Solution: Caesar Studies

Answer: GOOFY

Written by Jonah Ostroff

This puzzle consists of 48 nonsense strings in alphabetical order. The first step is to decipher them. They’re all Caesar ciphers, so this isn’t too hard, although a few of them might not make much sense yet.

Five of the deciphered strings form a set of instructions, beginning with “SPLIT STRINGS INTO GROUPS” and “SOLVE EACH GROUP’S MINIPUZZLE”. So the first step is to do that: group the other 43 strings into five minipuzzles, and solve them.

The solutions to each minipuzzle are described below. They are presented in final solution order for reading convenience, even though there is no immediately-apparent way to determine the order until they are solved.

Minipuzzle 1

Ten of the decrypted strings are elements of ordered lists. They've been shifted by distinct amounts from 1 to 10, giving an order. Move each element forward in its list by the shift amount to get a new element. The first letters of the new elements spell SEMICIRCLE.

Minipuzzle 2

Eight strings are harder to decrypt, because most of them aren’t words! That’s because each one is a word or phrase that starts with ROT, but with the ROT removed. Sort them by lengths (from 2 to 9), then read the shift amounts as A1-Z26 to get SAWFLIES.

Minipuzzle 3

Nine strings are statements, most of which describe a word, but they're contradictory! And one of the statements (“Q IS A VOWEL”) is false. If you shift Q by 24 (like its statement), it becomes O, which is a vowel! Similarly, each statement is describing the word after it has been shifted. The only word satisfying these constraints is MAFIA.

Minipuzzle 4

Seven strings are all phrases of the form “[word] [PLUS/MINUS] [number]”. They’ve all been Caesar shifted so the word looks like a Roman numeral. Add to or subtract from these Roman numerals to get new ones, from I to M. Decrypt them to spell LINDSAY.

Minipuzzle 5

Nine strings all say “ALTERNATIVE TO [word]”, and each of these words has an “alternative”: you can Caesar shift it into something else. The original words start with A through I, which gives an ordering. Compute the shift amounts from the alternative words to get small numbers, which index into these words to spell COMEDY DUO.

Final Extraction

The remaining instructions say how to extract: “SHIFT MINIPUZZLE ANSWERS APPROPRIATELY”, “FIND SECRETS AFTER SHIFTING”, and “USE SECRETS AS INDICES”. The instructions use five different shifts, and when you encrypt a minipuzzle answer with one of these five shifts, it contains a number.

The instructions only make sense in a particular order, so the minipuzzle answers can be sorted in that same order. Index into the shifted answers using the revealed numbers to spell the final answer: GOOFY.