Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1111: Puzzle Design

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

In this podcast, I talk about the basics of designing puzzles.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for a third drive to work. Okay, so today, in honor of all the puzzles in Murders at Carlove Manor, I decided to do a podcast about puzzles. So today is about puzzle design. Not specifically the Murders at Carlove Manor puzzles, but just puzzles in general. So I'm going to talk about the difference between game design and puzzle design, how they're similar, how they're different. But today is all about designing puzzles. Okay, so a little background on my puzzle-making background. I grew up not just a giant fan of games, which I did, but also a huge fan of puzzles. I did lots and lots of puzzles growing up, logic puzzles, and crosswords, and cryptic crosswords, and all sorts of different puzzles. I really am a huge puzzle fan. In fact, for those that know my history with Wizards,

my very first interaction with Wizards of the Coast was making a thing called Magic the Puzzling. And basically those were magic puzzles where you take the game of Magic, interaction with Wizards of the Coast was making a thing called Magic the Puzzling. And basically those were magic puzzles where you take the game of magic, you have a game in progress, and then you have some goal. Usually it's win the game that turn. But anyway, the way I started out in magic, my first foothold in the door was making magic puzzles. Also, I talked about this, I had a podcast on it. My wife and I really like throwing parties. One of the things I always do at parties is I make paper puzzles, which

they're things for people to solve at the thing. My family also has a huge hobby of escape rooms. Whenever we go on vacation, even sometimes here in Seattle, we'll do escape rooms. And we've done 20 plus escape rooms. And my family really enjoys it. It's a lot of fun. And escape rooms are sort of a series of puzzles. For those that have never done an escape room, you get put in a room. You have a time, usually an hour. And then you have to solve a series of puzzles to get out of the room.

And the puzzles are sequential. And usually there's a meta puzzle. But anyway, we do that. And, I mean, I'm just, I'm a frequent doer of puzzles. I loved Games Magazine back when that was a magazine that existed. And I was part of the team that made the puzzles for Murders at Carl of Manor. I did a podcast with Mark Gottlieb about it. So anyway, so let me first

talk about what is the difference between game design and puzzle design. And there's one core difference, I think. In making a game, you are trying to make an experience that each player has their own experience. That I'm trying to like... Both puzzles and games are about sort of mental challenge. Can you do the thing provided? Games are a little more open-ended. We'll give you a goal and rules and then everybody in some level

does it their own way. That usually a game isn't about doing how everybody else did it. It's about forging your own path. Puzzles are a little more the opposite, which is a lot of puzzles have a singular answer. So real quickly, there are what we call open puzzles and closed puzzles. So a closed puzzle is there's a singular answer. Everybody gets the same answer. We're all trying to find the same thing. That's a more traditional puzzle. An open-ended puzzle is

sometimes you're given a challenge and then you're trying to do the best you can do. And the idea is, it's how well can I do within that? Mark Gottlieb, who is a master puzzle designer, tends to refer to the open puzzles as more puzzle games. The good example there is, think of the game Boggle. So for those that have never played Boggle, it's a Hasbro game. You roll a series of cubes that have letters on them. Normal Boggle is four by four. Big Boggle is five by five. And then you are finding words by connecting letters.

Now, I have done Boggle puzzles. Usually a Boggle puzzle is you purposely place the letters and then you've hidden, like, there's some theme you have to figure out. Like, oh, it's all the Beatles or something. So I would say sort of the Boggle game and a Boggle puzzle, it very much is a puzzle game. Really, the big question is, like, in Boggle,

you're competing against other people. Puzzles are normally in a vacuum. Puzzles tend to be more solitary. But there are group puzzles. For example, the escape rooms I talked about, my whole family does them, you know. Now, in the escape room, there's multiple puzzles, and different people might be working on different puzzles simultaneously,

or sometimes you team up to work on puzzles. So puzzle solving can be a team experience. The majority of puzzles are done solo. The majority of puzzles are usually done solo. Traditional puzzles like you do in a magazine, usually those are solo experiences. Not always. Some people like doing the crosswords with their spouse or something. Okay, so the key difference, like I said, is most puzzles are more closed puzzles we're talking.

