Solution: Snake on Nine Keys
Answer: BLACKBERRY
Written by The Enigmatologists
To solve the puzzle one must successfully play through the snake game, recording the answers to the clues as they go.
| Clue | Number |
|---|---|
| September | 9 |
| Socks, Shoes, and Gloves | 2 |
| Neptune | 8 |
| Goldilocks | 3 |
| Medusa | 3 |
| G | 7 |
| League Boots | 7 |
| Periodic table | 7 |
| Psammead | 5 |
| taste, touch | 5 |
| Bowhead whale | 5 |
| Cho Oyu | 6 |
| Honeycomb | 6 |
| Strawberry moon month | 6 |
| Huang He | 6 |
| Edgar Mitchell | 6 |
| Guitar | 6 |
) |
0 |
| rainbow | 7 |
| Petra | 7 |
| Eta | 7 |
| Break a mirror | 7 |
| Capella | 6 |
| Janus | 2 |
| Sloth, Envy | 7 |
| Sheva Brachot | 7 |
| The Chariot | 7 |
| Moon phases | 8 |
| Snow White | 7 |
| Square | 4 |
| Buddhism | 4 |
| Dice | 6 |
| David's Star | 6 |
| Gobi | 6 |
| XXI-XV | 6 |
| Himalia | 6 |
| Clotho | 3 |
| Indian Ocean | 3 |
Using this data, the image of the old phone, and the title clue of "nine keys" we can turn these numbers into letters using T9 texting.
For strings of repeated numbers some guessing and checking may have to be done.
For example, three 5s in a row could be jjj, jk, kj, or l.
Given the spelling patterns of English, it is not to hard to figure out what letter sequences make sense.
After converting all number strings to letters we get the phrase waterloo smartphone and a bit of Googling will tell you that the smartphone invented in Waterloo is the BLACKBERRY.
Authors' Notes
Writing this puzzle was a lot of fun. I have a spreadsheet full of backup clue ideas (in fact, I have 43 extra clues listed). As someone who never T9 texted, and never played Snake before this (turns out I'm terrible at it) I cannot quite explain how the idea I started with ended up here, but this puzzle wouldn't exist without the awesome Enigmatologist who programmed the Snake game and the Enigmatologist who helped me create the original plan for this puzzle.