Puzzles are not normally thought of as a hobby requiring much by way of endurance. If you like to run, perhaps you will decide to train for a marathon — building up your stamina bit by bit until you can do the whole 26 miles. While you’re doing that, we puzzlers are stretched out on the sofa, clipboards in hand, content to leave the strenuous pastimes to other folks.

But even as sedentary a hobby as puzzling has its hardcore adherents. Look around a little and maybe you’ll find a “puzzle hunt” in your town, one that will take you from place to place, solving crafty puzzles with a team of friends for two or three hours. If you enjoy that, you might decide to step up and participate in the MIT Mystery Hunt, a weekend-long event requiring the brainpower of a team of dozens of dedicated solvers.

The Mystery Hunt has gotten its share of media coverage over the years, and you might believe, after reading one article or another about the annual event, that this is the top of the mountain — that puzzlers can’t possibly get more fanatical than this.

Well. Let me introduce you to “The Game.”

Since its origins on the West Coast in the 1970s, the Game has specialized in over-the-top puzzles that leap dramatically off the page — and that participating teams solve while driving around in a van for 24 to 36 sleepless hours. Early versions of the Game may have gone a little too over the top: Wikipedia describes a puzzle, if that’s the word for it, in which a team member was left at a strip club “stripped of all clothes and spectacles, dressed in nothing but a hospital gown.”

More recent iterations of the Game have been less likely to embarrass or threaten its participants, but the endurance component remains a core feature of the event. The latest version of the Game, Miskatonic University, was held in the Boston area this past weekend. After a fun Friday night introductory event, things really got going Saturday morning at 9:00 a.m…. and ended the following day at 4:00 in the afternoon. Somewhere in there I took a couple of fifteen or twenty-minute naps.

Miskatonic was a H.P. Lovecraft-themed puzzle event created by an army of kick-ass volunteers headed up by Sarah Leadbeater, with puzzles by constructors Nathan Curtis and Nathan Fung. Did the puzzles, as advertised, leap dramatically off the page? To some extent, yes. Sometimes, and especially in the first half of the event, they were variations on familiar puzzle types, set in offbeat locations. We were excited for what might await us at a miniature golf course, but what awaited us was a small maze puzzle that we solved sitting at a picnic table. Similarly, we were delighted when we went to a “children’s center” and were handed a school-cafeteria milk carton — but inside the carton was a fairly standard diagramless crossword.

Other puzzles more successfully used their environments. Some of the puzzles at the Friday night event, for example, could have been solved in your own living room with only minor modifications — but it was a thrill to solve them instead at Hammond Castle, the gorgeous medieval castle that was plonked down in Gloucester, MA in the 1920s.

Solvers who found the puzzles fun but were expecting a little more zing were rewarded by their patience: Saturday night, teams were sent to a community center and were met with a suite of puzzles bursting with innovation: A “beer pong” puzzle put a bunch of classic red Solo cups to creative use; another puzzle was locked in a gorgeous puzzle box that could only be opened with the crafty use of an assortment of gears; and most brilliant of all was a simple guess-the-word puzzle enlivened to the max by a Ouija board whose planchette moved all by itself (with the help of magnets and some ingenious programming).

I had the good fortune to be on one of the event’s stronger teams, anchored by Dan Katz, who routinely grasps in a matter of moments puzzles that are meant to take much longer. (Glancing briefly at a bunch of stacked-up specimen jars, each containing a sad little stuffed animal: “A lot of them are missing at least one eye. Have you tried counting up the eyes and seeing if they form Braille?”) We and a handful of other teams pretty much had the run of the community center for the first hour, solving puzzles alone in a room that would become much more crowded later on. By the time all 34 teams had arrived, the center was a scene of bustling chaos, held together admirably by Sarah Leadbeater, who seemed to be everywhere simultaneously — helping stuck teams, fixing broken puzzle elements, redirecting teams from too-crowded rooms to slightly less crowded ones. The puzzles were the main event, but her awesome powers of organization were a dazzling sideshow.

