I was contacted this week by a geocacher called Dominik who, like me, loves geocaching…. but hates it when the coordinates for a cache are hidden behind a virtual jigsaw puzzle.
A popular online jigsaw tool used by lazy geocache owners is Jigidi: I’ve come up with severaltechniques for bypassing their puzzles or at least making
them easier.
Not just any puzzle; the geocache used an ~1000 piece puzzle! Ugh!
I experimented with a few ways to work-around the jigsaw, e.g. dramatically increasing the “snap range” so dragging a piece any distance would result in it jumping to a
neighbour, and extracting original image URLs from localStorage. All were good, but none were
perfect.
For a while, making pieces “snap” at any range seemed to be the best hacky workaround.
Then I realised that – unlike Jigidi, where there can be a congratulatory “completion message” (with e.g. geocache coordinates in) – in JigsawExplorer the prize is seeing the
completed jigsaw.
You can click a button to see the “box” of a jigsaw, but this can be disabled by the image uploader.
Let’s work on attacking that bit of functionality. After all: if we can bypass the “added challenge” we’ll be able to see the finished jigsaw and, therefore, the geocache
coordinates. Like this:
Hackaround
Here’s how it’s done. Or keep reading if you just want to follow the instructions!
Open a jigsaw and try the “box cover” button at the top. If you get the message “This puzzle’s box top preview is disabled for added challenge.”, carry on.
Open your browser’s debug tools (F12) and navigate to the Sources tab.
Find the jigex-prog.js file. Right-click and select Override Content (or Add Script Override).
In the overridden version of the file, search for the string – e&&e.customMystery?tt.msgbox("This puzzle's box top preview is disabled for added challenge."): –
this code checks if the puzzle has the “custom mystery” setting switched on and if so shows the message, otherwise (after the :) shows the box cover.
Carefully delete that entire string. It’ll probably appear twice.
Reload the page. Now the “box cover” button will work.
The moral, as always, might be: don’t put functionality into the client-side JavaScript if you don’t want the user to be able to bypass it.
Or maybe the moral is: if you’re going to make a puzzle geocache, put some work in and do something clever, original, and ideally with fieldwork rather than yet another low-effort
“upload a picture and choose the highest number of jigsaw pieces to cut it into from the dropdown”.
A year and a half ago I came up with a technique for intercepting the “shuffle” operation
on jigsaw website Jigidi, allowing players to force the pieces to appear in a consecutive “stack” for ludicrously easy solving. I did this
partially because I was annoyed that a collection of geocaches near me used Jigidi puzzles as a barrier to their coordinates1…
but also because I enjoy hacking my way around artificially-imposed constraints on the Web (see, for example, my efforts last week to circumvent region-blocking on radio.garden).
My solver didn’t work for long: code changes at Jigidi’s end first made it harder, then made it impossible, to use the approach I suggested. That’s fine by me – I’d already got what I
wanted – but the comments thread on that post suggests that there’s
a lot of people who wish it still worked!2
And so I ignored the pleas of people who wanted me to re-develop a “Jigidi solver”. Until recently, when I once again needed to solve a jigsaw puzzle in order to find a geocache’s
coordinates.
Making A Jigidi Helper
Rather than interfere with the code provided by Jigidi, I decided to take a more-abstract approach: swapping out the jigsaw’s image for one that would be easier.
This approach benefits from (a) having multiple mechanisms of application: query interception, DNS hijacking, etc., meaning that if one stops working then another one can be easily
rolled-out, and (b) not relying so-heavily on the structure of Jigidi’s code (and therefore not being likely to “break” as a result of future upgrades to Jigidi’s platform).
It’s not as powerful as my previous technique – more a “helper” than a “solver” – but it’s good enough to shave at least half the time off that I’d otherwise spend solving a Jigidi
jigsaw, which means I get to spend more time out in the rain looking for lost tupperware. (If only geocaching were even the weirdest of my hobbies…)
How To Use The Jigidi Helper
To do this yourself and simplify your efforts to solve those annoying “all one colour” or otherwise super-frustrating jigsaw puzzles, here’s what you do:
Visit a Jigidi jigsaw. Do not be logged-in to a Jigidi account.
