MW’s Codes and Ciphers Series: The Keyword Polybius Square in The Ultimate Quest Armchair Treasure Hunt

The Ultimate Quest, published in 2001, was an armchair treasure hunt book. It has since been discontinued and remains an unsolved treasure hunt of today. The Prize was to be ‘a priceless replica of the Grail cup’. In order to have claimed the ‘Grail’, searchers needed to discover the contact information for the ‘Grail Keeper’ in the book, contact him, and then correctly answer five questions, which were also in the book. No one was able to complete the journey and the hunt was suspended in 2011.

For ten years, hunters worked on trying to solve the codes and ciphers in the book. Many of the initial ciphers were successfully solved. Unfortunately, even after these puzzles were solved, more questions, than answers, were had. The solved ciphers basically provided other riddles. Much in line with what the parchments of the Rennes le Chateau mystery had done, which did seem to have been connected in some way.

Nonetheless, one of the ciphers solved used a Keyword Polybius Square. That is what this segment is going to discuss. On one of the pages of the Ultimate Quest was a note. It can be noticed none of the numbers go above 5, and each grouping is of even count, suggesting a possible pairing.

As mentioned in a previous segment of MW’s Codes and Ciphers, a Polybius Square utilizes a 5×5 grid, with columns and rows numbered, filled with the alphabet. The I and J are often combined. A pairing of numbers can then be used to reveal a message. As shown.

A Keyword – Polybius Square is the same, but the alphabet is filled first by using a Keyword. If a searcher paired the numbers and applied the paired numbers of the Ultimate Quest note to a basic Polybius Square, without a Keyword, the decode would not make sense.

In The Ultimate Quest, there were actually two Keywords, and were a bit tricky. They were discovered to be GRAIL and QUEST. Which since the hunt was a ‘Grail Quest’ that seemed reasonable. What wasn’t so reasonable was the first word of GRAIL filled the first row, and QUEST filled the fourth row.

This was thought to be an additional clue. So using the Keywords, the 5×5 grid is filled by placing the letters of GRAIL and QUEST first, and then continuing with the remaining letters of the alphabet. The grid for the cipher of The Ultimate Quest was as follows:

The numbers on the note were paired: 34 41 11 52 54 ….. (and so on ..)