After the night at the community center, teams hit the road again, and by sunrise were at an Irish lodge for breakfast and my favorite puzzle of the weekend. The walls of the lodge were decorated with children’s drawings. We were instructed to make a drawing of our own, and were given crayons for the task. But, aha: This was still a Lovecraft-themed event, and the drawings were all charming depictions of multi-eyed tentacle monsters. And we couldn’t simply create any old multi-eyed tentacle monster — we had to create one that perfectly matched its name (“Thaathlog”). What did this mean? It meant analyzing the drawings on the wall and the names of the various monsters to determine the rules for monster creation. For example, it turned out that the color of each monster was determined by looking at which ROYGBIV letter was contained the most times by the monster’s name, and if a second ROYGBIV letter appeared, well, now you knew what color to make the monster’s spots. There were seven or eight such rules to suss out, some quite tricky — it was a just-right balance of puzzle challenge and theatricality. Also, our monster, drawn by teammate Jennifer Braun, came out great.

We left the lodge a couple of hours shy of the event’s 24-hour mark, and my whole team was feeling pretty weary. Nonetheless, there were more puzzles to solve, including a reconstruction of the Greenway Labyrinth with letter-strewn magnetic strips, and a Jenga tower constructed by following a set of clues.

The event’s finale took place in a field on the edge of Boston’s Public Garden. I took one look at what they were setting up and said “No, sorry, this is where I draw the line.” At nearly the 30-hour mark, in the bright August sunshine, they were clearly preparing some kind of athletic event. This turned out to be a funny variation on Simon Says — or rather, Cthulhu Says. It had something to do with racing to be the first team to complete a mosaic made of Rubik’s Cubes — I didn’t entirely follow it, except to see that most people found it great silly fun.

Our graduation from Miskatonic U ended on a bit of a sour note: the event’s organizers — exemplary in every other way — had neglected to print enough of the final puzzle, the one that would tie all of the previous answers together. My team was one of the unlucky ones that didn’t get a final puzzle, and it was a bit like binging a long, magnificent television series and then the last five minutes of the final episode cuts out. And then when we did finally get the missing puzzle, important instructions had been torn away, leaving us stuck and frustrated for longer than was necessary. A bit of a downer that might not even be worth mentioning except that it was literally the final moments of the whole wild event.

Despite this, the event was a joy, and I was thrilled to be a part of it. And I’m glad that I was on a team that was strong enough to see all of the puzzles — many teams were skipped past various puzzles, depending on their pace, so that everyone could meet at the grand finale at the same time. A reasonable idea — indeed, probably the only way to go about an event like this — but a bummer for the teams who missed out on, for example, the self-operating Ouija board.

All in all, I have enormous admiration for the event’s organizers — the staff of Miskatonic University. These behind-the-scenes photographs barely hint at the mind-boggling amount of work that went into this, all done for the love of the puzzles and the puzzle community. Heartfelt thanks to all of them, and best wishes for many, many hours of catch-up sleep.

When I was in high school and college, I was a rabid fan of Games magazine. Why? Because I loved turning the pages of a new issue, never sure what I was going to see next.

They had crossword puzzles in there, sure, but I usually ignored these. I was drawn to the more interesting puzzles: Grids where the words performed like acrobats in the circus, flipping around, going in circles, doing all kinds of unpredictable stunts.

I was a big fan of Will Shortz, Patrick Berry, Mike Shenk, Henry Hook, and many others who were not content to rely on the usual assortment of puzzle types. They wanted to give the puzzle-loving audience Something New, and boy, did they ever.

Here’s the thing, though: Those new and different variety puzzles? A lot of them were pretty damn tough. You had to be a devoted puzzle addict to want to tackle them.

There are a lot of people out there who say they like puzzles, but what they mean are easier, casual puzzles. They have no interest in trying to tackle, say, one of Mike Shenk’s Marching Bands, where words go absolutely every-freakin-where. I myself didn’t try a Marching Bands for many years. I was just too intimidated. And those dazzling three-star variety cryptics? Good heavens. Forget it. I knew I was probably missing something good, but I didn’t have a prayer of solving those puzzles.

But those variety puzzle types — the unusual and interesting puzzles that captivated me then and that I continue to adore now — don’t HAVE to be tough and intimidating. If you shrink them down a bit, and avoid obscure words in the grid’s fill — why, anybody can solve them, no matter their level of experience.

That’s what I’ve tried to do over the last few years, first under the name Puzzle Your Kids and then — when it became clear that adults also liked these puzzles — under the new name Puzzlesnacks.

Puzzlesnacks look a lot like those interesting puzzles I was drawn to back when I first started getting Games magazine. The words perform all kinds of stunts, and the puzzles will bend your brain in many new directions. But the puzzles are also much smaller — typically just 16-35 words, and with a vocabulary that pretty much anybody can tackle with confidence.

