GCHQ Royal Puzzle Main Thread
OK, this might take the place of some of the articles this week and I'm going to keep it live updated as we go along. This will be changing every few hours.
After Googling to find out whether the new GCHQ Christmas Quiz had started yet, which probably ate up a month of my life (or a month of my lesson time at least) last year, I realised that they had had a similar smaller quiz for the Queen’s 90th Birthday. I'm far too late to the party on this one, but I'm not going to look at the answers and I'm going to try to write my thinking and solutions here as I spend the week going through them.
Current Status of Puzzles
- Mary I, completely solved
- Henry III, completely solved
- George III, completely solved (after some struggles)
- Edward V, completely solved
- Charles II, completely solved
- Ulysses III, mostly solved one clue left
- David II, two clues left to solve
Overall Answer
From the website: "The answer to each challenge is the name of a famous person from history. Once you have worked out the names, convert each into a single letter, using the same process for all of your answers. Unscramble these to find the seven lettered word that royally connects all the answers and solve the overall puzzle."
Each answer that we have got so far is the name of some royal person from history. If you take each royal, for example James II and you take that numbered letter, so the second letter of James, which is A and put it all together we get: M, N, O, R, H, Y and ?. This suggests the word monarchy, so we think that question seven should give us a monarch where the letter C in their name matches their number. Originally we thought that this was either Charles I, or Richard III, but in solving the crossword we now have reason to believe it is a Scottish King. Originally we thought either Constantine I or Malcolm III, but this has led to some issues.
Update: it was a king of Scotland but it was David II. This gives the letter A so the overall word is Harmony.
