Solvers:
JTobcat
Ziot
LeFevre
cybourgeoisie
With help from:
In this write-up we will describe the content of the puzzle game and how to solve each part of it. We also point out where the bonus puzzle is which has its own prize pool of 4000 DCL wearables (solution not provided).
The Trailhead
This whole puzzle started with a single stealthy tweet
The image contains a message “Come Find Me Below” with the ciphertext of “;u8jj6”. This is a keyboard cipher where if you look at the keys below each letter on a keyboard, you see that it spells “/jimmy”.
This leads you to the jimmy page on the BAYC website:
https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/jimmy
From this page, you are able to load the puzzle game.
Jimmy the Monkey
Club House
The game is a 2D screen where you can click on rooms and interact with various objects. Most of the rooms contained a puzzle.
The Boat Room
The boat room contains a single interactable object in the room, which is a wall of dancing men. If you know a bit about ciphers, it’s fairly quick to recognize that it is a dancing man cipher.
Decoding the cipher reveals the following message:
This isnt a puzzle clue Suck on a banana bozo Love Jimmy
This seemed to be a troll as it was not used in the final solution.
The Party Room
The party room has two interactable objects in it. The first object is a dog collar with the numbers 0010 on it. The second object is a party poster containing song lyrics.
Dog Collar
We are unsure what this was for other than to maybe to indicate the prize BAKC was #10 as it was not used in the final puzzle solution.
The Lyric Sheet
The puzzle gives a selection of song lyrics sorted in alphabetical order by word with one of the words being replaced by the word Monkey. Solving this puzzle involves taking each lyric word bank, identifying the song, and figuring out which part of the song the lyrics are referencing. You sort each word in that set of lyrics in ABC order and figure out what word has been replaced with MONKEY.
This results in the following troll message:
WASTED YOUR TIME ON THIS ONE STUPID APES
The two objects in this room may have been used for something, but we did not end up using the lyric or dog collar for solving the final puzzle.
The Pool
Entering the pool area presents you with two puzzles. One located on the inflatable duck located in the pool, and the other on a drink menu located next to the bar.
Inflatable Duck
This puzzle presents a list of duck themed clues and their answer length. Going through and solving all the clues results in the list below.
Reading the first letter of each answer gives the phrase COCKTAILS ARE SHAKEN which is a clue for the puzzle located next to the bar.
Bar Menu
Using the hint from the previous puzzle, we now know this menu list is an anagram of cocktails. In addition, the text at the bottom of the menu indicates something extra was added to the drinks, hinting to there likely being an extra letter not used in the cocktail anagram. With there being 26 menu items, it seemed highly likely the extra letters or the cocktails used every letter A-Z for ordering when done.
It is quickly realized all the cocktails start with a unique letter A-Z that when put in order and reading the extra letters gives ORANGE LIQUEUR USED IN A SPRITZ which is the Liqueur Aperol.
Final Answer: Aperol
The Kitchen
Upon entering the kitchen, a sheet can be found lying next to the sink.
This puzzle provides instructions on what to do. Begin by identifying the dishes that are clued on the left and filling out in the blanks on the right.
The extracted letters (highlighted yellow on the sheet) spell the phrase GIBRALTARS BARBABY which is referencing a specific monkey that lives on Gibraltar, the Barbaby Macaque.
Final Answer: Macaque
The Library
Bus Don Ush Elf
In the library, you can start by clicking the bust on the top of the shelf which contains a puzzle scroll
This puzzle is a Mad Gab style puzzle as hinted by the title “Bus Don Ush Elf” which when read aloud sounds like “Bust on a Shelf”. You can make 4 Mad Gab style phrases using one word from each column on the scroll.
The output of each Mad gab is its own clue to a word. This final output is yet again a mad gab where EWES SICS SIGH FURS can be read as USE SIX CIPHERS, a hint for the bookshelf puzzle
Book Shelf
When you click on the book shelf next to the fireplace, it shows you an enlarged version of the bookshelf.
