Every year GCHQ, the UK’s intelligence and security organisation, sets some challenges within a Christmas card. These are supposed to be for kids (for goodness sake), but they present a pleasingly solvable challenge for adults. I thought it would be nice to share.
Front of the card:
I’ve only tried the first one so far and the answer is SEAWEED
See how you get on with this and the others.
Website with the published quiz is here BTW: NCSC
Well, #2, languages, is Polish for dog, pies . That’s very cute!
(I’ll leave others to other folks)
I concur with the previous posters, in addition I believe the answer to the third “Coding” puzzle is carpentry.
Minor hint for the final puzzle: I think calling it “Mathematics” is misleading, I would say it’s a word puzzle.
Thanks for posting this! I’ve got a book of their ‘adult’ puzzles and simply don’t have the time/intelligence to get some of them. These are just right for a momentary diversion.
Not overly hard, presumably because they’re aimed at kids, although I haven’t attempted the codebreaking one yet.
If you type the first three answers into w3w you end up in Alaska, but they don’t specify how all the words fit together.
ETA: Welp, the codebreaking one didn’t take long either.
And solved, once I bothered to read the instructions.
The answer of course is:
BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE
I’m stuck on the Engineering one: Unless I’m mistaken, the third gear ends up midway between the E and the F
And I can see two different defensible answers to the Analysis one:
The word “two” is an even number, but the word “it’s” appears an even number of times.
For the analysis one, the answer is
Director, because it has an even number of letters, while all the other words have an odd number.
OK, that’s a sufficiently statistically-unlikely fact that that’s probably the answer. I’ll buy it.
It is the answer.
Although I was joking about the secret message above, I’ve done the what3words bit properly and it all works, although the actual message is even less interesting than the fake one I mentioned above.
Don’t overthink it. Just count around each wheel 20 letters in the appropriate direction for the cog.
I got stuck because I didn’t initially see the “belts” between the second and third cogs, and the fourth and fifth cogs.
And I got stuck because I did see the belts, and assumed that they were equal-radius (hence, 2.5 full rotations of one gear would be 2.5 full rotations of the next).
Here’s this year’s challenge…
This is supposed to be for kids… 
Click on the image to enlargen…
The first one is easy: TIME
Well, 2 and 4 are DAY and TREE if that helps.
#3
PENNY PITCH SIRIUS - BLACK
DECLAN JASMINE STICKY - RICE
SCARBOROUGH BEVERLEY PUDSEY - TOWNS IN YORKSHIRE
BLACK RICE YORKSHIRE - PUDDING
I solved the cryptogram on 7, but I’m missing something, er, obvious. First solve the code/Identity a 4-letter word/Look everywhere/Maybe it’s obvious. The whole thing is a card, maybe that’s it?
My guess: the first letters of each line spell FILM.
Oh, that works.
#5 is STOCKING. But I confess I got that off just the first and last sequences.
Me too! The middle two have me stumped.
Okay, the third sequence: WvU,t,SrQ,p,OnM,l,KjI .
I’m giving up on the second one!
Got it. It’s CO MP LE TE backwards.
Teamwork!