We already have over 2,000 participants registered in over 1,000 teams from across the UK. We are very grateful to renowned author and script writer Anthony Horowitz for retweeting about the competition to help us widen our audience. (AH tweeted that his creation Alex Rider is a big fan of codes and ciphers – he is too modest, I happen to know he is a dab hand himself.) Challenge 1 is all set to go on Thursday at 3pm and there is still time to register. The first challenge this year is really really easy (part B is a bit trickier, but not much) so roll up your sleeves, sharpen your pencils and brains and get set to join the adventure.

Good luck,

Harry

Hope you are getting excited for Challenge 1 next week. We will be trying something a little different to help complete newbies, so with luck Challenge 1A will be easy peasy for everyone, and you will then be able to focus on Challenge 1B where we won’t give as much help.

If you haven’t yet registered it is easy, just head over to

https://2018.cipherchallenge.org/account-login/

to make your account.

If you have any questions you can either post them in the Forum, or email them to me at

[email protected]

Looking forward to getting to know you all a little bit.

Harry

Welcome back to the National Cipher Challenge. This year you will be working with Jodie on a new project. After returning from her adventures in the Middle East last year, I set her up with what looked like a simple job working for the British Library, archiving old documents from the Victorian era, but it didn’t turn out the way I thought it would. Something was wrong, or at the very least missing, and Jodie seems to have uncovered a new danger connected with an old enemy. Unless she can stop it someone could destabilise the already fragile peace with Russia, and she needs your help to track down the enemy and the missing files. Are you ready to tackle The Kompromat Files?