This bookshelf contains many different patterns throughout. As you start to group the patterns together you will discover there are 6 separate puzzles using 6 different ciphers, as hinted in the previous puzzle, contained in the shelf items.
The Monkey Hands
There are six hands throughout the shelves using American Sign Language to spell WEAPON
Naval Flags
There are six international maritime signal flags throughout the shelves that spell NASSAU
5 Bit Binary
There are six groups of books colored Orange and Green. These books are 5 bit binary which provides 10010 00101 00001 10011 01111 01110. These can be converted to their decimal equivalent of 18 5 1 19 15 14 which can further be converted to letters to read REASON
Clocks
There are six clocks through the shelves. Each clock face has a different time with both hands clearly visible. Using the clock hands as a flag semaphore you can obtain the letters to spell SALUTE
Book Titles
There are some books facing forward with their titles clearly visible. After reading through the titles you will notice some of the words are from the NATO alphabet. ECHO MIKE BRAVO ROMEO YANKEE OSCAR, when you extract the first letter of each NATO word, it will spell EMBRYO
Morse
Between each of the book shelves is a repeating pattern of a lighter color. Each shelf is a separate letter spelled using morse code. If you decode the morse for each shelf you it will spell ANALOG
Final
Now that we have the words extracted we need to extract the final answer. Looking at the words for a moment it can be seen that the first letter of each word can spell ANSWER when ordered correctly.
ANALOG
NASSAU
SALUTE
WEAPON
EMBRYO
REASON
Since the first letters spelled answer, we extracted the last letters to see if it provides an answer to the puzzle. The extract is GUENON, which is a breed of Old World Monkey.
Final Answer: Guenon
The Game Room
The game room contained two objects you can interact with. The first one is a game called “Jimmy the Asshole” which after some playing, didn’t appear to contain a puzzle. The second one is the game room puzzle.
You can check out the Jimmy the Asshole game here:
https://yugalabs.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/QmR1NBMBeUauT8UuomvrTBh5HXPUA1yeLM4UFeR584aoP7/
Board Game Rules
The flavor text for the puzzle is “there are lots of games to play here, if you can figure out the rules.” It also has some pictures of hangman and tic-tac-toe. These are big hints for what you are looking for and what the solution is going to be.
The solution for this puzzle involved taking each puzzle string and figuring out the puzzle rules that encoded the text.
Here is one as an example: PARDPORTHPIFTYPNPANASTA
There are a lot of P’s, so we want to analyze that first. You start by separating each line by P.
PARD
PORTH
PIFTY
PN
PANASTA
We are looking for game related words, so we can guess two words here: CARD and CANASTA. With these two, we can deduce that the rule for this puzzle is Replace first letter with P which when reversed from the cipher gives the following clue:
CARD
WORTH
FIFTY
IN
CANASTA
The answer to this clue is JOKER. However, we aren’t done just yet, now we need to apply the same rule we discovered (Replace first letter with P) to this answer to get a new answer out related to games. Applying the rule to JOKER results in POKER, the actual solution to this puzzle line
The rest:
Taking the first letter from each solution, you get the following phrase: DROOPERSAPTPAL, read DROOPERS APT PAL
After a quick google search, it was determined it is Drooper from The Banana Splits and his apartment pal is BINGO.
Drooper: https://thebananasplits.fandom.com/wiki/Drooper
Bingo: https://thebananasplits.fandom.com/wiki/Bingo
Bingo is an ape, so we can confidently determine that the answer is BINGO.
Final Answer: Bingo
The Attic
The attic is one of the more difficult puzzles and before we dive into it, we first have to talk about the skeleton in the crawlspace.
The Skeleton
The skeleton in the crawlspace has a bunch of 3 letter phrases and some numbers. With the flavor text of “NTH + EAT”, we know that we’re trying to combine the phrases to spell words with the numbers most likely being the length of each word.