Open your browser’s debug tools (usually F12). In the Console tab, paste it and press enter. You can close your debug tools again (F12) if you like.
Press Jigidi’s “restart” button, next to the timer. The jigsaw will restart, but the picture will be replaced with one that’s easier-to-solve than most, as described below.
Once you solve the jigsaw, the image will revert to normal (turn your screen around and show off your success to a friend!).
What makes it easier to solve?
The replacement image has the following characteristics that make it easier to solve than it might otherwise be:
Every piece has written on it the row and column it belongs in.
Every “column” is striped in a different colour.
Striped “bands” run along entire rows and columns.
To solve the jigsaw, start by grouping colours together, then start combining those that belong in the same column (based on the second digit on the piece). Join whole or partial
columns together as you go.
I’ve been using this technique or related ones for over six months now and no code changes on Jigidi’s side have impacted upon it at all, so it’s probably got better longevity than the
previous approach. I’m not entirely happy with it, and you might not be either, so feel free to fork my code and improve it: the legiblity of the numbers is sometimes suboptimal, and
the colour banding repeats on larger jigsaws which I’d rather avoid. There’s probably also potential to improve colour-recognition by making the colour bands span the gaps
between rows or columns of pieces, too, but more experiments are needed and, frankly, I’m not the right person for the job. For the second time, I’m going to abandon a tool
that streamlines Jigidi solving because I’ve already gotten what I needed out of it, and I’ll leave it up to you if you want to come up with an improvement and share it with the
community.
Footnotes
1 As I’ve mentioned before, and still nobody believes me: I’m not a fan of jigsaws! If you
enjoy them, that’s great: grab a bucket of popcorn and a jigsaw and go wild… but don’t feel compelled to share either with me.
2 The comments also include asuper-helpful person called Rich who’s been manually
solving people’s puzzles for them, and somebody called Perdita
who “could be my grandmother” (except: no) with whom I enjoyed a
conversation on- and off-line about the ethics of my technique. It’s one of the most-popular comment threads my blog has ever seen.
tl;dr? Just want instructions on how to solve Jigidi puzzles really fast with the help of your browser’s dev tools? Skip to that bit.
This approach doesn’t work any more. Want to see one that still does (but isn’t quite so automated)? Here you go!
I don’t enjoy jigsaw puzzles
I enjoy geocaching. I don’t enjoy jigsaw puzzles. So mystery caches that require you to solve an online jigsaw puzzle in order to get the coordinates really
don’t do it for me. When I’m geocaching I want to be outdoors exploring, not sitting at my computer gradually dragging pixels around!
Many of these mystery caches use Jigidi to host these jigsaw puzzles. An earlier version of Jigidi was auto-solvable with a userscript, but the service has continued to be developed and evolve and the current version works quite hard to
make it hard for simple scripts to solve. For example, it uses a WebSocket connection to telegraph back to the server how pieces are moved around and connected to one another and the
server only releases the secret “you’ve solved it” message after it detects that the pieces have been arranged in the appropriate relative configuration.
If there’s one thing I enjoy more than jigsaw puzzles – and as previously established there are about a billion things I enjoy more than jigsaw puzzles – it’s reverse-engineering a
computer system to exploit its weaknesses. So I took a dive into Jigidi’s client-side source code. Here’s what it does:
Get from the server the completed image and the dimensions (number of pieces).
Cut the image up into the appropriate number of pieces.
Shuffle the pieces.
Establish a WebSocket connection to keep the server up-to-date with the relative position of the pieces.
Start the game: the player can drag-and-drop pieces and if two adjacent pieces can be connected they lock together. Both pieces have to be mostly-visible (not buried under other
pieces), presumably to prevent players from just making a stack and then holding a piece against each edge of it to “fish” for its adjacent partners.