And in a closed puzzle, there usually is a singular answer or answers. Everybody doing the puzzle is getting to the same place. Unlike a game where you're all kind of getting there from different places. Now, it is possible to make a puzzle that has multiple answers or there's multiple ways to get to the answer. That is possible. But you usually are going to a signified the same answer in which games more there's an open-ended goal. So let me start getting into how we actually design puzzles. And the structure I decided I would use today is

I wrote an article many years ago called 10 Things Every Game Needs. I then did a series of podcasts, one podcast on each of the 10 things. So I was going to use that as a guideline for talking about making puzzles and talking about a lot of the core to puzzle design. And it'll let me talk a little bit about the differences between puzzles and games. Not everything. I mean, the interesting thing is when you talk about the 10 things every game needs, puzzles are close. There's a few differences, but they're pretty close. Okay, so let's start.

Number one was a goal or goals. So in a game, I have to tell you what it is you're trying to do. Puzzles are very similar. When you start a puzzle, I have to tell you what's the end state of the puzzle. How do you solve the puzzle? What are you looking for? Now, there are some puzzles in which understanding what the puzzle is doing can be part of the puzzle. There are some puzzles where the goal is nebulous. So most puzzles I tell you up front, it's a crossword puzzle. Fill in this grid. Or, you know, it's a word search. Find these words. Most of the time, if it's a word search. Find these words. You know,

most of the time, if it's a puzzle, I'm telling you what to do. It is possible to do a puzzle in which the goal itself, figuring out the goal is part of the puzzle. So games are a little clearer in what the goal is. Usually puzzles are pretty clear, but it is possible to make a puzzle in which part of the puzzle is figuring out what the puzzle is. That's one of the things that puzzles can do. Games really need to be a lot clearer up front what you're doing. Games don't want to be nebulous, where puzzles at times can be a little more nebulous. Now, that said, there needs to be a goal. There needs to be, what are you trying to do in the puzzle? You know, you, even if the, even if the puzzle doer is sort of solving that along the way, there does need to be, like, for example, there is an answer

to a puzzle, maybe multiple answers, but there's an answer or answers to a puzzle. And a lot of times the core goal of a puzzle is to get the answer or answers. Now in a meta puzzle, so what a meta puzzle is, is you do puzzles and that leads you to other puzzles. Normally in an escape room, that's a metapuzzle. You'll solve smaller puzzles that have answers that help give you more things to solve other puzzles. And sometimes, like Murders in Carlisle Manor, there are 12 individual puzzles you do.

You get an answer to those 12 puzzles. The answers to those 12 puzzles make the 13th puzzle. Traditionally, that's how a meta puzzle works, is the answer to the small puzzles are themselves a larger puzzle. Sometimes what they do in escape rooms is, in order to solve some of the puzzles, you need to solve other puzzles because they open up material that you need to solve the other puzzles. So technically, a meta puzzle is where the answers give you the solution to a new puzzle. There are sequential puzzles where I have to solve one puzzle before I can solve the other puzzle. A lot of times, like treasure hunts, for example,

the clues can be a little puzzle you have to solve that sends you somewhere. Then you get the next clue, which is the next puzzle, for example. Okay, so you do need goal or goals. You do need to have, you know, you're trying to do something. Traditionally with a puzzle, there's an answer. That's something, games don't inherently have an answer, where puzzles by default have an answer. There are puzzles that sort of either don't have one answer or are a little more nebulous, but mostly puzzles have an answer. Okay, number two, the rules. Now, in a game, the rules sort of define what you can and can't do. In a puzzle,

the rules are more set up by the, I mean, A, you can lay out a few rules if you want. For example, when you're doing an escape room, um, a lot of times they'll, they'll tell you a few things, mostly to help you, you know, anything you can't reach isn't part of the puzzle. Uh, you don't have to, you know, pull anything with any force that would break something. You know, they, they, they give you a few guidelines and there are some, um, what I would have called them, uh, They're somewhat structural rules. So a well-designed escape room, for example,

