Britain’s top spies pose tricky Christmas brainteasers – can you solve them?

Maybe don’t crack these codes after you crack open the bubbly this Christmas (Picture: PA)

Back in the late noughties, people were being asked if they were smarter than a 10-year-old.

These days, though, 10-year-olds are being asked if they’re smarter than British spies.

Every Christmas since 2020, the typically secretive electronic surveillance agency known as GCHQ releases a series of puzzles aimed at secondary school children who love science, technology and engineering.

GCHQ director Anne Keast-Butler will post Christmas cards to students up and down the UK packed with brainteasers designed by intelligence officials.

‘Puzzles have been at the heart of GCHQ from the start,’ she says.

‘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.’

This year’s is the Cheltenham-based agency’s ‘trickiest Christmas challenge so far’, with seven puzzles that all have a one-word answer which can follow the word ‘Christmas’.

All we can say is good luck (Picture: PA)

From music notes and binary codes to unscrambling gobbledygook and some suspicious-looking gift tags, solving the quiz unlocks a final challenge to compete.

The image on the front of the card is, of course, a clue in itself.

Depicting the snow-covered Bletchley Park mansion, once the agency’s wartime home, the image was discovered in the personal family album of codebreaker Joan Wingfield.

How there’s no ‘I’ in team certainly isn’t one of the codes to crack – Keast-Butler says the Christmas brainteasers should be solved together with friends and family.

‘Whether you are an analyst, an engineer or a creative, there is a puzzle for everyone,’ she says.

‘This is one for classmates, family and friends to try to solve together.’

Keast-Butler has even thrown in a bonus maths question for any fellow number whizzes out there.

Even the front of the Christmas card is itself a puzzle (Picture: PA)

Maybe don’t ask us for the answers. We’re journalists, not spies (or are we? no, probably not) (Picture: PA)

‘The Christmas card has seven puzzles. Four are of prime importance and two are boringly conventional. How many sides has the other one?’ the riddle reads.

The images in the above puzzle – surprise, surprise – contain hints to the answer, which also be released Friday morning on the GCHQ website.

Behind the festive puzzles is the rather mysteriously named Colin, GCHQ’s ‘chief puzzler’ which is, we gotta say, quite a job title.

He’s apparently such a good puzzle-maker even his quote below contains one.

‘Christmas is a great opportunity for GCHQ to engage young people, hence our annual Christmas Challenge,’ he says.

‘Our mission relies on people thinking differently and finding inventive ways to approach challenges.

‘Like the work at GCHQ, solving the puzzles on the card requires a mix of minds, and we want to show young people that thinking differently is a gift.

‘In order to read the final message these different approaches need to be brought together, demonstrating the value of teamwork as the final piece of the puzzle.

‘Not only do we want the Christmas Challenge to introduce young people to how we work at GCHQ, but we also intend it to be fun!’