For March, we went with a more open-ended puzzle hunt style challenge. Solvers were given a list of crossword clues and some flavor text suggesting there was a hidden message within.

Many of the clues admitted answers that sounded like groups of letters of the alphabet, and in fact observant solvers could notice that these letters helpfully came in alphabetic order! This extra constraint resolved any remaining ambiguities to find the following list of answers:

• Early stage of an animal - BABY
• Early stage of a plant - SEED
• Creepy - EERIE
• Reviled image that might fire up a crowd? - EFFIGY
• In minesweeper, it means you’re surrounded - EIGHT
• Spiced brew - CHAI
• Tapper on CNN - JAKE
• Iron or Bronze - AGE
• Iron but not bronze - ELEMENT
• Boy on “The Andy Griffith Show” - OPIE
• Signal - CUE
• Suspect, once apprehended - ARRESTEE
• “__ got mail” - YOUVE
• Raise the stakes yet again, in backgammon - REDOUBLE
• First mammal to be cloned - EWE
• Outer: prefix - EXO
• With consideration - WISELY

Here several solvers stopped, deciding the 11 letter long answer “THE ALPHABET” was correct. Sadly there was another layer to this onion! Armed with a list of answers that sound a lot like the alphabet, solvers could focus on the extra sounds that only occurred in our answer list. These were

BABY SEED EERIE EFFIGY EIGHT CHAI JAKE AGE ELEMENT OPIE CUE ARRESTEE YOUVE REDOUBLE EWE EXO WISELY

If a solver sounded out these extra sounds consecutively, they heard BRIDGE TROLL, an 11 letter answer that could be an obstacle discovered in a Puzzle Forest full of cryptic faeries.

Congrats to this month’s solvers that were able to fully decrypt the hidden warning offered by the faeries of Puzzle Forest!