British Spy Chiefs Devise Cryptic Christmas Card For Festive Codebreakers

The British government has created a cryptic Christmas card which includes a brain-teasing puzzle for wannabe codebreakers to crack over the festive season.

GCHQ director Robert Hannigan is sending out traditional greeting cards featuring the nativity scene ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’ by a pupil of Rembrandt, but unlike previous year’s cards, the 2015 edition will also feature the grid-shading puzzle.

By solving the first piece, players will create an image that leads to a series of challenges of increasing complexity.

Once all stages have been solved, players can submit their answer by the end of January 2016 to an email address provided by the governement intelligence and security agency.

Players are encourage to donate to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC).

For those who aren’t on the the spy boss’s Christmas card list, the first puzzle is here:

The GCHQ explains:

“In this type of grid-shading puzzle, each square is either black or white. Some of the black squares have already been filled in for you.

“Each row or column is labelled with a string of numbers. The numbers indicate the length of all consecutive runs of black squares, and are displayed in the order that the runs appear in that line. For example, a label “2 1 6” indicates sets of two, one and six black squares, each of which will have at least one white square separating them”.

Image credit: GCHQ