you use each item once. Meaning once I've used something to solve a puzzle, I know I don't need that anymore. I can put it away. And that way, when you're like, one of the things about sort of the rules of a puzzle is you just want to make it clear to the puzzle doer what it is they're

trying to do. For example, I'll use one of my puzzles from my parties. So at last year, not, so right now it is February. So not two months ago, but 14 months ago, I did, we do a holiday cookie party. And last year, we did a puzzle where we showed 50 Santas. And each Santa was from a different TV show or movie. And the goal of the puzzle was identify the TV show or movie. Now, some of it was recognition. Oh, I've seen that movie. Oh, that's Papa Elf from Elf. Some of it was trying to like, even if you didn't see the specific episode, there were a

lot of animated shows, for example. Oh, and one of the parameters, so like talking about rules, one of the parameters of the puzzle, they went unstated. It was built, so it was a rule that we, the puzzle builders, followed that you, the puzzle doer, could figure out, but we didn't inherently tell you, which was all our Santas were canonical Santas. What that means is none of the Santas in our puzzle were people who, in the story, are a guy dressed up as Santa. In all of them, it was canonically Santa. It was actually Santa Claus. So as you start solving the puzzle, that is a rule. So there are stated rules in puzzles where I tell you something about what's going to happen. And then there's unwritten rules where I, the

puzzle follower, follow a set of rules that you might figure out along the way that can help you solve it. And we'll get more, as we get into strategy, we'll get a little more into that. Okay, number next is, number three is interaction. So interaction is where we deviate a little bit. There is interaction in a puzzle designed for more than one player. Escape rooms, perfect example. A lot of times, for example, there are things in escape rooms that one person can't possibly do. A classic example is where one person has to solve something, but the means to solve it is somewhere else. So somebody, like let's say there's an answer, and then there's the pieces that you have to put, like you have to put pieces in a certain order. But the order itself is somewhere that the person looking at the pieces can't see.

So somebody else has to be, okay, it goes red, then green, then blue, so the person solving it can solve it. But you need to help another person. I've also seen puzzles where two people have to push buttons at the same time. Things in which, a lot of times, if you're designing a puzzle that is meant for more than one person, you can have interactions and you can do things in which, in order to solve the puzzle, you need multiple people. Most puzzles are solitary, meaning there's a single user. So in those, there's less interaction. One of the things I do, for example, in my paper puzzles and my games is one of my rules, which is just a universal rule, I do write this on the things, which is you are not allowed to use the internet, meaning

a lot of my things are trivia based. But one of the rules is you're allowed to talk to people at the party. Why do I do that? Well, it's a party. I want to encourage people to interact with each other. And so the games are meant not as a means to pull people apart, but draw people together. So the idea is, hey, if I don't know the answers to something, one of my routes to solving it might be talking to other people and getting answers from other people. Now, there also is a little bit of competition. There's a prize for the puzzles at the party. So some people want to share.

Some people don't want to share. So, you know, there's a give and take there. So there is ways to build interaction in the puzzles. But once again, it involves being beyond a solitary. In a solitary puzzle, there's less ways for interaction. Okay, number four, the catch-up feature. So in games, what that means is no matter where it is in the game, I want to feel like I have a chance.

If I make a game in which I feel like I'm behind and I can never catch up, you know, it can get kind of demoralizing. So puzzles isn't quite the same. I will use this thing to talk a little bit about how you want to make sure that you give, you build in clues inside your puzzle. And what I mean by that is you want to make sure that you are helping the puzzle doer on multiple levels. And there's a bunch of ways to do that. One of the ways I just talked about is maybe there's some inherent structure that as you start solving the puzzle, you start realizing there's internal rules that were followed, which once you understand that, it helps you figure out what's going on.

