Cards Against Humanity Holiday BS Puzzle

@ilikepopcans: did it taste like regular coal?

Was there ever a team name that was created?

I also can confirm that the website holidaybullshit.com has nothing revealing in the code for the page.

Just got my day 2 stuff today. Nothing really to add to the discussion, but the ole' noodle is working on it. if only we had Ben Gates from national treasure...

I've already thrown away the first few envelopes I received. Oh well.

Can someone post clear pictures of all the cards? I'm sad I missed out on this, as I've had a full collection of all the CAH cards so far, even the PAX ones.

The video is up for Day 4 It's a link to http://clusterfuckgame.com/ which is the new sex party game they created. At the bottom of the page are links to Zach Gage, Doug Wilson and CAH's websites. The two people's sites seem like they could be fake for this puzzle.

There is also a link to download the pdf of the Clusterfuck game. Will add more as I have time to read and scour the sites unless someone else can sooner.

I got Day 5's envelope today.

It has the mini expansion "Your shitty family". 4 White cards and a Black card.

Looking at the envelope, the Blue/Purple does look different, but I'm not sure if that's purposeful or a printer thing, they look incredibly similar. Of course, the CAH guys might have meant for that. Plans within plans within plans within dick jokes. Picture this time around is Five Golden Rings, being worn by a severed hand.

Envelope colors:

G, G, P, G, P, Y, G, Y, | Corner | P, G, G, Y, R, B, B, R, B, Y, G, G, P, G, G, B, R | Corner | G, G, P, G, G, B, G, P, R, R, | Corner | G, R, P, P, Y, P, P, R, P, R, P, R, Y, Y

Hey, can I be part of this team?

I think I might have figured something out. It looks like we might have to cut the envelopes into strips and then put them back together to make a new pictograph. It really looks like the drawings at the tops day 1 and 3 kind of fit together like a Mad Magazine fold over. I wonder if we have to cut them into strips using the lights as a guide and then put them together again? It does say the puzzle is "hidden across" the gifts.

I also would like to be apart of this team. But I have yet to receive day 4

I just got another set in the mail entitle "Elves, Etc".

Cards are:

@inversematrix: I think you're right on track with the lights being a message. In this particular case, I think number translation is a very likely step but adding them up has the problem that it throws away information, so to speak. (e.g. they chose to do RRB, but RBR would add up the same)

@aaronmorgan: I like the cut of your jib. That's a creative idea and totally takes advantage of a possible meaning of a hint they gave us. It's going to be a pain to do.

Hey folks, so if we want to do this together, we're going to want a place to organize our thoughts, upload images, share spreadsheets, etc. I'm new around here, so I'm sorry if this is somehow against unwritten or written rules, but what if I created a group collaboration project thing on another site so we can have all that stuff in one place. Of course anyone who wants can get permissions to the group and if there's some way to make the site publicly viewable, I'm all for that. (If not possible, maybe host a daily static mirror of our progress.)

I'm not really in it for the prize -- I'm sure there's smarter people than I somewhere who will win it. I just think it would be cool to put our heads together. There's clearly a lot of clever people on this thread and already too many good ideas to track in a forum thread format.

I'm sure others have noticed, but there's something else interesting about the holidaybullshit website.

I'm now staring at my envelopes...

hmmm im finding interesting things...could be something...

http://decisionstats.com/2012/04/09/play-color-cipher-and-visual-cryptography/

I have only received the lump of coal, and that was today. Should I start crying?

@billymagnum: I apologize for the bad link-

the real link is now at http://decisionstats.com/2013/04/14/play-color-cipher-and-visual-cryptography/

@scoonsalicious: not yet. I've only received day one's envelope still. And that was on Monday.

