Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1107: Murders at Karlov Manor Puzzles with Mark Gottlieb

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

In this podcast, I sit down with designer and puzzle-builder extraordinaire Mark Gottlieb to talk about the making of the puzzles for Murders at Karlov Manor.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work at Home Edition. So obviously I like to do interviews when I'm at home. So today I have Mark Gottlieb to talk all about puzzles. So Murs at Carlove Manor has a master puzzle. I mean, multiple puzzles built into it. And we're going to talk all about making puzzles. Hey, Mark. Hello, Mark. We're going to talk all about making puzzles. Hey, Mark. Hello, Mark.

So let's start. I want to give the audience, I know this, but the audience does. Let's talk a little bit about your puzzle-making background. Because obviously, this is not something new for you. So talk a little bit about, I just want to get you sort of your puzzle history. Oh, man. How much time do you have? I've been a puzzle aficionado uh my entire life um i mean even when i was a kid i would tote around like one of those giant books of puzzles

like how like my grandmother got me and just always had my head in a puzzle um and uh at a certain point i'm like i've solved I know how to solve all the puzzles I guess the next step is to start making puzzles but even when I was a kid I remember writing a crossword puzzle and handing it out to my fifth grade class.

So in my professional career, I have been a staff member at games magazine. I've done freelance puzzle writing and puzzle editing. I've had, I've had a couple of crossword puzzles published in the New York times. I had a couple of crossword puzzles published in the New York Times. I have been heavily involved in writing five MIT mystery hunts. You and I together, like we wrote puzzles together.

Back around when I first started at Wizards of the Coast, you and I were on a team together where we wrote puzzles for that year's World Puzzle Championships. I remember that, yeah. So, yeah. And just for the audience, my background is nowhere near as extensive as Mark. I think I consider myself more of an amateur puzzle creator, but I love throwing parties, for example. My wife and I throw parties all the time and a regular at my parties is I make puzzles and stuff for the parties. Paper games and such. And so I also enjoy

puzzles. I'm a long-time puzzle enthusiast. I don't have Mark's pedigree, but I have been making puzzles. I think you're forgetting Magic the Puzzling. Oh, yes! Magic the Puzzling. You're correct. I did make Magic the Puzzling. You are a professional puzzle creator. That's true. I have a book.

I have a book of puzzles. Yeah. I don't have a book. Okay, so I did a little behind the scenes for the audience. So I did another podcast where I talked about the making of this, and I briefly brought up the idea that long ago, Michael Ryan and I had come up with an idea for a murder mystery set that didn't end up happening. It was the

murder of Stark in Mercadia. It was like, oh, who killed Stark? But it never came to be. But this idea of a magic set as a place to nest puzzles has definitely been something

that's been bandied around forever. I mean, what makes a good puzzle is just there's lots of places to hide things, and magic sets have infinite places to hide things. So we knew when we put this on the schedule, some part of what's called the arc planning team, when we put this

on the schedule, literally from the day we put it on, we're like, we need to put a puzzle in this, or puzzles in this. And your name was attached, I think, from day one. We're like, and Gottlieb should be doing this, because we have other people at Wizards who also do puzzles, but I consider

you to be the foremost authority. Matt Tabak, for example, is someone else who does a lot of puzzles. He worked on, you, he, and I, and Bella, and a few other people worked on making these. Yeah. Bella Guo, who is on the puzzle writing team for the puzzles we're going to talk about today, she just put on an MIT Mystery Hunt just this month.

Anyway, okay. So let's talk about, I want to approach the problem from, like, you first hear, like, we come to you and say, okay, we're doing a murder mystery set. So we thought, you know, so there's going to be a murder, obviously, because it's a murder mystery set.

We want to have puzzle puzzles. What was told you when we started? Like, what were you first told? Yeah, basically that. And this is something you said, this is an idea that's been around for a long time. Aaron Forsythe has been into this idea for years. And we've

done puzzles. We've hidden puzzles on Magic cards before. We did a little embedded puzzle in Shadows of Renestrad that I put together. And we did a little hidden message in flavor text in, was it Return to Ravnica? Yeah, I think so. On the gates. So we've done it a little bit before. In a set here or there, we'll embed a message, which is, so an encoded message, that's a puzzle.

