"but i Will masK it"

This phrase can be looked at a number of ways...

1. Kit Williams anagram reference (could be instruction to look at
Treasure as others did for Masquerade to get the specific words for
the rabbit card). Does it mean you are to look at the picture in
that chapter for the four clues ?

2. "I" will mask "IT" or "eye" will mask "it"

3. I ILL M I adds up to 1+103+100+1=1103 or MCIII

4. There is a mask of some kind to be applied or removed to
the puzzle in some way.

Washington Square Park

I only became fully immersed in the game when my parents' marriage was falling apart: chess offered a tidy black-and-white sanctuary from the turmoil in the rest of my life... and my father lived only a ten-minute walk from its epicenter, Washington Square Park. My dad accompanied me to these places and, when he wasn't watching me play, passed the time reading novels and preparing his New School lectures. In the southwest corner of the park stood nineteen stone chess tables; these were occupied by all breeds of chess addict... Cops on horseback gathered near the tables... they'd look down from their high mounts and critique the moves on the boards—a time-honored tradition in chess known as kibitzing. When it was cold or raining, the park habitués retreated to three smoky chess parlors on Thompson and Sullivan, where they rented boards for pennies an hour to continue their games.

IXNEI VIDEO rabbit card possible solution

The following is a solution for the rabbit card puzzle in the video
version of the puzzle Treasure, in Search of the Golden Horse (TISOTGH).
And I have to say, I'm not very happy at all about it. In fact, it makes
my stomach turn. At any rate, I will post the details below, starting
with a refresher on the Nemo book card solution.

Nemo solution was as follows:

1,13,7,14,6,8,16,2,15,9,5,3,12,10,4,11 - card letter shuffle FYI

FESTOON J IZZARD IF - 4 strange things

festoonjizzardif - top row letters
frndojfeiiosaztz - letter reorder bottom row
pampampampampamp - additional key applied (*)
tryroutetwodozen

TRY ROUTE TWO DOZEN

The video rabbit card works in very much the same manner:

10,13,12,5,14,2,9,11,3,6,15,4,1,8,7 - card letter shuffle FYI

AI CUFF GUIDE JOEY - 4 strange things

aicuffguidejoey - top 2 row letters
dojfeiiecfyuaug - letter reorder bottom 2 rows
pampampampampam - additional key applied (*)
routetwentyfour

ROUTE TWENTY FOUR

Rationale:
JOEY - That baby kangaroo stuffed animal (kinda looks like a fox...)
GUIDE - The man with black gloves/black bird/whatever you want to call
it...
CUFF - that magical vanishing/reappearing color-changing bracelet...
AI - uhh, the 3 toed sloth?!...

FWIW, the odds of accidentally getting 4 legal dictionary words that
align precisely with the 4 prescribed word boundaries should be slim to
none for this sort of keyed shuffle cypher, so this must be the intended
Dr. K rewrite. The disappointment I feel after arriving at this video
rabbit card solution isn't the sort of pleasure/excitement I would have
expected back 20 years ago...

(*) - "the map is the key (in more ways than one)"
"the way to move forward is (sometimes) to go back"
The applied key was actually 'lao', not 'map', illustrating a gross
(intentional?!) encoding error in the original puzzle (the M
and P were decremented an additional 1).

IXNEI Greek puzzle partial solution

Here is a challenging puzzle, which should be easily solvable using
dictionary word search techniques. At any rate, I post it below:
ΜΗΕΣΠΗ ΤΩΔΕ
ΤΩ ΝΗΜΑΤΙ

ΜΗΕΣΠΗ ΤΩΔΕ
ΤΩ ΙΧΝΕΙ

ΡΕΓΓΑ ΦΟΙΝΙΞ
ΑΔΙΕΞΟΔΟΣ
I'm assuming that each symbol is a unique letter. Your mileage may vary.
Translating from Unicode(?) to (arbitrary) ASCII:

BCDE C FGHD FG ICBJFK
BCDE C FGHD FG KLIDK
MDNNJ OPKIKQ JHKDQPHPE

which doesn't seem to have any obvious solution, at least not in
English. Perhaps the solution is also in Greek?

Something's not quite right in your translation - here's what I got:

ABCDEB FGHC
FG IBAJFK

ABCDEB FGHC
FG KLICK

MCNNJ OPKIKQ
JHKCQPHPD

The solution should be in English - however my assumptions may be wrong
(single cyphertext letter to single plaintext letter, unique cyphertext
letters - injective/one-to-one).

After further inspection, this one appears to be some form of the Greek
language. What I've translated so far:

_____? this
here thread

_____? this
here (sole/underside)?

herring phoenix
(deadlock/deadend)

WHY ??

If one happens to come past this blog and ask "why do you not believe the official solution... why are you still bothering?". I will tell you...

My father bought me the book of Treasure back in 1984, when I was sixteen. For six years I wondered about the solution of this thing. As with many things, you lose interest, and I finally did.

One night a year later, I happened to watch an evening broadcast of PM Magazine on channel 5. It interviewed Nick & Tony and showed the solution (at least part of it). I said to myself "branches and trees...? I don't buy this... not at all... this doesn't show me exactly where to dig." So now, I want to see if I can find the solution (or part of it) myself. I deserve to know what the hell the solution is.

If you look at my previous post "it aint festoon", you'll see that their solution is absolutely false, or at least based on false information.

NOT THE SHOWER OF GOLD

An ancient post by Jim Gillogly incorrectly named the Anderssen vs. Keseritzky game shown in the video as "The Shower of Gold" game. This is false. The Game was actually "The Immortal Game". Marshall vs Levitzky was the "Shower of Gold" game.

Considering Gillogly wrote chess programs in fortran back in the 70s and must have known the game well, I find it difficult to believe he would make such a mistake, or confuse the two games.

MARY OR IL PUTTINO

If you google the years 1542 and 1587, they do indeed bring up
the birth/death years of Queen Mary.

But they are also the birth and death years of Giovanni Leonardo
di Bona, an Italian chess master known
as "Il Puttino" or "the wandering knight". He was considered
the first chess master.