I played this one through. I went on a bit of a rampage fairly early on (starting with Buddhabrennusmark) and ended up controlling the southern half of the continent. I used Mansamark as a trading buddy for most of the game. I think I got to Alpha Centauri in 1952.
I got severely distracted--after getting Optics and uncovering the sea squares--in trying to crack the codes of the various islands. I finally decided that I could only see a couple Morse code items: A pair of islands of the form ..--- which is "2" in Morse code and two sets each of the letters T (-), W (.--) and O (...). While researching "visual ciphers," I learned a fair bit about puzzles and cryptography and spent an inordinate amount of time reading about the Allies efforts to crack the Nazi Enigma code machine. (This probably doubled 8) the amount of time I put into the game.)
(I'm writing this before reading other reports or the sponsor's comments, so I'm curious to see if there were other map subtleties that I missed).
Since I did decode two Morse messages, and since I spent about as much time being distracted by them as I did playing the game, I'm going to give myself a self-reported score of: 2. I figure this will put me at the bottom of the barrel (unless the sponsor decides to list the results from lowest to highest
).
I got severely distracted--after getting Optics and uncovering the sea squares--in trying to crack the codes of the various islands. I finally decided that I could only see a couple Morse code items: A pair of islands of the form ..--- which is "2" in Morse code and two sets each of the letters T (-), W (.--) and O (...). While researching "visual ciphers," I learned a fair bit about puzzles and cryptography and spent an inordinate amount of time reading about the Allies efforts to crack the Nazi Enigma code machine. (This probably doubled 8) the amount of time I put into the game.)
(I'm writing this before reading other reports or the sponsor's comments, so I'm curious to see if there were other map subtleties that I missed).
Since I did decode two Morse messages, and since I spent about as much time being distracted by them as I did playing the game, I'm going to give myself a self-reported score of: 2. I figure this will put me at the bottom of the barrel (unless the sponsor decides to list the results from lowest to highest
).