You're figuring out what this message is. Oh yeah, the unsets had an encoded message. Although it was not very hard. And the scope of this was just wildly different because it wasn't, we're going to put in one thing and we're going to put in, and it'll just be a message to read, but it was

okay, puzzle. Puzzles, plural. 10 puzzles? 12 puzzles? How many puzzles can we fit into the art set, into the product suite? So let's talk a little bit about the concept of a meta puzzle. We are puzzle aficionados.

Let's talk a little bit to the audience. What is a meta puzzle? What does that mean? So that's a great question. So typically, when you solve a puzzle, then it's over, then you're done. Like if you open up the New York Times, you take out the crossword puzzle, you solve the crossword puzzle, when you're done, you have a completed grid. That's it. That's the solution to the puzzle. That's the end of the puzzle. Job well done. For a puzzle hunt, for a puzzle extravaganza, for a suite of puzzles, then those are made up of multiple constituent puzzles, each of which is generally independent from one another.

And then there's a capstone puzzle at the end called a metapuzzle. And the input to that puzzle is the answers to all the previous puzzles. So you solve the individual puzzles, you get a list of answers. And then for the final puzzle, you need those answers. And then you're solving a puzzle based on what those answers are. It's a puzzle of other puzzle answers. without giving away the details so that people can enjoy the puzzle. By the way, real quickly, the pre-release is coming up. In fact, I think this is going up the day of the pre-release or the day before the pre-release. So the idea is, if you enjoy what we're talking about, you can participate. So I just want to make sure, as we're talking about this, this isn't something that you've missed. This is something that is happening now that you can participate in.

Yeah, I mean, just to ground this in reality, like we're talking abstractly, but... Right, the hidden within Murders at Karloff Manor, hidden in the cards, in different products, there's a collection of 12 puzzles, 12 individual puzzles, plus a 13th meta puzzle that everyone can collect the pieces of and participate in and solve. There is a website, ravnica-detective-agency.com. It is the staging site. The homepage is live right now. The staging site, the homepage is live right now. And as soon as the pre-release happens,

a new puzzle page will unlock every single day for 13 days. So every day you can go back to that website and find the new puzzle that has unlocked for which you will, in order to solve it, you will need bits, items, pieces from somewhere in the Mergers at Karloff Manor product suite. Yeah, so once again, behind the scenes here, one of the things we chose to do was we could have embedded the entire puzzle

100% just in what we were doing, but the audience, there's a million people, there's lots and lots of magic players, we didn't want them just solving everything day one. And so the puzzles are constructed in such a way that, I think for almost all of them,

maybe one or two, that's not true, that there's some information we have to give you to help you solve the puzzle, meaning you can't solve it without this piece of information. Right, and we've seen this behavior. Magic players, puzzle aficionados, magic players, super smart, very clever. There's quite a lot of them working together on the internet. We know that if just puzzle material is released

and it's completely self-contained in whatever we release, it's going to get solved by someone, by people working together on day one. And that's awesome. That's great. We've seen that before in the messages that we've hidden. But we didn't want that to be just, oh, and day one, it's over, or like the previews of cards are up and the puzzle event is over already. So it's constructed very intentionally to be

spread out. You can collect, you can pour through the card set and other and related products and figure out, oh, this is weird. This is suspicious. Let me save this for later. Let me collect this. But most of the puzzles you can't actually finish before the component website page opens for that puzzle. And it gives you a chart or a grid or a code key or some other specific information. So you need both of those together to solve most of the puzzles. We have seen for already, we have

seen one of the puzzles just found and solved. There's one completely self-contained puzzle found and solved already and that's great. But for most of them, we wanted to And that's great. But for most of them, we wanted to just kind of put a clock on it a little bit to give that one puzzle a day cadence to it. Yeah, the other thing that I've learned this over the years is there's a dynamic to the way groups work that a group of people, especially as many people as play magic are insanely, insanely smart that, that, that the combined intelligence of people sharing information allow,

like we had to make this very difficult because if we did a very simple puzzle, it would be solved instantaneously. And so part of making this puzzle is making something that like we knew going into it, like it has to be actually very difficult because when you, when you want one person to solve it in a vacuum, like I know this from doing my puzzles,

like where people come to my parties and Hey, they're mostly going to solve this by themselves. Maybe they talk to one or two other people. That's a very different animal than millions of people on the internet. And so the difficulty level has to be gauged against how we get solved. Right, right. And I don't want to oversell the difficulty here.