I spent some time tracing call stacks to find this line… only to discover that it’s one of only four lines to actually contain the word “shuffle” and I could have just searched for
it…
Looking at that process, there’s an obvious weak point – the shuffling (point 3) happens client-side, and before the WebSocket sync begins. We could override the
shuffling function to lay the pieces out in a grid, but we’d still have to click each of them in turn to trigger the connection. Or we could skip the shuffling entirely and just leave
the pieces in their default positions.
An unshuffled jigsaw appears as a stack, as if each piece from left to right and then top to bottom were placed one at a time into a pile.
And what are the default positions? It’s a stack with the bottom-right jigsaw piece on the top, the piece to the left of it below it, then the piece to the left of that and son on
through the first row… then the rightmost piece from the second-to-bottom row, then the piece to the left of that, and so on.
That’s… a pretty convenient order if you want to solve a jigsaw. All you have to do is drag the top piece to the right to join it to the piece below that. Then move those two to the
right to join to the piece below them. And so on through the bottom row before moving back – like a typewriter’s carriage return – to collect the second-to-bottom row and so on.
How can I do this?
If you’d like to cheat at Jigidi jigsaws, this approach works as of the time of writing. I used Firefox, but the same basic approach should work with virtually any modern desktop web
browser.
Go to a Jigidi jigsaw in your web browser.
Pop up your browser’s developer tools (F12, usually) and switch to the Debugger tab. Open the file game/js/release.js and uncompress it by pressing the
{} button, if necessary.
Find the line where the code considers shuffling; right now for me it’s like 3671 and looks like this:
return this.j ? (V.info('board-data-bytes already exists, no need to send SHUFFLE'), Promise.resolve(this.j)) : new Promise(function (d, e) {
I spent some time tracing call stacks to find this line… only to discover that it’s one of only four lines to actually contain the word “shuffle” and I could have just searched
for it…
Set a breakpoint on that line by clicking its line number.
Restart the puzzle by clicking the restart button to the right of the timer. The puzzle will reload but then stop with a “Paused on breakpoint” message. At this point the
application is considering whether or not to shuffle the pieces, which normally depends on whether you’ve started the puzzle for the first time or you’re continuing a saved puzzle from
where you left off.
In the developer tools, switch to the Console tab.
Type: this.j = true (this ensures that the ternary operation we set the breakpoint on will resolve to the true condition, i.e. not shuffle the pieces).
Press the play button to continue running the code from the breakpoint. You can now close the developer tools if you like.
Solve the puzzle as described/shown above, by moving the top piece on the stack slightly to the right, repeatedly, and then down and left at the end of each full row.
Update 2021-09-22:Abraxas observes that Jigidi have changed
their code, possibly in response to this shortcut. Unfortunately for them, while they continue to perform shuffling on the client-side they’ll always be vulnerable to this kind of
simple exploit. Their new code seems to be named not release.js but given a version number; right now it’s 14.3.1977. You can still expand it in the same way,
and find the shuffling code: right now for me this starts on line 1129:
Put a breakpoint on line 1129. This code gets called twice, so the first time the breakpoint gets hit just hit continue and play on until the second time. The second time it gets hit,
move the breakpoint to line 1130 and press continue. Then use the console to enter the code d = a.G and continue. Only one piece of jigsaw will be shuffled; the rest will
be arranged in a neat stack like before (I’m sure you can work out where the one piece goes when you get to it).
Update 2023-03-09: I’ve not had time nor inclination to re-“break” Jigidi’s shuffler, but on the rare ocassions I’ve
needed to solve a Jigidi, I’ve come up with a technique that replaces a jigsaw’s pieces with ones that each
show the row and column number they belong to, as well as colour-coding the rows and columns and drawing horizontal and vertical bars to help visual alignment. It makes the process
significantly less-painful. It’s still pretty buggy code though and I end up tweaking it each and every time I use it, but it certainly works and makes jigsaws that lack clear visual
markers (e.g. large areas the same colour) a lot easier.
