Welcome to the "The 12 Days of Cachemas," a cache series running from December 25 to January 5 modeled after a familiar Christmas song. Starting on December 25th, one new cache in this series will be released each day, until the song is complete. Each cache in this series will contain a clue. You have by now no doubt collected all the clues in order to figure out the location of this bonus cache. The D-rating is for the puzzle; the find should be very straightforward. The T-rating is for the many, many miles you will have to drive to find the 12 caches you need in order to collect the information needed to solve the puzzle.
To convert the clues to coordinates, solve the following puzzle:
- Each of the Cachemas caches, as you know, represents one of the 12 Days of Christmas, as referenced in the song of the same name. They have been released in the order that they appear in the song, so, for instance, Day 1/Cache 1 is "A partridge in a pear tree," and so on down to "twelve drummers drumming."
- All of the code words also reference one of the 12 Days of Christmas as presented in the song. So when you run into the code word "swans," for instance, that will represent Day 7. This is referred to in the puzzle as "Code Word Day."
- The code word for each cache, however, does NOT necessarily match the day of that particular cache, which is the day of the song, and which is referred to as "Cache Day" or "Original Song Day"! For example: Perhaps the day 12 cache, 12 Drummers Drumming, might have a code word which references the first day in the song--Partridge in a Pear tree. Then the code word day would be "partridge," or 1, while the cache day or original song day would be 12. (Note that day 12 does NOT have "partridge" as a code word--this is a made-up example for the purposes of explaining the directions! You will have to go find the Day 12 cache to get the actual code word!)
- You will need BOTH the number of the cache day AND the number of the day represented by the code word.
- For each of the 12 Days of Cachemas below (presented in cache order, which is the same as the original song order), follow the direction. This will give you a number for each of the 12 code words.
The bonus cache can be found at the following coordinates:
N 3A BC.DEF W 07G HI.JKL
Day 1: Code word day + 5 = G
Day 2: Code word day + 6 = A
Day 3: Code word day divided by 4 = E
Day 4: Code word day - number from original song day for swans = B
Day 5: Code word day - original song day for pipers + original song day for leaping lords = L
Day 6: Original song day for hens + code word day = J
Day 7: What is the number of the code word day? = F
Day 8: Difference between the original song day for this code word and the day of this cache = C
Day 9: Difference between the code word day and the original song day of ths cache = D
Day 10: Add code word day plus original song day for drummers. Subtract original song word day for partridge and then divide by original song day for lords= K
Day 11: Difference between original song day for maids and code word day - original song word day for turtle doves = I
Day 12: Figure the dfference between code word day and original song day for Drummers, then divide by 3 = H
Many thanks to all the elves who contributed to the 2024 CVGA 12 Days of Cachemas series:
You can validate your puzzle solution with
certitude.
Congratulations to ZKIDS for a quick FTF on this bright morning before the snowstorm moves in!