GOLDEN BEETLE Partial Solution

[Leveret]

Partial Solution for the GOLDEN BEETLE Token, and Bonus Prize!

The GOLDEN BEETLE token was hidden in Danbury, CT in the Children's Garden in Tarrywile Park under a stone in the back of a rock wall, at a location shown roughly in map grid cell CU.

The following message was hidden in Golden Beetle's TEXT song lyrics, using a method that the authors are not revealing at this time:
TARRYWILE PK CU

The authors are offering a Bonus Prize, a beetle coin, to the first participant or team that successfully reports to the authors in detail how that message hidden/encoded. Please use the official email address to submit claims for this bonus prize.

[update on 7/2/22: the Bonus Prize has been claimed by Team Palmford.]
[update on 7/29/22: more information on the solution has been posted below.]

[Leveret]

The GOLDEN BEETLE bonus prize/coin has been claimed by Team Palmford. Congratulations to that team!

[stercox]

Congratulation to Team Palmford! Nice job!!

Will we finally be getting additional information now on this puzzle's partial solution, dear Leveret?

[Leveret]

Jul 2, 2022 10:08:15 GMT -5 stercox said:

Will we finally be getting additional information now on this puzzle's partial solution, dear Leveret?

More details on how TARRYWILE PK CU was encoded in the Golden Beetle lyrics will be revealed on July 29th, 28 days after that solution was first reported to the authors.

[Leveret]

More of the Solution for the GOLDEN BEETLE Token

The following message was hidden in Golden Beetle's TEXT song lyrics:
TARRYWILE PK CU

This message was one of many hidden in the book using a Polybius 6x6 (aka Poly6) square. The Poly6 squares used in Leveret had a structured-but-unusual 36 symbol ordering and used keywords at the top of the Poly6 square.

The basic structure of the Poly6 square was revealed by the messages encoded in the borders of the map. The left and right sides were encoded with progressively trickier versions of Caesar shifts, which led to a message encoded at the top of the map. The message at the top left side used all 26 letters, while the message at the top right side hinted at a message that also used digits, a minus sign/hyphen, and a period.

The dominos at the bottom of the map encoded the very same message as the top, but with the full use of numbers, -, and . revealed on the far right. Putting the symbols into a 6x6 square as revealed by the dominos resulted in a square with KEYWORD at the top, (i.e., K=11, E=12, Y=13, etc) followed by the remaining letters, digits, and symbols in a regular-but-unusual pattern. This allowed solvers to find the base Poly6 structure.

One of three messages hidden in the town names was encoded using this Poly6 square (called message #8 in the released hints). If the map was turned upside-down, the 48 town names corresponded to the locations of the 48 capitals of the US states. If the town names were ordered in a manner suggested by the binary message hidden in the border of Verdee's art and if the first and last letters were removed (as they were used in messages #7 and #9), the remaining portions of the town names were length 1-6. Using these lengths to index into the Poly6 square from the dominos revealed a message explaining what the other keywords were for other puzzles in the book.

Knowing the Poly6 structure and the correct keyword, solvers could then attempt to solve the Golden Beetle puzzle.

Hidden in the Golden Beetle artwork were vowel pairs AE, IO, and UY, hinting that vowel pairs were important and suggesting the typical ordering of the 6 vowels AEIOUY=123456. Taking words from Golden Beetle's lyrics that had two vowels in them and using the vowel pairs to index into the Poly6 square with the correct keyword finally revealed the message:
TARRYWILE PK CU