There’s really no approach other than maybe looking up “words that start with” or “words that end with”, but the best place to start was realizing NTH and EAT were clued as being connected and could spell N THE AT. After that it is mixing and matching until you get something good out.
The output: ANASTASIA STEELE REALLY LOVES THE HEXES USED IN THE ATTIC.
This is a reference to Anastasia Steele from 50 Shades of Gray which is referencing that the hex color codes in the attic are “Gray Codes”. This is basically a second hint for Baudot — which you can see in The Attic section below.
The Attic Puzzle
The attic starts with an image with some pixels and flavor text about having to feel your way around in the dark. This is a reference for being blind and hinting towards the pixels being Braille.
The phrase you get out using colored pixels as Braille dots “BEGINNERS ALWAYS UNLOCK DIM OLD TONES”. If you take the first letter of each word as hinted by the word Beginners, you get: BAUDOT which is a type of cipher.
This is the one puzzle you can right click and export the image and it just so happens to be SVG, so we can extract the hex color codes accurately for the next step as hinted by the skeleton puzzle.
You can view the SVG and source blob here:
https://gist.github.com/ziot/7d7f57b6daef02acacfe9afc479cf7d3
Extracting all of the binary codes out and removing the lead 0, you get the following:
00111 11000 01110 00001 11001 11100 01101 11010
10011 10010 11110 00001 01101 10100 11110 01010
10000 00011 00110 00001 11100 01011 11000 01100
01110 11000 10010 00111 11100 01100 00011 01010
Using BAUDOT encoding on the binary:
https://www.dcode.fr/baudot-code
You get the following:
UOCEBMFG
WLVEFHVR
TAIEMJON
COLUMNAR
The only interesting thing we get is COLUMNAR (another type of cipher) at the end of the data. This suggests that our extract is valid, but the rest of it is ciphertext.
We then used this string with a Columnar Transposition solver, but without a key, it was just a bunch of guessing words as a key:
https://www.dcode.fr/columnar-transposition-cipher
We got stuck here for awhile until it was noticed that attempting some auto solves on the grid assuming 6 columns instead of 8 resulted in the final 8 letters looking like a scrambled version of VIGENERE. Given that the first set of data gave us COLUMNAR and having it almost end with VIGENERE now (another cipher type) was too likely to be a coincidence.
Putting some effort in manually with a 6 column assumption, we came up with the following:
Using columnar key of 412563 or 214563 gives an output that spells VIGENERE at the end. Giving us the following possible strings:
BUMWFTMOJLHAFCOV VIGENERE
BWMUFTMLJOHAFVOC VIGENERE
Cutting VIGENERE off the end and taking the remaining letters, we try to to decrypt the cipher using Vigenere and testing keywords related to Bored Apes and the puzzle. Eventually we land on the following:
By vigenere decoding the string (using https://cryptii.com/) with the key BAUDOT, we get the output: AUSTRALOPITHECUS which is the answer for the attic puzzle.
Final Answer: Australopithecus
The Final Solution
At this point we have used everything we have found so far, so it was time to turn our attention to what the final solution could be.
Taking the answers from each puzzles and sorting them ABC, we get the following words:
Aperol
Australopithecus
Bingo
Guenon
Macaque
Which leads us the string that is the solution for the Bored Apes puzzle:
aperol australopithecus bingo guenon macaque
The Submission
The Win
Thanks
We’d like to thank the BAYC team for building and releasing this puzzle. We had loads of fun solving it.
Bonus
For those of you still wanting to enjoy this puzzle, there is a bonus puzzle which the first 4000 correct submission can win a special bonus prize. While we don't include the solution in this guide, the puzzle can be found in the game as located below.
The Crate Room (Bonus Puzzle)
The crate room has a stern message to “not touch the fucking crate” and has one interactable object on the wall that you can click.
This is the bonus puzzle, that when solved and submitted while holding an ape will reward you with 1 of 4 unique DCL wearables (1000 supply each).
