Now I Know My ABCs

This puzzle is a series of interactive minigames with the same objective: fix the alphabet A-Z, one letter at a time.

The format of the character mapping ("A = …") tells us that each level is based on a common cipher. In each of the first three levels, we can select two input buttons (that's what we'll call the contents of the white box after "A = …") followed by a colored button which performs some operation on them.

The following table summarizes the operations.

We note that operation buttons are associated with a different shape at each level. Alphanumeric operations are circles, semaphore buttons are diamond, and braille buttons are square.

This becomes relevant in the final level. All the operation buttons are available at once and each must be used exactly once to get the final cluephrase: ALL OPERATION NOW RECOVERED.

Each operation button converts an alphabetic input A-Z to the corresponding cipher, performs the operation, and then converts back to alphabetic (if a letter exists, in the case of semaphore or braille). Input letters may not be used twice in a single operation, though they can be reused throughout operations. An operation is accepted and the corresponding button marked used only if both output letters exist in the respective halves of the cluephrase.

There are multiple combinations of input letters and operations to achieve the full cluephrase. See the appendix for a possible solution. Satisfying all cluephrase letters marks the puzzle solved.

Authors' Notes

This puzzle was brainstormed as an interactive game to challenge solvers to memorize their ciphers for fun. The timekeeping was added to motivate this even though it is not necessary for the puzzle solve. One testsolver used “all-brain” to finish the levels, and I want to believe they were not the last. It was originally intended to have a mini leaderboard for tracking speedrun times in the spirit of interactive puzzles from GalactiCardCaptors, though this was deprioritized as hunt approached.

Writing the puzzle was a challenge for me. The original concept was an answerable puzzle that was assigned to this slot with the hope it translates well to answerless (it didn't). Next, an answerless puzzle more or less implies interactivity (I had never written "hello world" in ReactJS).

For initial testsolves I wrote a full prototype in pygame and then thanks to the help and iron patience of Alex G rewrote the logic for web.

Appendix

Final Level Strategy

There are multiple solutions for the final level, one of which is shown below. The order in which letters are submitted does not matter, so this table lists steps in the order the operation buttons appeared in the puzzle.

The intended solution path is to first logically determine some valid input/output pairs for the most constrained buttons (semaphore, especially red and blue), followed by less constrained buttons (braille), and then fill in the gaps with buttons that can work for any pair (A1Z26).