@scoonsalicious: I'm in the same boat as @noboners. I know someone else here in Seattle who got day one on Tuesday and hasn't seen anything else.

i apologize for nothing. the link was fine....now its broken for some reason

cached:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sCI3mDbT6u0J:decisionstats.com/2012/04/09/play-color-cipher-and-visual-cryptography/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

just got my 6 geese a' layin'

I also live in Canada and haven't received anything yet.

i apologize for nothing. the link was fine....now its broken for some reason

cached:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sCI3mDbT6u0J:decisionstats.com/2012/04/09/play-color-cipher-and-visual-cryptography/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

just got my 6 geese a' layin'

Chiming in to cement my place on the team! Also, I'm in New York and have received the first 2 thus far. I'm leaning toward the thought that the lights surrounding each envelope will be strung together in a long chain. At simple replacement cipher or some version of it will likely be needed after putting them in the correct order. Unfortunately, this has us waiting to solve after receiving all 12, clearly a less than ideal strategy.

Anyone else notice that the envelopes portray the 12 days of Christmas?

Hey, so I signed up just to share info. I am all for winning this as a group!

So, if you follow the string of lights counter clockwise from the top, at least for days 1-5, it always ends in a green light... could this be significant?

Also, should we make some sort of private facebook group or something so someone outside of the group cant take our findings and use them to win?

guys after thinking about it, i don't think that the envelopes are the key. i'm assuming that the people at cah wanted to make this contest as fair as possible. with that in mind, hearing that some people have gotten as many as 6 things already where as people like myself have only 1. still others have nothing. with them being unable to control when the post office delivers everything, they couldn't rely on that part of it to be fair for everyone, where as at the website they can control the flow and insure that everyone has the same exposure to all of the clues. i'm not saying that they may not help, but i think that what we need to be focusing on is things posted at the website more so than the clues we get at home. the lights around the boarder may just in fact be a red herring.

just a thought.

Well if its from the website then EVERYONE has a chance at the prizes. Not just those of us that got gifts. Also, the code in day 1 specifically daid not to throw anything away and its seems that the envelopes are the only thing we have to throw away in most of the days. Therefore, I assume its got to be the envelopes. And people have apparently thrown some envelopes away.

@highheelcartwheel: there should be some sort of verification for those who have them and those who don't, but you are correct. I don't know how much CAH would honor something on a forum though.

@ahatzz11: this is true.... hmmmm

I'd also like to join this group for collaborative puzzle-solving. I've only got the first 3 gifts so far. I think the 12 DoC visual puns are mainly there to be funny, but also they do help you put the gifts in order. Right now I'm betting that the colored lights form either a cipher text or a key that can be used to decode cipher text. I doubt it is as simple as a substitution cipher, since they bragged about how hard it is.

Observations and speculations: The coloring on gift 2's lights is different from the coloring on 1 and 3, and I'm less convinced that there are 5 distinct colors. There are 4 lights! :-) Well, maybe. One compelling thing about 4 is that it's the same number of characters used in another well-known code - DNA. But which color goes to which base pair? And how would you ultimately turn them into English characters? On the other hand, if there really are 5 intended colors, then every 2 lights could be a letter, assuming you throw out some letter we don't use much, like X. But then, I don't see an easy way to assign the color pairs to letters. We've also got the number of lights on each side of the rectangle - 8, 17, 10, 14. So 49 total lights on each envelope, until you get to the longer ones. 49 is an interesting number: 7^2, and 7 is prime, so you can't divide the 49 by anything else without leaving a remainder. But it's hard to believe we need chunks of 7 lights per character. So for a reasonably small chunk size, some characters must be spread across multiple envelopes, again suggesting one long string, as mentioned above. And one more thing: https://www.holidaybullshit.com/ - right under the words "HOLIDAY BULLSHIT", there's a string of lights. 33 lights, to be exact.

@captcrax: Any ideas of where to organize us all?

Also F the post office. got 2 in one day and nothing in the last 2 days. I am way to excited about this.

Also when I messaged them, they said that we will know the answer when we see it. Not that that helps us much.

I'm in the same boat; I got 2 envelopes in 2 days, then nothing for the past 3...