Once you know that all the Santas are canonical Santas, oh, you can say, oh, this can't be trading places because Dan Aykroyd wasn't Santa. He was his character dressed up as Santa. Oh, I can eliminate that as an option. That can't be an option. Another thing that's very common, I'll use Jeopardy for the sample. If you ever see the Jeopardy clues, the people who make Jeopardy clues are puzzle people. Normally, in a lot of the clues, there's a little extra clue within the answer.

When they give you the answer, Jeopardy, you have to give the questions. But the idea is there's little subtle nods, there's little subtle things to help you, and so if you're really careful about reading clue, a lot of times they give you extra information that might be useful. The other thing that can happen in, that can help with the catch-up feature is sometime there's a structure. You can sort of, as you solve the puzzle, that can remove options. So a classic example of this would be a matching puzzle. And what I mean by that is, so for example, I did the Santa Claus puzzle. A year later, two months ago, we did a similar puzzle with elves.

The difference is the Santa Claus puzzle, you were trying to say what showed Santa, like they're all Santa Claus. The elf puzzle, we did a slightly different thing. We wanted to do a visual puzzle. The Santa puzzle had gone over well. So we showed, I think it was 35 elves from pop culture, movies, TV shows, books, comics, cereal boxes. We just did elves from popular places. And the goal was not to identify where they came from necessarily. Well, the goal was to identify who they were. But that was more complex than Santa.

Santa was Santa. So what we did on this puzzle is we gave you the 50 or the 35 answers for the 35 pictures. That's what's called a matching puzzle. I'm telling you the answers, but you have to say which answer goes with which picture. And so that has a nice feature to it in that, let's say I go, oh, that's Papa Elf from Elf, and I cross it off. Well, nobody else is

Papa Elf. I've now eliminated an option, right? I've eliminated a choice for you. So some puzzles are designed in such a way that as you start solving some of them, it helps make later part of the puzzle easier. A crossword is another great example. Let's say I don't know a clue. Well, as I start solving other clues, it starts giving me letters, and now I have a leg up to figure that out. So it's important in puzzles that you build in qualities that help people as they start solving the puzzle that helps them with other parts of the puzzle. That the puzzle is interconnected and that doing part of it

helps you with other parts. Okay number five is inertia. So in a game what that means is you need it to finish. You need to make sure that the action playing the game ends the game. And that one of the real common mistakes of beginning game designers is they make things that can't be, that the correct strategy is to stall and so the game doesn't end. Right? You want to make the game end.

You want to make what you need to do to win the game makes it end. So that there, it's, inertia basically means you just want to make the game end. You want to make what you need to do to win the game makes it end. Inertia basically means you just want to push forward. The steps it takes to win is making the game end. And in a puzzle, there is inertia. So one of the things you need to do is what is sort of called a ramped up challenge. So the idea is, I will, my elf puzzle for a second. Um, okay. So what I want to do is when you first come to the puzzle, you want to make sure like if, if, if the puzzle is too hard, unless you're, unless your audience is like diehard puzzle people. Um,

and that's another important thing real quickly is you have to design your puzzle to your audience. And that's another important thing real quickly is you have to design your puzzle to your audience. For example, I do a lot of puzzles at my parties. So one time I did a neighborhood party. It wasn't my normal audience, which is a lot of R&D folk. It was people from my neighborhood. And I made a puzzle for it. But I aimed the puzzle like I did to a normal party in which R&D is there.

And R&D in general, they're game players, they're puzzle people. They're much better at puzzles. And it was too hard. One of the things you want to do in a puzzle is you want to make sure there's part of the puzzle that draws people in. That you want, right away, you want people to see some answers. So, for example, if I'm doing a visual puzzle, take the elves

as an example, I'm going to put some elves in that I know you know. Papa Elf from Elf is a good example. It's Bob Newhart. Most people have seen Elf. You're probably going to know what that is. You want some hard ones too. There definitely were some elves from properties that I don't think people had seen. But as I'll get into in a second, there are ways to help people figure those out as well. But I want to make sure when you look at a puzzle that immediately there's some things you know. And what you want to do is you want to make the puzzle have a ramp to it. So there's some things you can do right away so you don't get discouraged.