I’m imagining a door marked Love of Puzzles, you see, and I want to swing that door wide open, for kids and for adults who think the early-week newspaper crossword is the most interesting puzzle available to them.

I’ve been creating these puzzles for the last three years. And today the first full collection of Puzzlesnacks is officially available: 110 puzzles covering nearly 40 different puzzle types. You can find Puzzlesnacks at your favorite bookstore (I hope, anyway), or online at the usual places.

If you buy it, and enjoy it, give it a review on Amazon or Goodreads or your bookstore Web site of choice, wouldja? You wouldn’t believe how big a difference a few good, honest reviews make.

Thanks.

Eric recently ran a “farm-to-table” puzzle event for the Stepping Stones Children’s Museum in Norwalk, CT. Read about it here.

Getting my new book, Puzzlesnacks, for free could be as easy as pushing a button! Head on over to Goodreads and enter the drawing by July 30 for your chance to win one of two free copies.

I recently gave Will Shortz a little puzzle challenge, and he used it on his segment of NPR’s Weekend Edition. You can listen to it (or read the transcript) here. Submit your answer and maybe you’ll get to play a game with Will Shortz on the air!

Many of the National Puzzlers’ League con-goers bring a puzzle to hand out to the other attendees. My 2019 handout can be found right here.

Escape Room Highlight: Hard to choose. I really liked the two rooms I did with my friend Alison at Puzzah! in Denver, CO. That would be “M.A.S.K.” and “Kazam!” if you’re in that neighborhood and looking for recommendations. Ultimately I would play nearly every Puzzah! room, but those would remain my favorites.

Puzzah!’s rooms are designed to be easy to run and easy to reset, which means that while the puzzles are often engaging and sometimes superb, overall the rooms feel a little stripped down. Not so at Rabbit Hole in nearby Louisville, CO, whose two rooms, “Paradox” and “Mystic Temple,” are lavish in their production values, with great puzzles and more than a few “Wow!” moments. “Mystic Temple” in particular has one of the grandest finales I have ever seen in an escape room. I don’t want to be too spoilery, but I will say that “easy to reset” was definitely not one of the company’s considerations when they designed this room.

The local escape room companies were pretty darn happy that a convention of puzzlers had come to town. I myself did six escape rooms, three of them within a couple of hours of my plane landing on the ground. Some of my friends did twice as many, if not more.

One group of NPLers set the record for the fastest escape at, I think, Paradox — a record that stood for perhaps 45 minutes before it was broken by the next group of NPLers. We are, as a whole, pretty good at escape rooms.

Theatrical Highlight: NPL conventions don’t generally have a Theatrical Highlight, but then at no previous NPL convention did I get to experience an event like “The Last Defender.”

I suppose “The Last Defender” would not have been out of place listed among the Escape Room Highlights, since it has many recognizable escape room elements — notably, a countdown timer and a whole lotta puzzles. But “Defender” has grander ambitions. For a start, the event is designed to be played by sixteen people, far more than your average escape room. For another, the first thing that happens is those sixteen people are assigned codenames… and bright orange jumpsuits, which are worn throughout the event. (Until they start getting too hot, at which point certain participants might start to shed them.)

Thus costumed, the sixteen players transform into a team working in missile defense in the middle of the Cold War, circa 1983. The Defenders’ headquarters is filled with machinery, much of which bears striking resemblance to early 80s arcade games. (The soundtrack to the first part of the evening is tinkling 8-bit arcade music.) The sixteen players, broken up into an assortment of subcommittees (Intelligence, Technology, etc.) get to work maintaining our country’s stockpile of nuclear missiles and keeping tabs on the Russkies, who may or may not be about to attack.

“Defender” takes place in a sprawling complex of rooms, and ultimately you and your team will need to explore every inch in your quest to avert a nuclear war. With a glorious and wide-ranging assortment of puzzles by Sandor Weisz, there is plenty to do for every one of the team’s sixteen people. (I can hardly imagine achieving victory with less.) The sly and funny satire of rah-rah patriotism in the face of nuclear madness is a bonus.

“The Last Defender” has been extended to September 8. I cannot recommend it highly enough, particularly if you and your friends can buy out the house and defend America as a team. And here’s hoping that large-scale hybrids of theater and puzzles spread to other cities.

