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Solution

In honor of the start of 2026, I wanted to build a theme around the alphabet. I did this with 13 Raddles, where each of the title words started with a different letter of the alphabet. But that was only the beginning of the mystery. Here's how it worked:

The first step was to notice that each day featured letters in opposite positions of the alphabet. A → Z, B → Y, C → X, etc. You can spot this by scanning the 13 Raddle titles.

The letters were paired up to suggest a cipher where A turned into Z and Z into A. B turned into Y and Y into B. And so on. (This cipher is called Atbash, but you didn't need to know that to solve.)

But what letters to translate? This is where the cluephrase comes in. It said "the ends justify the means". The "ends" in this case are the ends of each word.

  • U from ADIEU becomes F
  • R from ZIPPER becomes I
  • U from BAYOU becomes F
  • Y from YOUNG becomes T
  • etc.

When converted, the 26 letters spell out five words, in this order:

  • FIFTY
  • NITROGEN
  • VOLT
  • SHIRT
  • ZULU

The next step is to recognize that these five words can be abbreviated or symbolized with a single letter each:

  • L (Roman numeral for FIFTY)
  • N (symbol for NITROGEN)
  • V (symbol for a VOLT)
  • T (shape of SHIRT, or shorthand for a t-shirt)
  • Z (ZULU in the NATO phonetic alphabet)

LNVTZ doesn't spell anything sensical, but if you re-convert it using the original cipher, you get the solution: OMEGA!

Our randomly chosen winner is…

Alexa Silverman

Solvers

Congrats to all 183 of you who got it right!

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