The challenge invites thousands of entrants to tackle a sequence of increasingly complex ciphers split into Part A (introductory) and Part B (advanced).

At LRGS we had two teams competing:
Our Upper Sixth team did exceptionally well, completing every challenge apart from the last one, which was set over the Christmas break when they were surely working hard preparing for exams.
Our Lower Sixth team managed to complete the whole set of challenges.

The leaderboard, published last week, suggests that they were one of the first 125 teams to break the final cipher, 10B.

The boys explored a wide range of ciphers, finding a connection between the encrypted text and a set of playing cards with each card represented as a pair of characters. Combining this with a four-square Polybius cipher, they achieved their goal using excellent coding skills. The tenacity, team spirit and hard work needed to get this far, over the holidays, is noteworthy.
Well done, boys!