This is kind of set up. Like a lot of that goal of make sure it's not solved instantaneously, that is accomplished by the website timing unlocks. It is set up so that if you want to work in a group, I think it'll work for that. If the entire internet collectively wants to solve it all at once, great, fantastic, go for it. If you, an individual person, wants to attack it just by yourself, even at a later time. It's not a contest. It's not a race. If you want to solve individual puzzles at your leisure, you can do that. You're obviously

not going to solve them in five minutes, but the difficulty level is set so that, yeah, individual people can approach and solve these puzzles. And a feature of the website, there is, so within Murders of Karloff Banner, our master detective character is named Alquist Proft. On the website, on each puzzle page, there is a button where you can ask allquist questions. There are three preset questions. They're basically hints that you can preview what is the question asking. Do I want to ask that question and find that

answer? And if so, you can click any or none or all of those buttons just to get more information. So, right, there's a preset hint system built into the website so that any individual solver can set the information level and the difficulty level of each puzzle at, you know, the level they're comfortable with. If they're like, this puzzle isn't giving me enough information, it's under-clued, I'm annoyed by it, they just get more information.

There's no penalty, no one's checking, it's fine. It's there for you to access. And if you're like, no, I want to do this on hard mode, great, don't click any of the Ask AllQuest buttons and solve it with the least amount of information that we give you. But it's customizable. The difficulty level is customizable on a per-puzzle basis. Yeah, and that's a lot, like, I've talked a lot about normal magic design, which is a lot of different audiences that want different things. And so this was designed such that, hey, the other thing I should stress, you can look at the puzzles and

say, this looks interesting. I want to solve it. And this one doesn't. And you don't have to solve that. You're not required to solve all the puzzles. You can solve whatever puzzles you want to solve. You know, I mean, there's a meta puzzle for the people that want to do the whole thing, but you, the individual, if one puzzle looks cool, another doesn't, do the ones that look cool to you. The system does not require you to do all the puzzles. Right. Like I said, it's not a race. It's not a contest.

The prize here isn't, hey, if I solve all these puzzles, then I'll get, you know, giant prize. The prize here is the puzzle. You get a bunch of free puzzles. That's cool. Okay, so here's another thing I want to tackle. So one of the things that came up when we first started to make the puzzle is, okay, what's the puzzle about?

And there's a low-hanging fruit that I want to talk about because it's not what we did. And the low-hanging fruit is, hey, there's the puzzle about? And there's a low-hanging fruit that I want to talk about, because it's not what we did. And the low-hanging fruit is, hey, there's a murder mystery. Why don't we solve the murder mystery? So let's talk about why didn't we just solve the murder mystery? Why wasn't that the puzzle? Who killed Zagana? That could have been the murder mystery, right? Because that's the, you know.

Yeah, no, that's a good question. And certainly we right we talked about that in the just the initial uh concept design of what is this about why what's the story here why are we doing this and um and it can like it wants to be on a separate track it kind of conflicted with uh if this was the mainline murder mystery plot of the card set well you're not solving that uh allquist is solving that and trotta is solving that you know um uh plus just the way the story is is released uh but like the story exists in web fiction the story exists in flavor text on cards which are going to be released all at once and you may encounter them

in non-linear fashion like all the details of that murder mystery are they're just out there they're just they're known already So if the answer to the puzzle, which you have to work for and is, you know, hidden intentionally, if that's the same as the answer to the narrative of Mirza Karlov Manor, I mean, that just doesn't align. So this is a tangential storyline where basically all the professional detectives on Ravnica are really busy right now solving who killed Zagana and all the subsequent murders, they're occupied. So the narrative of the puzzles here is, well, you know, there's some other mysterious things happening.