But that the puzzle has a range from some easy things to some medium things to some hard things. That there's progression to the puzzle. things to some medium things to some hard things, that there's progression to the puzzle. And a lot of the inertia means that you want to make sure the person is ready for the part of the puzzle they're at. And that the way you finish the puzzle is by having a ramp to it, people solve what they can solve and it pushes them forward. Escape rooms have a similar quality where there's usually easier puzzles up front. And then as you do them, the puzzles start getting a little bit harder.

But you've learned things about the room. You've learned things about the puzzle. And so that makes future puzzles a little bit easier. Okay, number six is surprise. So there's an important part in making a puzzle, what we call the aha moment. What the aha moment is, is usually in a puzzle, not necessarily, not always, but in a good puzzle, I will say, there's a moment of aha where you realize something, you figure something out. Now, there could be one giant aha moment,

there could be some small aha moments, but there's a moment where you figure something about the puzzle. Now, some puzzles, what a big aha moment is, is you're like, I'm not sure what's going on. I'm not sure what's going on. Ha ha, I figured it out. Escape rooms do a lot of the big aha, where I have component pieces, but then I have to figure out what the puzzle is. And the aha moment is seeing what the puzzle is. Now, like an escape room, there's clues. So the way escape rooms usually work is there's a bunch of locks. This lock has a four-digit number on it. This lock has a five-letter word on it. This lock is looking for direction, you know, up, down, right, left. And so as you solve a puzzle, you start to figure out, oh, what kind of puzzle it is. And then that puzzle, oh, I get it. This

puzzle's, the answer is a five-letter word. That's going to solve this lock and open up there. So there is aha moments, like how am I using this puzzle if it's in a larger thing or in a metapuzzle or stuff or sequential puzzle. Another aha thing, like, for example, let's take the Santa Claus puzzle. the Santa Claus puzzle. Okay, some of the stuff I'll recognize because I just, oh yeah, that is Santa Claus from Elf. That's Ed Asner. He plays Santa Claus

in Elf. I know that. Other times it might be, okay, I don't necessarily know the episode that Santa appeared, but oh, this is an animated show. And animated shows have a very stylized thing. Oh, well I can tell the people are yellow and they have four fingers and like, oh, that's the Simpsons. Now, maybe I've never seen the episode

where Santa Claus is on the Simpsons, but I can recognize from the style. And then there's this aha moment where I'm like, ah, here's this extra set of clues I can use. So small ahas are more like that the, there can be handholds, and I'll get more into handholds in a second, but there can be handholds in the puzzle, meaning little things that help you solve the puzzle that can be built in. And a lot of the aha moments are either figuring out the larger structure of the puzzle, maybe you figure out what you're trying to solve, or maybe you're figuring out little things that help you out how to solve the puzzle, which leads us into strategy because handholds are a very good part

of strategy. So in a game, what you want is you want people to learn things from playing your game such that in future games, they're better at the game because of things they learned. The idea that there's things to learn in the game to win the game. And the more you understand the strategy, the better you are at the game. Now in a game, there's a repeat quality that doesn't always happen in a puzzle. Often in a puzzle, you solve it and you're done with that puzzle. Now maybe you go do a similar, you know, I like crosswords and so I do a crossword. I solve that crossword, but then I go do another crossword. Where games, you play the same game, so it's a little different here. But the same sense is you want some strategy built into your puzzle. What that means is you

want your audience to figure things out that help them with the puzzle. Those are what we call handholds, and that's something you, the puzzle designer, put in the puzzle. For example, when we picked the picture, one of the pictures of Santa was from SpongeBob. Now, there's a couple different pictures we could have picked, but one of the pictures we picked had a certain little symbol in it. And that symbol shows up in SpongeBob SquarePants. So that was a little clue that, like, if you recognize the symbol. Another, for example, of a hand handheld is when I made my elf puzzle, one of the things that I did was

we tried to pick a bunch of female elves. I think there were nine out of the 35. So if you see a name of an elf and it's a female name, you go, oh, that's probably one of the female elves. And that narrows down, you know. Or when we gave you the name of the elf, we also gave you the name of where they come from, the movie or TV show or something. And so maybe as you look at it, you're like, oh, this seems like a comic book. Well, I know this is a movie.