Cryptic Highlight: A few years ago the greatly admired puzzle constructor Patrick Berry created a cryptic crossword called “Middle of the Road” that blew solvers’ brains clean out of their skulls. It was the most astonishing construction many of us had ever seen, and it led to a discussion about other cryptics that belonged on the list of Best Cryptics Ever. High on that list was a puzzle by Mark Gottlieb called Color Ado, created for the National Puzzlers’ League’s convention in Denver in 2008. Now that the NPL was back in the neighborhood, it was apparently time for a sequel, and sure enough, Mark came armed with Color Ado 2. You knew before you even glanced at the instructions that you were in for something special: The puzzle’s grid had been printed on a transparency, and solvers supplied with Sharpies of various colors with which to write the answers. Once again, I don’t want to spoil things in case you have the opportunity (somehow) to solve this puzzle, but the payoff is amazing, and reaching the finish line with the help of Jackie, my co-solver, was a pleasure.

Patrick Berry had a cryptic at this convention, too. It was pretty great. No surprise there. Check back: I should be able to provide a link to that one eventually. (Update: Here it is!)

Late-Night Highlight: There’s an official program of puzzles and games at the National Puzzlers’ League convention, and these are always fun — particularly, this year, an interesting trivia variant by Trip Payne and a great wordplay game by Todd McClary. But after the official events are over, nobody goes to sleep. Instead, people break out their home-brewed puzzles and game shows: A half-dozen different Jeopardy! games, often with zany variations; verbal escape rooms a la “Escape This Podcast“; a puzzle game that needed to be solved blindfolded. My favorite unofficial games of the week included “Overtime” by Darren Rigby, in which you and your team work together to solve six different and utterly diabolical puzzle games in ten minutes or less. (We didn’t come close to succeeding at this, but it sure was fun trying.) There was also “The Hardcover Hoodlum,” from Sandor Weisz of “The Last Defender” fame, in which teams had to figure out a wide variety of puzzles using the same set of cleverly designed book covers. And I was delighted and somewhat surprised to hold my own in a pop-culture themed Quiz Bowl presented by Eric Berman.

Highlight of Highlights: The most anticipated official event at any convention of the National Puzzlers’ League is the Saturday-night “extravaganza,” in which teams of solvers race to be the first to complete a suite of varied puzzles. Usually we’re talking about fifteen, maybe twenty puzzles. This year, the constructing team of Rick Rubinstein, Joshua Kosman, and Greg Pliska gave us no less than 40 quick-but-wonderful puzzles. There’s a danger, with such a quantity of puzzles, that solving will become a blur, but many of these puzzles were too special to get lost in a crowd: Among these, there was a “drunken cryptic crossword;” a hilarious puzzle in which every word of a song’s lyrics had been replaced by a rhyme; and an amazing little crossword themed to the Three Little Pigs that had so much going on in the constraints of a 9×9 grid that I had to stop for a little while to stare in wonder. Solving the full suite on a team that included my friends Nancy Coughlin and Patrick Berry was a magnificent way to close out a grand week.

Highlight I Didn’t Get To Actually See: At last year’s convention in Milwaukee, I was given one of the greatest honors of my life: The Maso Award, named for a member of the National Puzzlers’ League who was taken from us far too soon and given each year to an NPLer who “demonstrates the true spirit of the NPL convention.” As such, I was invited to take part in the discussion of who should receive this year’s award. I was excited to be a part of that, but then it turned out that no discussion was necessary: The same person was at the top of everybody’s list. Todd McClary has provided an uncountable number of puzzles and games to the con over the years, and many of these have achieved legendary status. (He once received a standing ovation in the middle of explaining a game’s instructions, because the game’s special twist was just that good.) Add to that his much-needed, much-valued involvement in compiling the events for each year’s convention, and his kind, friendly nature, and honestly, nobody else really comes close.

I was asked if I wanted to announce this year’s Maso Award winner, at the Sunday morning awards ceremony. Of course I would have been delighted to do so, but alas, by that time it was required that I should be on a plane, flying home. Still, I’m delighted to have played even a small role in seeing Todd get the honor he most certainly deserves.

Post-Con Highlights: Sleeping in my own bed. Writing this report. And most of all, anticipating next year’s convention in Toronto, Canada.

After a successful funding on Kickstarter, Puzzlesnacks has officially launched! Quick and fun variety word puzzles will be available every Friday morning, starting on July 5th. Subscribers don’t have to remember to grab it — it’ll be sent right to their inbox, along with a healthy number of bonus puzzles. At $3/month, it’s a pretty solid bargain for any puzzle lover, kid or adult. Sign up and join us today!

After a drought of decent puzzle games for my iPad, a whole bunch of them were simultaneously brought to my attention.

