When I was writing my previous post, I spoke about how much I enjoy eliciting that spontaneous feeling of accomplishment that accompanies the moment when a player solves a puzzle – the “Eureka!” moment, if you will. But there are a whole host of other emotions that lead up to the conclusion of solving a…
All the escape rooms I’ve ever been to have had one very simple thing in common: You stay in the room the entire time. Sure, you may find a hidden passage leading to another room, but I’ve never really had an escape experience where I felt that I was ever forcibly removed from the environment…
In my last two posts (both titled Of Trits and Tangrams) I discussed the mechanics of a puzzle I created, but I didn’t talk a lot about the design process behind it. When I thought about why I didn’t feel the need to talk about the design process for that particular puzzle, I came to…
When we left off, our intrepid solvers had discovered two pieces of information – a 3×3 grid of colored squares and a trio of strange sounding words: At this point, most reasonably experienced solvers have likely recognized this setup as a ternary number problem. The issue before us now is to figure out the correspondence…
It’s not common for smart people to wake with a start when their subconscious solves a complex problem or stumbles across an incredible discovery. I like to imagine that this is how Jonas Salk figured out the key to the first successful polio vaccine: jolting upright from a deep sleep, wearing a big floppy nightcap,…
Ah my first puzzle project…The Madness From the Sea was – like Cthulhu himself – probably too big for its own good. The truth is that I really just can’t help myself. I suppose you could say that I have a soft spot for overwrought, unwieldy abominations, regardless of their nature. Since it’s been a…