The Golden Mantis Treasure Hunt is structured into two parts: Big Picture Puzzles identify a general, 10 to 12 acre area where the token is hidden, and the later Pinpoint Puzzles narrow down to within 5 feet of the token.
The first of the four Big Picture puzzles, the audiophiles puzzle.
The four Big Picture Puzzles, in order, are titled Audiophiles, Bibliophiles, Race Day, and Road Trip. Each one has an intro paragraph before presenting its puzzle.
The Audiophiles puzzle is a screenshot of a Spotify playlist with songs that all appear to be movie theme songs. Bibliophiles is a photo books in a bookshelf. Race Day, by far the most elaborate photo, is a two-page race form with 8 horse names and races they've competed in. Finally, Road Trip presents a table labelled “Itinerary” with a column of ”favorite person" and “birthplace to visit.” There are 16 rows of people and their birthplace in the table.
Solution
Location: Aurora Cemetery, Aurora, Texas, USA, GPS coordinates
Solver(s):
Desiree, Jeremy, Sean Cronin, Stacy "Unicorn," and Tristina (Team P4L)
Big Picture Puzzles
The four puzzles in this section, per the hunt PDF, will identify a general, 10 to 12 acre area where the token is hidden. Each puzzle solved to a listed of numbers that could be converted into GPS coordinates by inserting decimal points, the comma, and a negative symbol at the appropriate locations.
The X created from the 4 Big Picture coordinates.
1: Audiophiles Each song's peak position on the Billboard Hot 100 gives the numbers/GPS coordinates. 30.476111, -91.197778
2: Bibliophiles First letters of the authors’ names spells out: “Spend a long weekend at lovely Lake Brownwood. I love the Santa Rosa Blue Hole.” The goal was to find something more specific though. The number of books in each group gives you the exact GPS coordinate you're looking for: 35.166944, -103.733611
3: Race Day On standard race forms, which this is emulating, for each horse, the four cells in each row with exponent numbers indicate the horse’s position at the end of each quarter stage of a race. The exponential number shows how many lengths behind the leader the horse was. If the horse is in first place at any stage (indicated by a large 1 on the chart), it should not have an exponent, because it can't be any length behind the leader, because they are the leader. Taking the exponent numbers for each 1 in the race for gives you the coordinates we need: 34.996667, -91.988611
4: Road Trip Take the final digit of each person’s birth year (hinted at by the “At last! We’ve been wanting to do this for years!” in this puzzle’s intro) to get the GPS coordinates: 30.30904, -104.020630
The narrowed down “big picture” area is found by connecting these 4 coordinates creating an X, to find Aurora Cemetery in Aurora, Texas.
Pinpoint Puzzles
The Pinpoint Puzzles, per the hunt PDF, will take the hunter within 5 feet of the proxy token.
Poem and Playfair Cipher
The intro to this section states “Perhaps we didn’t Play Fair?” so it was literally telling the hunter that a Playfair cipher was involved. The final word of each poem line ended up being the cipher key, and in the case of the last line of the poem, which didn't rhyme, you needed to deduce “climb” was the word to use instead of “slope”.
The 6 ciphertexts decode to the following (the first four calling back to the Big Picture puzzles):
LIKES WATCHING THE HORSE RACES
QUITE A FAN OF MOVIE MUSIC
VERY AVID READER
LOVES A FUN ROAD TRIP
ALWAYS LOOKS UP WHILE ON A SEARCH
FIND THE SECRET PAGE AT SKIPWORKPLAYGAMES FOR THE NEXT STEP
The Secret Page
The secret page consists of 4 items: a congratulations message, a paragraph of cipher text, a poem titled “My Secret Poem,” and an illustration of a praying mantis over an AI-generated old-style map of Texas and the surrounding states.
The ciphertext, poem, and illustration are irrelevant distractions. The ciphertext is a simple substitution cipher (cryptogram) that decrypts to “Did you seriously think we would hide the secret code in a single substitu(a)tion cipher? It has to be at least a little harder than that. But we promise, the secret code is indeed hidden somewhere in this page. Keep looking!” The poem is an acrostic with its leftmost letters spelling out “No Secret Here.” The illustration, as far as I can tell, is there only to add some visual decoration.
The secret code was hidden in the secret page's HTML, but it was clearly labeled.
The congratulations message is the important part of the secret page. It tells the hunter to find the secret code hidden somewhere in the secret page. Viewing the HTML source code of the page and searching for the word “secret” gave the hunter the secret code they were looking for: BJAYuss. The hard part was figuring out what to do once you had it!