There's some open case files here. And everyone else is busy. So why don't you help out? You can do it. The big murder stuff is a little over your head maybe, but a little dangerous for you, but why don't you solve these case files? Another thing that was important is

we work closely with the creative team. They want to tell a story. There's an audience that very much cares about the story and that there's a certain pacing you want to tell in the story, and the problem with the puzzles is we don't control quite the pace of the puzzles. That, I mean, we somehow control it

in that we're releasing information at a certain time. I mean, we have some ability to control it, I guess. But we, let's say, for example, the murderer was in the puzzle and it takes so long for the audience to solve the puzzle. Like, there's certain information the story people wanted to do and they wanted to tell the story

and have the story happen at a certain... So, putting it in the puzzle sort of made it hard to just tell the story people wanted to do and they wanted to tell the story and have the story happen to certain so it right putting it in the puzzle sort of made it hard to just tell the story and we wanted to just tell the story that's another big reason why the puzzle is not that mystery but as a side mystery yeah no that that's that's a great point i mean you're right we did talk about that as well like the the puzzle is because of the time release nature of the puzzle, puzzle 13, the meta puzzle is going to be solved on day 13 of the murderer in the main storyline until this day, like two weeks after pre-release. That was just completely unrealistic. That just couldn't work.

Okay, so next question is, so one of the things, so I was part of the team we were talking about where we sat down and we said, okay, we want to make puzzles. Like, sort of the early questions was, how do we take a magic product? Once again, it's not just in Murder at Karloff Manor, the main set. There's also puzzles built into other components. I don't want to give away what those components are,

but it's... Oh, I've already given away. Oh, you guys have already given away? There's a puzzle in the pre-release kits. There's a puzzle in the commander decks. There's a puzzle in the pre-release kits there's a puzzle in the commander decks there's a puzzle in the bundle there's yeah there's

there's a puzzle on the art series cards there's lots of puzzles in on the cards themselves that are just you know in your play boosters. Yeah. Yes. I mean, I remember early on,

one of the conversations we had is where can we, what can we make puzzles out of? Oh, here's another constraint. Let me talk to, this is important. So whenever you're building anything, a magic set or whatever, you have constraints. So there was a very, very big constraint on us. Let me stress that, because if we're going to do behind the scenes, magic comes out in many languages. Every

language had to participate in this puzzle. So all the puzzles had it work in all the languages the set was being released in. Which is a giant challenge. It is. And especially, it's a little out of my wheelhouse.

Like, I'm puzzle polymath. I can make any kind of puzzle that there is. But my specialty is word puzzles, like crossword puzzles, cryptic crosswords. Like, I love making word grids and that does not work for uh puzzles that we want to be globally accessible to uh to every um to every player in every language that we print magic in. You can't just, right, if a crossword puzzle that works

in English is not going to work in any other language. So, right, the challenge then became not just, well, we're making puzzles and where can we hide, where can we put constituent elements of these puzzles, and where can we hide, where can we put constituent elements of these puzzles? But it limited the puzzles to things that were either language neutral or things that could, in fact, be translated, that could be localized into each language we print.

uh translated that could be localized into into each language we print um so right there are and and also like some some questions of okay what things are the same in every single language um numbers numbers are the same in every language. Magic expansion codes are the same in every language. But yeah, I couldn't just write a crossword puzzle. But the puzzle suite here includes some logic puzzles. It includes some cryptography puzzles. puzzles, it includes some, like, cryptography puzzles. There are, in fact, like, some, there's some amount of word puzzle in which then it's constructed in a way that it is, in fact, localized. It is translated into every language. So one of the puzzles, I actually wrote a puzzle in, like, six languages simultaneously, which was a delightful challenge. I actually enjoyed that. But yeah, it definitely tested the kind of the puzzle writing discipline of what can we do and what can't we do and what is able to be translated and what isn't.

And there's another thing, and once again, I'm going to be a little bit vague on this, but one of the other interesting things that we did is going to production and saying, okay, what can we do? Like, what tools are at disposal? And I will say that everybody was very on board with the puzzles, you know, that all the different sections of the company were like, how can we help try to make this puzzle?

And we were very bold in some of the asks of like what we needed to do to make the puzzles happen. Yeah, this it was a huge, huge effort amongst basically every team that produces any aspect of of the cards uh and of the product suite um and yeah i try like i i know like anything that is uh like it's just additional content with constraints of like okay and we're adding this thing into into the art or into the you know into some kind of printed material or something, we're adding this extra thing. And also, don't change it. Don't change a single letter. It's very important that it's very, very precise. Let me tell you the cautionary tale. So when I did one of my preview articles for Merders at Karloff Manor,

