Help with a Christmas Activity, Please

[Masaryk]

I want to send a friend of mine on a hunt through my house for his Christmas gift. I plan to give a succession of clues for him to follow to find the next clue, then the next, and so on, until he finds his gift. I wanted to use riddles and cryptograms (stuff like in the TDN Halloween Plot). I was planning to have 8-12 steps.

 

However, I'm really busy tonight, so I don't have time to spend doing a great job on this (especially since I have to wrap a present containing each clue). Does anyone want to give me a hand coming up with puzzles for this?

 

I need 8-12 word puzzles, cryptograms, riddles, clues, etc.

Puzzles can be a bit tricky.

Any location in my house or yard is fair game.

[antiaircraft]

Well I'd recommend some codes, but I've been told that my codes are way too hard to break. :P

 

Eh, I'll point out one method I've used in the past anyway:

 

And now I can post the answer to the scenario that nobody got right. :devil:

 

The message was encoded with a method that involved both scrambling and disguising.

 

HECYR8 EAPYQHLFU 5SB D3PK5EX

 

First you get rid of all the spaces:

HECYR8EAPYQHLFU5SBD3PK5EX

 

Now, I mentioned as a hint to look for the one number that was repeated twice, which in this case was the number five. So you break the message up into groups of five letters:

HECYR 8EAPY QHLFU 5SBD3 PK5EX

 

Next, you write each of the groups in its own column to form a grid:

H8Q5P

EEHSK

CALB5

YPFDE

RYU3X

 

Then, you form another string of letters by reading across the grid:

H8Q5PEEHSKCALB5YPFDERYU3X

 

Now the two numbers repeated in the code come into play again. The message was disguised by hiding it in a whole load of junk text, so you get rid of everything except the letters in between the two number '5's:

PEEHSKCALB

 

Then you simply reverse the text to get:

BLACKSHEEP

 

black sheep

 

I love the grid scrambling method, it's effective yet easy to use. b)