Puzzles From Games
My dad taught me how much fun it is to make games from stuff lying around the house. He cut open two album covers and taped them together to make a large, foldable board. Then he cut the corners from an entire deck of cards so that only the suit and value was visible. Finally, he lined up the little cut-outs on all four sides and taped them down. The result? Card Monopoly!
I don't remember anything about the gameplay, but that experience stayed with me. When my kids were young, they watched me do similar crafting projects. Soon enough, all of them were making home-made games and gifting them to each other and to me and my wife.
When I'm not crafting, I'm doodling with existing games. making new rules. Often, they are silly solo adventure designs that I try out a couple of times before moving on. Solo adventures, as the name implies, are solitaire games. From a design perspective, which means that I can make up whatever I feel like. Creativity, daydreaming and fun all swirling about in a glorious fugue state.
You should not be surprised where this is going: all that doodling and making up stuff leads to puzzle ideas. Usually, I just stumble onto something and go with it to see how it comes out. A couple of weeks ago, inspired by the feedback from the Visual Puzzles issue, I decided to pull out some games and repurpose the pieces.
I've got some custom puzzles lined up for you! They incorporate visuals with my amateur phone photography. They're either logic puzzles or spot-the-difference. In addition to Boggle cubes, poker chips and playing cards, I added some cards from a game called Double Play. Finally, I threw in some random design pieces like dice, meeple, wooden blocks and colorful chips.
Chess pieces were supposed to be part of the collection, however, they are hard to photograph, and I needed more pieces than I have on hand. So I asked Claude Sonnet to make an SVG image for me. It came out great!
Anyway, I hope there is at least one puzzle that you enjoy. Let me know if you want more visual style puzzles. I enjoy making them!
Are you a doodler or a game designer? Let me know!
Design Corner
With the exception of Machiavellian Meeple, each of these puzzle designs are off-the-cuff and not particularly optimized. I just have fun creating them. In the case of Machiavellian Meeple, I wanted to exercise my logic puzzle clue construction muscles.
Liars and Truthtellers are classic Boolean logic problems. To make a unique puzzle solution, only one combination should correctly solve all of the true/false statements.
Even though LLMs are generally bad at solving logic problems, they are great at providing the math and logic that can be used to verify a puzzle. So, that is what I used Claude to help me do. I based this worksheet on an older workbook that I had done by hand for Gibberish!, one of the logic puzzles in Mind-bending Variety Puzzles Volume 2.
It's nothing fancy, just a brute-force listing of every possible combination of values for each meeple, along with calculations that confirm whether a specific combination yields a truth result for a specific meeple's statement.
Using Excel, I was able to detect poorly written clues, ambiguities and combinations that allowed for multiple liars to co-exist (which violated the main rule of the puzzle!)
I'm curious to know if you think the puzzle was too easy, too hard or just right.