G30

You know that feeling where you can’t quite think of a word you need? It’s just on the other side of a fog that seems to have coalesced inside your brain? That’s the problem faced by the protagonist of G30, except it’s not words that have been forgotten — it’s objects. On each level of this absorbing little game, you are given a target item to assemble. You start off with something that seems close to right, but isn’t quite there yet. By turning an assortment of dials, you adjust the details — changing the shape of this part or that part, or rearranging the whole — until finally you magically assemble the eyeglasses, or the file cabinet, or whatever it is you’re trying to remember.

The game quickly becomes fairly complicated, as certain dials can’t be turned until other dials are properly positioned. Turning those dials, however, might screw up the evolution of your target item. Getting to the finish line then becomes a careful, logical ordering of steps — or, quite possibly, a whole lot of random turning combined with a vague intuition of how to reach your goal.

G30 by Ivan Kovalov. $3.99.

Pavilion

A maze game in which you’re not the one running through the maze. That job has been filled by a thin man in a brown suit. He, however, is more often than not at a complete loss at how to proceed through the game’s many gorgeously detailed levels.

You’ll help him out by ringing a series of bells. When our man hears a bell, he runs toward it — climbing up and down ladders, scuttling through passageways, anything it takes to get to the source of the sound. The only thing that will stop him on his way is the ringing of another bell. That will get our friend to swerve in his tracks and head for the new ringing sound.

Figuring out the order of the bells and the timing of ringing them is a tricky but fun challenge. (I am highly adept at making the little man run in endless circles.)

Pavilion: Touch Edition by Visiontrick Media AB. $3.99.

OCO

A maze game so abstract, it doesn’t look like a maze game at all. You are nothing more than a white square, and all you can do is run and hop. Your goal: Collect all of the yellow bits on each level, and do so in the least amount of time and/or with the smallest number of hops. (On many levels, these two goals cannot be accomplished at the same time.) This is easy enough on the lower levels, but before too long it’s going to take a lot of trial and error before the correct path through the maze becomes clear.

OCO by Spectrum48 Limited. Free with ads, .99 minimum to buy outright.

Achromatic!

In general my feeling is, spare me from any more “minimalist” puzzle games, and yet this one sorta snagged me. You have a field of random-seeming shapes: Circles, squares, oblongs. On each turn, you’ll trace a path from two like-colored shapes, passing through an assortment of shapes of a second like-color. (So in the above example, you can draw a straight line from one dark green circle to the other, passing through the blue circle-in-a-circle. If there had been other blue shapes along the way, that’s fine, too.) The path completed, all of the shapes you touched along the way will become the color of the starting and ending shapes. (So our blue circle-in-a-circle will turn dark green.) The object of the game: Make all the shapes the same color.

Additional rules throw complications galore into the mix. Your path can only turn on a square. Oblongs can only be passed through on their long side. When that circle-in-a-circle changes color, so does all its neighbors.

Ostensibly this is a logic puzzle, but unlike a pencil-and-paper visual logic puzzle, where each step leads inexorably to the next, it’s not always easy in Achromatic to see the path to the solution — trial and error is the order of the day, and a certain amount of feeling your way along. But when you finally do see how to reach the goal, it can be pretty darn satisfying.

Achromatic! by Nick Carney. $1.99.

Typoman

A side-scrolling platform game with a wordplay twist. You’ll do the usual things one does in a game like this — run, jump, avoid monsters and obstacles — but along the way you’ll encounter various letters and words. By manipulating these, you’ll literally change your environment. (Need an obstacle to get out your way? Perhaps the word PRAISE sits nearby. Just get rid of the first letter.) A very neat twist on the dustiest of genres.

Typoman Mobile by Baitian Technology Limited. Free with ads. $1.99 to buy outright.

Yesterday I officially launched a new Kickstarter, to help me get my rebranded puzzle project off the ground. Puzzlesnacks, as of this moment, is already 89% of the way towards its goal — and it reached that level in less than a day!

I’m hoping the whole thing might get funded just over 24 hours, which would be thrilling, and then we can move on to all of the fun stretch goals: Supersized Puzzlesnacks!

So if you like the idea of quick little puzzles that aren’t too easy but also aren’t too hard, click on through. For just $3 a month, you’ll get Puzzlesnacks in your in-box every week, plus lots of bonus puzzles. Climb into the higher reward tiers and I’ll send you some (or even all!) of my books, including the first volume of Puzzlesnacks, which will be in bookstores this summer. (More about that very soon.)