s OK.
• Buying cards makes you a better person. Sorry, but it’s kind of a karma thing. (Note: buying the cards isn’t mandatory, and you can follow the Perplex City mystery - or maybe even find the Cube - without spending a cent if you so wish.)
• Anything you’re confused about? Check out the wiki, an encyclopedia of our total knowledge to date.
• But the fun part (now you know your Viard from your Violet) is joining in with the group of people trying to find the Cube. The Perplex City website has some cool forums, but the dedicated hang out at the Unforums (and its associated chatroom.) People are generally really friendly and, rest assured, don’t take the whole thing too seriously!

What’s all this other cool stuff I’ve been hearing about in a variety of well-informed articles in highly respected broadsheets?

Perplex City works like an alternate reality game. If you’ve never heard of one of those, check out the Wikipedia article, and Brooke’s great quickstart guide (you’re here, after all, so I guess you like starting quickly.) Needless to say, Perplex City functions as if it were a real place - we can visit their websites, email people there, and their world runs in "real-time." Their newspaper updates twice a week, for example.

So we’ve got loads of Perplex City websites being transmitted to Earth, people to email… and there have also been a raft of clues and puzzles at live events (a game that makes you leave the house! imagine!) Using these resources, players are able to find out more about the theft of the cube, ultimately leading to it’s location. We hope so anyway, otherwise we’ll just look silly.

It’s really, really important to remember that while there will be only one winner, at this stage everyone has to work together so we can make progress in finding out more about the Cube theft. Although the endgame might be a little manic, right now any kind of "I know something you don’t know, naar-nerrr-nee" malarky is frowned upon. All together now: "There’s No I In T-E-A-M!"

What are the cards like?

The cards are about the size of a standard photograph, and each presents a puzzle for you to solve. The range of puzzles is extremely diverse and includes riddles, logic puzzles, optical tricks and pop-trivia to name but a few. Each pack (£2.50) contains six randomly selected cards, although the cards differ in rarity - for instance, only one in ten packs should contain a silver card. The rarest cards are also the most difficult to solve. Finally, each card has a piece of the Perplex City Map on the back.

In total, there’ll eventually be 256 different cards, although right now only 66 have been released. The "pack" (if you will) is further divided into eight colours (from the easy, common reds to the ultra-rare, mindsporking silvers) with 32 cards each. These are further divided into "sets" of four cards - solving all four in a set gets you extra Perplex Points.

What are Perplex Points? And how do I find out the answers?

Now, printing the answers in a small font upside-down on the back would be a bit passè, don’t you think? Once you think you’ve cracked the puzzle on a card, you can go to the Perplex City site, log in, and enter the unique code from underneath the silver scratch-off panel. Then, enter your answer, and it’ll tell you if you’re right. Not only that, but you’ll earn Perplex Points, propelling you up the leaderboard and making you the envy of other puzzlers.

My appetite for information knows no bounds! Tell me more…

Each card contains a core puzzle for you to try and solve. But there can be extra, secret layers of information to a card. First of all, look at you main answer. Is there something you can do with it? Does it provide information about the mystery? Next, look at the information provided on the card. Is there a URL you can visit? Is there any "left over" stuff that might contain an added puzzle? Finally, think totally outside the box. How could you hide extra information on a card? What inks could you use? How could you see them?

There’s also clues that span the cards. For instance, there’s a large message that’s faintly printed over the whole deck. The prime-numbered cards have a playing card symbol on them, which we think might have something to do with solving one of the silver cards. There’s a lot more than initially meets the eye, that’s for sure. On the other hand, there are lots of cards that don’t seem to have any direct link to the cube-hunt, nor any hidden extras. The sharp player must walk the line between observant and paranoid…

As you’ll have noticed, you can view low-resolution scans of the cards at Brian’s card catalogue, if you want to get clued up without shelling out the big bucks. The merely "thrifty" might want to check out the superawesome Perplex City Trades site to exchange cards with other players.

Have fun, play nicely and good hunting!