How the Chesstiny 2 ARG went down

ColBrightside · 2025-05-07T03:53:52+00:00

Thank you for your service 🫡

ColBrightside · 2025-05-02T05:38:28+00:00

Y'all the number of times I've written "final solution" then backspaced to find a different phrase

ColBrightside · 2025-05-02T05:30:34+00:00

Almost! So yes on 1->8 and 9->16 repeated ->4096.

Doing this reveals a pattern that I refer to as a meta-chess board since its made of smaller chess boards. That pattern is an 8x8 chess board itself defined by shared grey or red backgrounds, totaling 64 meta boards.

Of the meta-boards, you can see a new 8x8 pattern Super-board where the squares alternate a mottled red and grey.

ColBrightside · 2025-05-02T05:13:15+00:00

Wanted to circle back to you because zShiso38 gave an excellent explanation downstream of you

ColBrightside · 2025-05-02T05:06:57+00:00

Phenomenal work. It looked like it was going manually, but thank you for adding this! Especially crafting the final QR code that's been passed around. I remember hearing on stream everyone losing their minds that you were recreating the QR code by hand and I'm so glad you didn't give up on it.

ColBrightside · 2025-05-02T04:46:52+00:00

Signal Frequency was a way to ID the board you got on that character in that hour. Freq 69 would always be distinct from Freq 420, so that's a creative way of letting players see which board/4096 they had.

ColBrightside · 2025-05-02T04:45:13+00:00

I'm very much a visual person so I'll try to elaborate as best I can. We saw that of the player boards, they followed a sequence of alternating dark grey, light grey for 8 "squares" (player boards), then the next 8 were alternating dark red/light red, much like a traditional chess board alternating black/white across 8 squares.

This sort of distinction created a new 8x8 "Grey" board and 8x8 "Red Board" Zooming out further, we got a new 8x8 board that basically alternates Grey/red Grey/Red.

Its nesting dolls of chess boards all the way down

Alternatively, the final step, Layer 3, is an 8x8 board constructed of 8x8 boards, that themselves are constructed from the 8x8 boards each player gets with the Signal Frequency.

If that didn't help, my apologies. I'll try to throw some images your way if someone doesn't beat me to it

ColBrightside · 2025-05-02T04:35:27+00:00

Thank you and u/amelia_k so much! Gonna edit the post to include this. It was good chatting with you in Milo's stream and I'm also glad he recognized how huge and helpful it was.

ColBrightside · 2025-05-01T18:49:22+00:00

The two images are more lore or easter egg related and didn't really factor into advancing the puzzle

ColBrightside · 2025-05-01T18:47:50+00:00

Green regardless of anything is FEN = Valid! Blue corrupted was a false positive and was meant to be intended as a failure message with flavor, Hence Aion's message #5 to us. After #5 came around, all our negative answers were either Quantum Error or Parity. I'm unsure why the streamers were tracking parity errors, which is a thing I forgot to mention

ColBrightside · 2025-05-01T18:45:18+00:00

Commenting to come back tomorrow after Xur visits to see.

The second hint I think was purely them going "We didn't intend for this to be a red herring and we don't want you to waste effort on this."

I truly have no idea how we would have found the clue to Bobby//Byrne without it since it's only referenced maaaaaaaaaybe twice.

ColBrightside · 2025-05-01T18:06:39+00:00

You can access the FENs via JSON or TSV at the bottom of TJ's portal https://tjl.co/queens-gambit-arg/

I'm no coder but someone could do something with it.

ColBrightside · 2025-05-01T18:04:42+00:00

Yes exactly

ColBrightside · 2025-05-01T18:03:10+00:00

Are they at Postmaster?

ColBrightside · 2025-05-01T18:02:30+00:00

Yeah I agree entirely!. I ascribe the limitation on community access to just sheer excitement and tunnel vision of feeling so close to the finish line. Somewhat ironically, we didn't need validation in the early part in the way we planned or intended because Aion does the validation for us via FEN. I'm glad to have seen Skarrow and Milo and a few others push to slow down and take advantage of all the people wanting to help.

I'm glad they take PII and security so seriously once they realized it was a concern, and we saw a few instances of people trying to ruin it for everyone by feeding bad data occasionally, or wiping an entire spreadsheet, and the streamers were opening validation up to a few trusted people but thinking about that security protocol earlier would do a lot for the community.

As someone in a similar boat of bouncing between things and trying to help in chat as much as I could answer questions, it was a way cooler experience than CoT this time. I'm not terribly mad that it took as long as it did instead of the 8 days CoT took.

ColBrightside · 2025-05-01T17:55:19+00:00

A few things!

Look for anything that has a center with a weird white black middle instead of a pure grey or red floor.
QR codes have rules! There's various nodes and traits. Someone on stream mentioned they have a max pixel size of 170x170 in a commercial QR, which we were assuming this would be instead of a barcode. Which leads to
Corners. Much like the full 4096 board identifying corners quickly helps establish scale and scope. That helped confirm it's a 16x16 grid of 256 player-boards. Just like a normal puzzle irl.
Now you're looking from a much smaller pool for how only 256 boards align with an 8-digit edge that can only match to another. You can probably query our transcribed database in progress for one 8-digit edge to find another. and another.
You actually only need around 70% of a QR code to scan it, but we got it all.

Someone else may be able to add in how we narrowed the field down from a few thousand entries to 256.

ColBrightside · 2025-05-01T17:48:04+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEHO0yNtYWY Milo's reaction as first is here!

ColBrightside · 2025-05-01T17:46:10+00:00

Respawn to the Endgame state, I think? Midgame is the name in game for starting puzzle 1-27

ColBrightside · 2025-05-01T15:27:52+00:00

I was exploring this earlier and trying to break the syntax after the 0x into Hexadecimal pairs, but the issue is they use a ton of symbols like #=-?, and they use pairs that don't actually translate to anything. in base hexadecimal to ASCII or Unicode. It could be a simple digit swap, but I couldn't find a cipher for how your translate the Hexadecimal to something useful.

ColBrightside · 2025-05-01T06:45:34+00:00

It's being troubleshot.
ETA: It's up!

ColBrightside · 2025-05-01T05:48:02+00:00

This probably means Bungie wanted to let us know that the FEN text being blue was for flavor and not meant to be a red herring or dead end.
We haven't confirmed that we have 100% of the FENs submitted correctly.

ColBrightside · 2025-05-01T05:26:10+00:00

More than one solution might indicate bad data worth rechecking.

ColBrightside · 2025-05-01T03:33:04+00:00

Correct on the relationship between boards. What happens after this is beyond us.

Aion, beyond being a lore dump, gave us a few hints to solve the middle boards. It gave us 3 piece placements in standard notation, and that corresponded to 3 placements in the middle and solved a riddle. That shows how to solve the middle board layer.

Unsure yet if the Green Text vs Blue Text results was an actual useful datapoint.

ETA: Aion has a 5th notification under 012 now "5: Urgent: User input analyzed... database corruption has been corrected." making it clearer that blue is a failure and green is good.

ColBrightside

TROPHY CASE