Puzzle Description:

A message written with flags from the international code of signals.

#1: Jan Wolter (jan) on Aug 28, 2008 [SPOILER]

It says WEBPBN.

The triangular flag is a repeater. A ship generally doesn't carry more than one of each flag, so if there is a repeated letter they fly a repeater in this case, the third repeater, indicating a repetition of the third letter of the word.

All these national flag puzzles got me thinking about signal flags, so I thought that might be an interesting kind of puzzle to create.

Happily, none of the flags needed to spell "webpbn" contained yellow, but I almost gave up on the idea of spelling "webpbn" when I saw the "N" flag, which seemed like it was going to have multiple solutions no matter how you drew it. So I spent some time trying to think of what else I could spell, but the yellow problem eliminated many letters, including all vowels except E and A.

Then I figured out how repeaters work, and decided I had to have a repeated letter, and that made "webpbn" look good again, but got me back to the problem of how to do the "N" flag without multiple solutions.

My first idea was to silhouette figures doing the semaphore codes for the same letters in front of each flag. That would have been cool, but to draw decent looking semaphore men would have made the puzzle pretty big. Then I had the simple idea of having the tip of the repeater overlap the "N" flag, which solved the multiple solution problem.

I also decided to position the flags in two rows of three, so that neither rows nor columns would be too trivial to solve. Then I staggered the flags instead of lining them up neatly, so as to avoid too many blank rows and columns, which would make the puzzle too easy, and to hide the fact that they were all different sizes. The different sizes are because some flags needed to have an odd height to look good (B and the repeater), and one needed to be even (E), one needed to be a multiple of four (N) and one needed to be a multiple of 5 (W).

In other words, I wasted way too much thought on this stupid little puzzle.

Neat! I had a lot of fun solving this one!

Actually, though flags can be used to spell out words like this, it is almost never done. There are standard codes for all the most common messages ships want to broadcast. These consists of just one, two or three flags. Like "L" indicates a ship in quarantine.

More complex messages were always rare, and have pretty much disappeared in the age of radio, so spelling things out like this is pretty much an obsolete art. In fact, these days the flags are mostly just used to decorate ships for festive occasions.

LOL Jan, you can never spend to much time on creating a puzzle, Thank you I enjoyed solving this

It's always good to see your name, Jan, and thank you for an interesting puzzle!

Nice puzzle and a good idea too, thankyou! :)

By the way, the most famous signal ever sent is certainly Admiral Horatio Nelson's signal at the start of the battle of Trafalgar: "England expects that every man will do his duty".

I thought of doing that phrase, but it was transmitted in a different version of the code, requiring 31 flags, many of them yellow. (All nations used to have their own secret signal codes so they could send messages without the enemy being able to read them.) Oh well.

Fantastic solution the the solvability problem. I am truly impressed by your puzzle making skills. I cross-stitched all the signal flags for a piece I did for my brother.

Great puzzle and history lesson/information. Fun.

Thank you for the puzzle and for the interesting cultural capsule.

thank you for the lesson on flag code, but most of all for your wonderful imagination and all your time spent creating the puzzles. I love solving them.

very interesting puzzle.

I knew immediately (well, once I saw all the 2x2 blue squares) that the triangle flag was overlapping for solvability. :)

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