For our game this year, we decided quickly we'd go with the idea of steganography. It was going to be about Elizabethan courtiers sending hidden messages embedded inside innocuous ones. So I came up with the idea that:

1. Each message would contain a reference to an ordinal number, like "third" or "fourth".
2. That would mean that you would take every e.g. third or fourth letter of the message to get the hidden meaning.

This turned out to be INCREDIBLY HARD to design. I suck at word puzzles at the best of times, but after hours and hours Saturday, the best I could come up with was this stilted, barely grammatical "poem" using the dubiously real word "sallyeth":

How can I ever express

How my love sallyeth?

Jewelry ever t'was

A seventh bit thy equal

A dream to I

The like of a kiss

...which should spell out HERMAJESTYDIES if read correctly. Saturday night I ditched the idea and went with a much simpler form of steganography.

The lesson: I don't know a lot about anagrams, language puzzles and so on, and that extends to having a really poor read on what kinds of puzzles are going to be hard or easy to design. It sounded so doable at first!