NewsWorthy!: Cardboard Radio Tonight!

Happy Leap Day everyone!

Maybe you're like me and you were going to try and stay up for the Sabres/Ducks game tonight.  Or maybe you're just a night owl.

Either way, if you're up at 11pm EST tonight, tune-in to Cardboard Connection Radio and listen to us talk about solving The Ginter Code.  In addition to speaking to Doug Cataldo and Voice of the Collector Rob Bertrand, it's very likely to be the firs time that Ryan and Guillaume speak on the phone together!  (Unless we have an emergency practice conference call before hand.)

Can't stay up? No problem.  These shows get podcasted, and we'll post the link later.

Code Crumbs 1: wallet-sized clues

Newsworthy!: Press on Becket!!

Our first official Press Shout Out comes from the blog at Beckett.com.


Thanks to Susan Lulgjuraj for the very nice write up. This makes our trials and tribulations understandable to people who didn't obsess of the details for the last 7 months. It'd be kind of like explaining LOST in about two paragraphs, and still getting pretty much everything-so very good work!


Click here for the Article.

The Original Ten

The first ten cards we connected to the clocks were somewhat different from the correct ten cards. But, that doesn't mean there isn't a logical explanation about how to do so. I will do my best to show you that there were 7 others cards that could logically be connected to 7 of the times. It doesn't matter anymore, because the last word on those cards didn't lead you to a website. But, it does show you that we were connecting cards to clocks before connecting clocks to cards was cool!

1:11

Correct Card: Pablo Sandoval (Card #111 Base Set) led to Giant Panda (recovery)

Incorrect Card: Kaspar Hauser (Volume 111 of Journal of Medicine)

Kaspar Hauser is one of those mysterious figures that, unless you ever had to write a paper on him, you would likely have never heard of. Kaspar was rumored to be royalty and was stabbed at a young age after spending a long time locked up. The interesting connection with Hauser is his mirror writing. It was completely logical in my mind for Kaspar Hauser to be the Keeper of the Code. Mirrors played a role this year in the code and Hauser was a mirror code writer, seems logical to me. Plus, if you look in volume 111 of some journal of medicine you will find reference to a disorder that involves people like Hauser.

How we traveled from the First Point of Aries: the solution to the 2011 Ginter Code

My name's Guillaume, you might know me better by now as @gyom39 on Twitter. And here is how my teammates and I solved that 8 month challenge that was the 2011 Ginter Code.

All it took was a lucky number.

Of course right, now, that’s how I feel. But back in the middle of July 2011, I was more mesmerized than anything. See, the 2011 edition of the Allen & Ginter Code happens to be loaded with red herrings. Literally, all over the place!!

It usually starts the same way for all codebreakers: scanning auction websites for potential scans of cards before the release date, or the more traditional way of getting packs/boxes/cases/truckloads of A&G to bust open, get the master set and work from there.

I personally did like every year, get my one box to open from Never Enough Cards in Port Jefferson, NY, and see what I can get my hands on and then use my (new) best friend Google to look for additional clues. I think I will now speak for many: those parallel cards with clovers in the corners looked veeeeery intriguing. So much so that I started looking for how many there were out there, until I realized that the ENTIRE base set was involved.

But something didn’t feel right: some clovers were dark, some others “golden”. Two puzzles? That looks complicated. Not to mention the money involved in acquiring the entire set. A trick that worked in years past was getting scans from auction sites, but this year everybody was smart about it: the corners were taken off of the scans. Already, the chase was getting difficult.

Navigating by the North Star

My name is Ryan McCabe and this is my story. I could never have imagined when I bought my first pack of A&G cards last summer that I would be here today telling you how I was part of a team of three regular guys that solved one of the biggest challenges in the hobby world today.

I hadn’t bought a pack of cards in years. Being the type who likes to support the local small business folks I decided to make my way into the local card shop on my way home from work, Toys From the Attic in Somersworth, NH. If you are ever in southern NH please pay them a visit, very cool shop. I asked about any vintage stuff he might have and then I noticed the new stuff he had out on display. So I inquired and he introduced me to the Allen & Ginter cards. They looked pretty neat and the cards you could pull from the packs looked awesome. So, I decided to buy a few packs.

When I got home I ripped open the first pack and in it was a Ryan Braun printing plate. What a find! The second pack will always be my greatest pull though, my first A&G Code Ad card. I looked it over, thinking it was just like a 10% off card you might find in other packs. It had the “Crack the Code” thing and I thought; “wow, I am pretty decent at code stuff”. So I followed the Codemaster on twitter, easy enough. But, he hadn’t tweeted yet, what was I supposed to do?

Dr. Reginald V. Thorpwell III (Or How I Learned To Love The Code)

How Many times Did you Look At this!

Hello Ginter fanatics. I’m  Going to go out on a limb and assume most of you don't know me or what I'm about.  My twitter handle is @TheRealFrankL and I was one of three guys who won the 2011 Ginter Code this year.  Ryan and Guillaume are going to be posting their own versions of this story, and my original post was going to be on my other blog.  So click over there if you like-I'll eventually repost this over there.  We're hoping that this will be a good resource for fans of this code and future codes to talk about all sorts of things-not just how to solve it, but what we got wrong, thing we love and hate about it, etc.  Plus, R and G have very good stories to tell too-so stay tuned!

At the outset, I want to say that I'm going to tell this story as a story.  My team-mates Ryan and Guillaume plan on doing the same.  That said, the story of figuring this out is much bigger than I could tell here, so if you are just looking for a solution-well you should be able to skim this pretty quickly.

The only caveat I insist on is that you understand that I didn't solve this puzzle, not on my own.  This was a three way effort, and Ryan and Guillaume deserve as much, if not more, credit than I do.  I'm happy to have done my part, and to know that I helped.  That what I did was part of the solution, but it wasn't the whole thing.

That said.  My eyes are about to come bleeding out of my skull from this code.