Quick start

The alternate reality game Perplex City (PXC) is a real-life treasure hunt, a collaborative competition and an interactive mystery/conspiracy/adventure story, in the vein of "Alice in Wonderland", William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition", "the Da Vinci Code", 'The Game' starring Michael Douglas, and Kit Williams's "Masquerade".

Perplex City itself is the story of an alternate universe that is actually quite similar to ours. They have a precious artifact known as the Receda Cube, which has been stolen. The role of players is to become familiar with Perplex City culture, which is based on mental agility (whereas Earth would be physical), and eventually find the Cube.

This task is being put forth by the Perplex City Academy, run by Sente Kiteway. The Academy contacted Earth-based company Mind Candy, who have "sorted through the information provided" and produce puzzle cards for Earth players to solve. It isn't necessary to buy the cards to play the game, but they are a lot of fun.

There's a leaderboard on the website based on points for solving cards (228016 cards solved so far, by 18097 registered players). The cards have been out in the UK for a while, and they recently picked up a couple of US distributors. So far, two waves of 66 cards each have been released, and the third wave is anticipated by the end of this month.

Puzzle cards are ranked by difficulty, with silver cards representing the most dificult puzzles. Of the cards that have been released, three silver cards are still unsolved, and they pose very different problems.

One of the silver cards, "The Thirteenth Labour", requires unscrambling a block of text that has been encrypted using the RC5.64 standard first cracked by [http://www.distributed.net distributed.net. To do this, players will have to band together and combine processing power to form a grid computing attack, not unlike the SETI at home program.

Yet another asks players to band together to devise a proof for the famously difficult Riemann Hypothesis.

In addition to card solving, Perplex City is a diverse, involved game that combines online activity with offline interaction:

- When a character needed credentials in a library to get access to a rare book, Earth players wrote short stories which were published by a Perplex City company and which is now available for sale on Earth.

- Another trail led from a woman's dying words to a London university, to movie theatres in Canada, to an automated phone system, to a turn-based multi-player online game, to a banner pulled by a plane in the skies of Manchester, to a live meeting where players solved puzzles together.

- After that live event, a mole that had been helping solve puzzles and interacting with players all day fled the scene and escaped in a black helicopter.

- At another recent event, players formed an impromptu 127-person long conga line in London's Trafalgar Square, stuffed themselves into phone booths and went on a treasure hunt in the National Gallery, all while texting trivia answers to a home base and receiving updates via SMS.

- Later that night, while riding the London Eye, players witnessed messages being flashed in Morse code from the banks of the River Thames

Some helpful websites

http://www.perplexcity.com

http://www.mindcandydesign.com

Interested? Check out our getting started page!