TL;DR: I fixed the Geodyssey site. It can now be solved fully and completely once again.
Eight years ago, I had this idea to work my way through the book Puzzlecraft, constructing one of each type of puzzle it described, in much the way that Julie Powell decided to cook her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
I never finished (and barely started) that project. But I did accept the challenge of constructing puzzles with which I was not familiar, and I’m quite proud of the result: a puzzle suite that I called Geodyssey. The story of Geodyssey is documented on earlier posts in this blog, if you care to read them. It was a great deal of fun to roll out in real time and interact with the solvers along the way.
I wanted to create a puzzle suite that had two separate parallel solutions: one virtual (the Remote Challenge) available to anyone on the internet, and another available only to people with the ability to visit physical locations (the Local Challenge) in South Florida. It succeeded in all the ways I’d hoped.
For a while, at least. Two things happened to mess up both the Local and Remote Challenges.
First, some of the stages of the Local Challenge were irreparably altered, including the final benchmark and final container. Basically, some physical structures referenced by the puzzles or onto which the puzzle pieces were attached were removed or destroyed.
Second, benchmark hunting (both real and virtual) forms a unifying theme across all of the puzzles, and many of the puzzles use benchmark pages stored on the Geocaching.com web site. But Groundspeak announced that they would be removing all support for benchmark hunting from their site. So my carefully-constructed references to those benchmark pages were wiped out. This prevented both the Local and Remote Challenges from ever being solved.
Until today.
I’ve finished going back over the site and removing all references to the Groundspeak benchmark hunting pages. I’ve moved all of the content that was on that site into this, so that it functions as a standalone puzzle solving experience.
I also did a bit of puzzle page editing, reworked the FAQ section, and updated all of the plugins in the web site.
In short, Geodyssey is back.
If you haven’t already solved it, I encourage you to give it a shot. There are approximately 25 puzzles in the entire suite (although you’ll have to take a few different exploratory paths to find them all).
The puzzles aren’t designed to be too hard – if they were in Games Magazine, they’d rate 1-2 stars or so.
The puzzle suite is fairly straight-forward to follow through its solving paths. It’s much easier than Foggy Brume’s Puzzle Boat … think of Geodyssey as more of a “puzzle dinghy” … or, really, more like a “puzzle kayak”.
There are hints along the way that I’ve supplied, and I’m happy to answer any questions that pop up for you. I want you to be successful … don’t let one stumbling block keep you from experiencing all that the suite has to offer.
I hope you enjoy Geodyssey!
