It’s coming up this Saturday, June 14th, and you can do it in the comfort of your own home.  This is always my favorite puzzle day of the year.  Registration is open through June 12th.  Winners who are US citizens get a spot on the US team for the world puzzle competition.  But even those outside the US can take part.

Last year, Google teamed up with Columbia Pictures to promote The Da Vinci Code with an online puzzle game.  This year, Google has teamed up with Universal Pictures to promote the new movie The Bourne Ultimatum, with an online puzzle game called The Ultimate Search for Bourne.

For the game, you take on the role of an agent trying to find Jason Bourne.  You do this with the help of tools provided by Google.  The game has you searching fake web sites for information on surveillance agents and the like.  Successfully playing the game each day allows you to place surveillance cameras in different locations with the hope of spotting Bourne on one of them.

The prizes for the game are similar to last years prizes for the Da Vinci Code Challenge.  They include, cash, a car, and trips to the major cities featured in the movies.  There are also additional daily prizes of $1000 gift cards.  And a special sightings prize of an iPhone for which anyone with over 25 sightings of Bourne is eligible.  The prizes this year are given out in sweepstakes fashion, so it’s really all luck whether or not you win.

The game has been only running a few days, and the challenges so far have not been terribly challenging, though there are some very interesting tools on the game display that have not yet been used.  All in all, a little less puzzley than last years game, but still worth a look.

The winner of the 2006 Google US Puzzle Championships is Thomas Snyder who scored 270 out of a possible 285 points.  Wei-Hwa Huang finished second with 369.  Interesting to note, Thomas and Wei-Hwa were the second and third place winners in the World Sudoku Championships.  Zack Butler, who won the US Puzzle Championship last year placed third.  These three and Roger Barkan make up the US team this year.

On this coming Saturday, June 17th, the Google US Puzzle Championship will be taking place.  In order to participate, you have to register before before Thursday June 15th.  You also need to block out two and a half hours starting at 1PM EDT.  The winners will represent the US in the World Puzzle Competition in Bulgaria.

If you want to get an idea of what the competition is like, they have a number of tests from previous years.

It’s a simple puzzle with fancier stuff promised in the future.

The puzzle asks you to take the numbers 3, 3, 8, and 8, arrange them in a specific order and create a mathematical expression that equals 24. You can use addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. All of the numbers must be used.

My Da Vinci Code cryptex arrived today and it’s much nicer than I was expecting.  I knew they said that it had a retail value of $30, but somehow I was still envisioning something made entirely out of plastic.  Quite a bit of it is metal and it’s fairly heavy.  Here’s a picture:

The code for opening it was on on the bottom of the box.  Now, we’re all set for the final round.

And the final puzzle of the quest could be solved in minutes.  The final “observation” challenge was particularly easy if you had read the book, which would have given you the answer to the final question.  It also wasn’t hard to figure out which video on Google videos would be used today and watch it before the challenge was released.

Now, if you’re done, it’s time to sit back and wait to see if you’re in the top 10,000.

The penultimate puzzle is a “geography” challenge meaning that is the final round, the puzzles are played in order from top to bottom. I already had a strong feeling about which city would be featured today, and the four cities featured formed the set that I was expecting.

The final challenge was, however, not as difficult as the last two. The final question was a mathematical one and not a geographical one, which made it easier for me. They also manage to tie all of the geography puzzles together which is pretty nice.

Tomorrow, the final puzzle.

For all that’s been said about helpmates and such. The “chess” challenges still baffle me. I played a couple different boards today. I am convinced that some of the boards have multiple solutions. Further, for one board I played, a wrong answer on the first trivia question resulted in what I thought was a valid first move for the helpmate. If we do indeed see helpmate puzzles like these in the final challenge, I hope that there is a single solution or that all valid solutions will be accepted.

For the last of the “curator” challenges, the puzzle does become slightly more difficult because there are no paintings placed for you, but this still remains the easiest of the puzzles.  Now, we move on to the question based puzzles to finish up our quest.

The key to answering the trivia questions this round seems to be Google book search.  We’ll see what kinds of questions we get for the “chess” and “observation” challenges.

For some reason, the final “restoration” challenge seemed easier than the one before it. And there didn’t seem to be more particles of debris. I can see in soem ways this being the sort of puzzle game where you can just get lucky and stumble upon the solution faster.

The question today was a Leonardo related trivia question made for Google. I’m beginning to wonder how long it will take for 10,000 people to solve all 24 puzzles. Certainly, it seems right now that any of the puzzles could be solved in minutes.

The final “symbol” challenge is the 6X6 sudoku as predicted.  I had thought that the chalice would be the sixth symbol, but instead a key, which we’ve never seen before, was used.

The question today required intimate knowledge of a very specific passage from a book.  And provided a link to Google book search which was, in fact, very helpful.

It seems that the degree of difficulty for the jigsaw portion of the “geography” challenges will not be increasing. However, the map manipulations and questions that follow are getting more complex. Today’s challenge was the most difficult of the quest so far. the final question in particular took me a good amount of time and many wrong guesses. Ultimately, it was Google Maps that helped me to find the answer. In retrospect, I maybe should have tried to use knowledge from The Da Vinci Code a little bit more as well.

Warning: Comments contain answers to today’s challenge.

I definitely found it easier today to pay more attention to the chess board than the trivia questions.  I believe that all of the answers to the trivia questions may actually be found in The Da Vinci Code, but you would have to have read it very closely.  You’d be much better off if you were a history buff.  I’m still having difficulty seeing the solutions from the beginning of the challenge.  I think because they usually require black to make a really bad move, and I just have trouble thinking that way.

Again more hooks for the “curator” challenge, but the puzzles here aren’t getting any harder.  There are very few spots where the large paintings fit.  I don’t even notice the hooks when I try to hang the paintings.

The question today asked for a translation from English into another language, which is a more difficult question for native English speakers.  Still, web resources abound for this sort of thing.