@fishboy: If there are 7 letter chunks, each envelope could be a word in a 12 word sentence. Not necessarily implying that each is exactly 7 letters, but a generic idea to start from.

I know what you mean. I have everything except about 1/4 of the PAX set. Sucks being so close.

My mail has been stupidly slow, but a friend of mine has been getting her envelopes pretty quickly. I'll let you duders know if there's anything interesting.

Well, this has been a good test of the USPS, lol. Only got the first one last Thursday. It's not like I live in a desolate place either.

I'm in one of the biggest cities in Canada and neither me or my friends have gotten anything.

I live in Chicago and still only have the first 3. I should just drive over to their offices and pick them up, hah.

Maybe the Toronto postal service is just burning these? I haven't seen a single one yet.

First of all, it will take a while for people in Canada to get their stuff. That should be obvious.

Second, The USPS does not run on sundays so it shouldn't be a surprise that nothing came for anyone today. Mail ships in batches. That's how it works. Getting everything perfectly as they intended with 12 letters and 100,000 would have been impossible. There are still lots of days before christmas, we should all settle down a little.

Agreed! They will probably post one final thing on Xmas that is needed to solve it.

Observation: The initials of "A Lump Of Coal" are an anagram for "COAL".

Notes:

@whytepanther and @inversematrix posted 2 slightly different versions of the Day 3 light sequence. I agree with InverseMatrix - the 11th light on that envelope is Blue, not Green. (And not Violet.)

@captcrax pointed out that there may be 5 different colors, although Blue and Violet are difficult to distinguish. However, so far the only light sequences posted with 5 colors are Day 1 and Day 5. So I'm going to go ahead and try to determine the 5-color sequence for Day 2 and Day 3, since I have those envelopes. I also suggest we use the convention B = Blue, V = Violet for the 5-color schema, and continue calling them both P = Purple in the 4-color schema.

Could some folks who have Day 4 and Day 6 please post the light sequences for those? Best if you assume there are 5 colors.

Please check my work.

@fishboy, thank you for that! So, am I to understand that you are able to plainly see a blue/violet distinction on the day 2 envelope? I'm also following the holiday bullshit threads on reddit and there is a lot of disagreement. Some people swear they looked at their day 2 envelopes and there's definitely only four colors.

@misswench: I created a Basecamp account, but between the time of my suggestion and now I discovered that there's a bunch of people doing really good work on reddit. One of the folks there created a wikia site (http://cah-holiday-bs.wikia.com) and I've been working on organizing some info there. It does nicely solve the problem of how to keep all of the work public.

Is there any reason not to join forces? I mean, at some level its silly to be part of Team Internets because that's almost the opposite of a team, but it is sort of a self selecting group.

I won't cross-post anything without explicit permission, FWIW.

Update: @fishboy, someone posted a high-res scan of the Day 3 envelope on the wiki and it looks like the first light on the left side after the bottom corner is blue, not violet. You may want to check your own envelope again and update your notes.

@captcrax: I feel like it would be a good idea for the Internet to all become one big team. I'm sure the guys over at CAH love seeint this all unravel.

@phinneas8052 said:

Gallery

Here are the first three envelopes and contents. On the back of each envelope is a bulk-mail sort stamp with the date so you can tell what day they were shipped, so the order is clear. The images on the front are humorous interpretations of the 12 days of Christmas: A partridge in a pear tree, two turtle-doves, three french hens, and it sounds like someone got four collie-birds.

The second day is the coal which was mailed from MA and the video said it was coal from PA, so it makes sense to mail from close to there.

Might want to black out your address

I am amazed so far with what people have come up with.

But we all know who we are dealing with. The same people that sent Ryan a giant box with peanuts containing just some paperwork.

I highly doubt the puzzle is anything extremely elaborate. Honestly, I can see this being "Haha we got you! There is no puzzle!"

SHHHH how are random people across the internet supposed to send him exciting new offers?

I'm amazed how many people only joined this site to possibly claim the prize....

Here's the envelope for day 8, haven't gotten my coal yet even though I live in Boston...