And maybe I don't even know which one's the comic book, but at least I can eliminate the movies. So handholds a lot of time are trying to divvy up how you have answers or how you design the answers or, I mean, how you build the handholds can depend a lot on the kind of puzzle you're building. But what you want to do is, as you're constructing it, think about how players can figure things out along the way how there's contextual information that they can they can figure out because part of a good puzzle is as you start solving it you learn things about it and that helps you solve it and that it's not as it like there are trivia puzzles there are a few puzzles where like i know it or i don't but even

a good trivia puzzle right tries to work in clues or tries to give you a larger structure like a crossword puzzle where if I don't know the answer immediately, I get things later that give me more information to help me solve it. Because it's puzzles in which I know it or I don't know it. I mean, there are some trivia things, but a good trivia is not solely like do you know it or not know it? There's stuff built in to help you maybe solve it. Okay. Number eight is fun. One of the ideas there is that the thing that you enjoyed playing the game, the thing that's the most fun about the game, you want to make sure that that is the avenue to win. That one of the common mistakes game designers can make, or amateur game designers, is that they make a game in which the correct way to win is boring, and that the fun thing about the game isn't the correct way to win.

So people, because people want to win the game, they're not doing the fun thing, they're doing this boring thing. And at the end of the game, they're like, that wasn't fun. So you want to make sure your fun's there. Puzzles is very similar in that you want to make sure when you build your puzzle that the activity needed to solve the puzzle is a fun activity. For example, I'll take my SATA puzzle. Hey, it's kind of fun to go, ooh, where's this from? I've seen a lot of TV shows and movies. Oh, he looks familiar. Where's he from? And you know,

you can chat with other people and get contextual clues. And it's fun to try to figure that out because that's a fun thing. Recalling where you saw something or, you know, trivia can be fun. Or let's say you're doing a crossword puzzle. It's fun to fill in grids

and be like, like whatever you're doing or like my favorite thing is called the cryptic crossword. So for those that have never, for those that have done traditional crosswords but never done the cryptic crossword,

cryptic crosswords, the clues themselves are like little word games and you have to solve the word or the little word puzzles and you have to solve the little word puzzle to understand the clue to know what the word is. So like each clue is itself, it's a little puzzle. Um, and there's different kinds of clues, but it's really fun. And it's like a little word, like it's each clue is itself, it's a little word puzzle. it's, each clue is itself this little word puzzle and then you use that to solve the bigger puzzle. So it's a lot of fun. But you have to do that

and make sure that you weave that in. Number nine is flavor. So the idea of a game is that one of the tools to help people understand a game is to help them understand you can use flavor as a way to help make things easier to

learn. Like when you're learning how to play magic, flying is very intuitive because flying is a real thing. Birds fly. Oh, I understand why this bear can't block the bird. Oh, the bird could fly over it. And so that mechanic is easier to understand because it's relatable to something, to a flavor that you get. And so flavor does two things. One is it helps make the puzzle and or game easier to understand. The second is it makes it more fun. You know, one of the things, for example, about escape rooms is most escape rooms, or almost all escape rooms, have a flavor to it. is most escape rooms, or almost all escape rooms,

have a flavor to it. Oh, I'm trying to make a jailbreak, or I'm in a saloon, or there's a zombie outbreak, and I have to find a clue to stop the zombie outbreak. Like, I'm somewhere, and that the puzzles intertwine with the theme. You know, my family and I have done,

like, Alice in Wonderland theme puzzles, Scooby-Doo theme puzzles, you know, things in which, oh, there's something going on, there's some mystery to solve, but the flavor really can add a lot. And sometimes the flavor itself even might have clues in it, or you can use that as a means to build something around.

