Operation: Sleeper Cell Summary

If you didn't play Operation: Sleeper Cell, here is what you missed!

Background

Operation: Sleeper Cell was made by Law 37 to raise money and awareness for Cancer Research UK as a result of the Let's Change The Game competition. The game ran for ten weeks in late 2008 and we raised £3668 in total. Everybody who worked on the game did so in their spare time as volunteers.

Introducing The Agency

Operation: Sleeper Cell was a game about biscuits, tea (stirred not shaken) and loveliness. To play the game, you signed up as a trainee special agent with The Agency, a secret organisation dedicated to spreading loveliness across the world. Its archenemies are the Erudite Villains in Leather aka E.V.I.L and at the start of the game, alerts of new E.V.I.L activity have reached The Agency. To combat this new threat, The Agency need to awaken and fund their sleeper cells.

The Agency website www.wearenottheagency.com is where the main story for the game unfolded in the blogs of Agent Herring, Agent Nova and Agent Stock. The website also contains everything you might want to know about The Agency, from a virtual tour of their building drawn on paper napkins to a quiz to a list of The Agency's favourite gadgets.

Screenshot of The Agency website

The blogs were supplemented by tweets from Agent Herring throughout the game.

Unlocking sleeper cells

The main game website was www.operationsleepercell.com which you can still visit (we have had to turn off a few of the features though now that the game has ended).

Screenshot of Operation Sleeper Cell site

The game centred around 'The Grid'. Most of the cells on the grid were 'sleeper cells' that provided missions to complete. As you completed the missions, you uncovered secret intelligence from the cells and went up in rank in The Agency, gaining access to more difficult missions.

But before players could access a mission, each cell needed to be unlocked with a donation usually of about £30 (although some cells were much more expensive and some cheaper), representing funding the cell. Sponsoring a cell in this way gave the sponsoring team a 12-hour head start over other players on the mission behind that cell. The sponsoring team could also pick the image for the cell. Once one team had sponsored the cell then all players had access to the mission behind it, so it was possible to play without making any donations.

New cells were released gradually as the game unfolded. By the end of the game, there were nearly 70 missions on The Grid.

Examples of Missions

Most of the missions were puzzles, but there were also some missions that involved real life challenges. Here are a few examples to give you a taste. All the missions can still be accessed on the Operation: Sleeper Cell if you would like to have a try at any of them.

Wiretapping

'Oh dear, it looks like Agent Slack has got his wires crossed. When HQ asked him to wiretap a suspicious cell to see if we could get anything out of them, he proceeded to place his fingers on the telephone cord and started drumming out a message.

As luck would have it, Rose Marie (our telephone operator) was on the ball and managed to record the message Agent Slack sent to the rogue cell.

What was Agent Stock asking for?'

This mission could be solved by listening to the message and decoding the morse code it contained, with one twist: the dashes and dots were transposed. The reflected message on the phone gives a hint to this.

Bookshelf

'This is a recent photograph taken in the study of one of our Agents. Just a normal desk with a few common items and a well-stocked (if a little wide-ranging) bookshelf. We know now, though he was trying to tell us something. A name, a codeword, what?'

This was one of thEe hardest missions in the game. The first letter of the surnames of each of the authors on the shelves spells 'Second letter from seventh word from each opus'.

If you find the second letter from the seventh word of each of the books depicted then they spell out the question 'Whose ultra auric anserine staff never honked?' or in other words 'Whose golden geese never cackled?" (with the word 'ultra' thrown in as an extra hint). The answer is that it was Churchill's geese who, in his words, never cackled. He was referring to the staff at Bletchley Park who provided him with intelligence (codeword ULTRA) from Enigma decrypts.

Copycat

'As laughably unrealistic to daily Agency life as they are, the popular James Bond films are a good source of jokes and banter in the Agency HQ. We've seen them so much though, now, that (as well as wearing out our remote control) we're looking for more comedic material to occupy us in tea breaks. Reconstruct a scene from one of the Bond films however you like (with friends and costumes, or puppets, or edible forms... go wild!) and take a photo. If we can guess which scene you have chosen then you'll get your reward in points.'

International Day of Tea

As well as the missions, The Agency declared Friday 7th November to be the International Day of Tea. Players were encouraged to ask their colleagues, family and friends to sponsor them to make tea for them for the day.

Photos from players

There were some great photos from players in response to some of the missions. You can see more at the Operation: Sleeper Cell Flickr group.

From SarahB:

The name's Spud... James Spud.
James Spud: Do you expect me to talk?!
Spudfinger: No, Mr Spud, I expect you to FRY.

From Angelsk

From AndyAndyO

From Angelsk

Mission Rewards

When players completed a mission they got a reward from the sleeper cell in question.

Some of these were just for fun like a story the episodes of which were hidden behind different cells, and these Top Crumbs cards:

Others such as these contained more vital intelligence which was used to find the username and password for E.V.I.L's secret masterplan.

There were also about forty pieces of a blueprint beind some of the cell. If you completed the jigsaw, you found that the blueprint was for a machine that E.V.I.L were building to destroy all the loveliness in the world.

View E.V.I.L's blueprint (thanks to Agent Rogi for putting the pieces together on a web page!)

Infiltrating E.V.I.L

Partway through the game, players found that a company called Bespoke Leather had sponsored one of the cells. The sponsored cell has a link to their website http://www.bespokeleather.co.uk/

After a little bit more investigation, the website turned out to be a front for E.V.I.L. On the site was a password-protected section for E.V.I.L's secret masterplan.

E.V.I.L was led by Baron Von Thistlethorpe III who kept a pet goldfish.

This pet goldfish, Sweety, turned out to be a very clever goldfish. So clever, in fact, that she could blog. She also hated the Baron and was a useful source of hints for the players.

Parallel, to this, evidence was discovered that there was a mole in The Agency and players had to figure out who the identity of the mole.

Defeating E.V.I.L

Through a circuitous journey based on cult spy TV shows and a sudoku based on the grid squares, the clues behind the cells eventually led players to the book 'A Field Guide to the Birds of the West Indies'. This was the book that inspired Ian Fleming when he was deciding the name for 007.

For full details on how the clues worked and the parts of the puzzle described below, see the Big Puzzle Walkthrough.

The names of the birds in the book could be used to decode a message on the blueprint pieces. The message led people to the Cancer Research UK shop in Bletchley where they could find a copy of the book sitting on a shelf behind the counter.

A clue in the book together with the original message, hinted to the players where in Bletchley Park to look for the password to E.V.I.L's secret masterplan section (it was in a cabinet in the Ian Fleming exhibition in Hut 12).

The message also told players how to get the username.

When players sponsored a cell, they were posted a 'certificate of cell sponsorship' with an Agency business card paperclipped to it. Each of the business cards had one of the letters of the username written on the back in UV pen, so the players had to collaborate to figure out what the username was.

E.V.I.L defeated

The game culminated in a pub meet-up in London and the destruction of E.V.I.L's machine with some help from Sweety.

Thank you to everybody who played, who donated and who helped to make the game!