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UK spy agency releases annual Christmas puzzle challenge for students: Can you solve it?

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(NEXSTAR) – Are you smarter than a British fifth-through-twelfth-grader?

The U.K.’s Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) has published the 2023 edition of its annual “GCHQ Christmas Challenge,” which tasks students throughout the country with cracking a series of holiday-themed codes.

The GCGQ — the U.K’s leading intelligence agency — had already sent the brainteasers to over 1,000 schools before revealing the puzzles to the general public on Thursday, The Guardian reported. The idea, according to GCHQ Director Anne Keast-Butler, is to promote disciplines including problem-solving and teamwork.

“Puzzles have been at the heart of GCHQ from the start. These skills represent our historic roots in cryptography and encryption and continue to be important to our modern-day mission to keep the country safe,” Keast-Butler said in a statement included with a Thursday news release.

This year’s puzzles, presented in the form of a Christmas card, include a riddle, a cryptogram, and an algebraic problem, among others.

(GCHQ.co.uk/)

For the “final challenge,” the GCHQ instructs players to refer to the front of the Christmas card for visual clues that, in some way, correspond to the answers of the first seven puzzles.

GCHQ Christmas Challenge2
(GCHQ.co.uk/)

The card can also be downloaded at GCHQ.co.uk. (For those interested, the answers were also made available at the GCHQ website on Friday.)

The GCHQ, currently based in Gloucestershire, England, was first established as the Government Code & Cypher School after WWI in 1919. During WWII, the agency was based at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire (which is depicted on the front of the 2023 Christmas card), where code-breakers including Alan Turing successfully deciphered encrypted Nazi communications.

“Our brilliant people use cutting-edge technology, technical ingenuity and wide-ranging partnerships to identify, analyse and disrupt threats to the UK,” the GCHQ writes on its official site.

Nexstar Media Wire

Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

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