I had Mark put together the bios for all the designers. And so he added a puzzle to that. And our editor changed one word. One word got changed by the editor, and the puzzle didn't work. I mean, I went back and fixed it. It works now. Yeah. If you look at the Murders at Karloff Manor designer bios right now yes there's a puzzle in there and it works uh but yeah the we uh the editor changed the word

and to the word that and it just broke the puzzle um but yeah no like the this effort it was just a massive massive effort uh we had coordinating meetings um with uh with constituents from all kinds of different departments and like um uh art narrative story packaging um uh production like typesetting and just so many people because there's puzzle components everywhere and uh and so many people were uh there's puzzle components everywhere. And so many people were touching different elements of it. And everyone was just so game to be aboard. And it's just such a cool, unique event that even though it was massive, massive, massive amounts of work, and I feel somewhat guilty for giving all these wonderful people extra, extra work.

Everyone was just so down to be on board with like, yeah, like puzzles are awesome. Puzzles are fun. Let's put all these puzzles in different places. Yeah, I was. Yeah, for. Go ahead. One of the puzzles, I wanted to put a puzzle in just the concept of like, you know, like packaging material. Could we put a puzzle on a box or in a box or something like that? that's responsible for making the,

right, physically making the packaging and like inserts that you see inside components. And like we had, like Rosewater mentioned, like we had a design team that was coming up with ideas for what what puzzles can we make where can we put them and then this was just a completely separate effort when i contacted uh this team i contacted the packaging team like okay we're thinking of doing this like um would would you be willing to uh to help out would you uh can i pitch you some ideas and they're like no no we're gonna pitch you some ideas and they came uh that team brainstormed up a whole bunch of really cool

ideas they came to me with a pitch with a slideshow of like here's i don't remember how many there were but there were like eight to twenty eight to twelve different ideas of we could do this we could do this what if we put this here would this be cool and um like some of them like overlapped things we already had in the works which was awesome um but yeah their number one idea their uh their most i mean really most uh grandiose experimental like out there idea was their their top thing they're like we think this is really cool and we're like that's it we're doing it um and i actually took one of the puzzles I had penciled in and said, nope, we're not doing that one.

We're doing their idea. It's really cool. So yeah, just to show how eager some of the participation was within the company for putting puzzles everywhere. Yeah, I know it was, the other thing that, even if you don't solve the puzzles, if you just want to take a,

go to, what, ravnicadetectiveagency.com. ravnicadetectiveagency.com. Even just to see what the, like, it might be fun for you just to see what we, like, there's so many things hidden in so many places.

It is, once again, even if you don't solve them, just sort of seeing what we did is also very entertaining. It is, once again, even if you don't solve them, just sort of seeing what we did is also very entertaining. There's, and by the way, the amount of work marked in to make these happen. Also, I must say, you were, I was part of the early team that I was brainstorming, but you were, you actually executed these over years. I don't know how long it took. It took years. I mean, I'm still literally working on it today as we're recording this. So we're still working on getting the finishing touches on that website. So it's up and running by the time the pre-release happens. And I mean,

we mentioned different languages. The website is also localized. So there's language, like when you're on this website, you choose which language you speak. And so it's not like if you're in a different part of the world, you have to interact with this English language website. Even the website pages per puzzle are customized for the languages that we print magic in. Well, anyway, we're almost out of time here, but I hope the goal of today is to A, say to the audience,

here's a really cool component that most magic sets do not have that we want you to participate. Nothing has this. Nothing has this. This is completely unprecedented. Yes, yes, unprecedented. Nothing has just embedded puzzles to this level that are just there. But yeah, if you open up a booster pack,

if you're building a deck with Murders of Karloff Manor cards, you are going to touch cards that have secret puzzle components on them. You just are. There's so many of them. So, anyway, I want to thank you for being with us today and giving us a little behind-the-scenes look at all the puzzles.

Yeah, happy to be here. And one last time, ravnegadetectiveagency.com That's the website um the first puzzle is at the pre-release and every day

after that there are brand new puzzles for 13 days so check it out and uh if you are a puzzle fan I think you'll be

tickled pink and if you're not a puzzle fan I still think that you would enjoy it and even just seeing all the stuff we did it is

unprecedented is correct is definitely the word anyway I still think that you would enjoy it. And even just seeing all the stuff we did, it is unprecedented. It's definitely the word. Anyway, thanks, Mark. And to everybody else, I'm at my desk. So we all know what that means. It means that my end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Thanks, everybody.

I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.