And so flavor, well, A, adds to the fun, which is important. B, it can add structural elements either to build around or to help people understand something that can be very valuable. Number 10 is a hook. So one of the things I was talking about when you make a game

is that, at least in professional game making, you then have to sell the game. And so one of the things about it is there's something about it that has to make people want to buy it. What's special about this game? Why would I want to buy this game? So in games, not games, in puzzles, I mean, A, I want people to do the puzzle. So there might be a little hook of why this puzzle is fun. Usually what a hook in a puzzle is, there's some theme to the puzzle.

There's something about the puzzle that, you know, there's some novelty. Now, there's some traditional puzzles like a crusher puzzle that, but even crusher puzzles often will have some novelty to it. Oh, there's a theme. Some of the words all play into some theme together. That might make it a little fun. Like, oh, it's St. Patrick's Day. So it has, or Valentine's Day or whatever.

So it has some theme that plays into something. And it's a lot of fun. Like, for example, I'm talking about my parties. Well, I'm having a holiday-themed party. Well, my games are holiday-themed, you know. It just fits the mood and the tone. And so a lot of times, and the other thing about a hook for a puzzle is you want someone to do the puzzle. So something about the puzzle wants to draw them in.

So, for example, you know, the sand puzzles, the elf puzzle, like, it's just very visual. And you go, ooh, I know who that is. And all of a sudden, like, hey, I solved a little piece of the puzzle. Maybe, you know, and then it makes me want to look and see what else I know. And so a hook is valuable in the sense that, you know, it draws you in and it makes you want to do that. Hog is valuable in the sense that it draws you in and it makes you want to do that. Now, one last thing to talk about is I did talk about Magic the Puzzling,

which is a puzzle. So Magic the Puzzling, normally there was a singular solution in the sense that it's something you had to do. But there's something that I did with it that I didn't really talk about. So I'll use my last example of matching the puzzle and talk about something, which is that one of the funs of a puzzle is you want the puzzle user to have to challenge something. Some of this could be the aha moment, but usually a fun part of a puzzle is

that you want the player in the act of working on the puzzle to realize something about the puzzle along the way. For example, the way I used to do it in Magic the Puzzling is I would make you use a card in a way you usually didn't use the card. Oh look, it's a card drawing spell, but to solve the puzzle you're going to give your opponent cards, you know, or you're just going to do something that's a little off the beaten path. Because one of the fun things about a lot of puzzles is there's this mental challenge that goes into it to say, okay, I've got to solve it. That you want the person, you want to push against preconceived notions. And a lot of puzzles like to play around with the idea that the

player has to challenge them. The that the player has to challenge themselves. The puzzle doer has to challenge themselves. That solving the puzzles is sort of not taking everything at face value all the time. And figuring out the handholds and figuring out... Like, there's a lot of crafting to solving a puzzle. And that a puzzle isn't just like you know it or you don't know it. That's not a great puzzle where it's like, well, do I know it or not know it? No, that's okay.

I mean, there's some things like trivia that can be the people that really like trivia. But mostly a good puzzle has to do with it is a journey that you take the puzzle goer on. And that they have fun on the journey. And they do things on the journey. And they work their brain. And they solve things. A lot of what makes a good puzzle is you feel proud for solving the puzzle, that the puzzle was solved, that you would have figured it out. And a lot of times,

part of figuring it out is adding this element that might not be obvious. That can be your aha moment. Aha moments can function in a couple of different ways. But that's an important part of the puzzles is the idea that you're making something that is a challenge for someone to solve, and that it's solvable. Making a puzzle that no one can solve isn't... You want to make things that people can solve. You can set difficulties, and once again, know your audience. Anyway, guys, so that is lots of information

about how to design a puzzle. So this is a little off the beaten path. I've done a lot of podcasts, so I like to veer off a little bit. This tied into our Murders of Carl Love Manor puzzle theme, so I thought it was a good time to talk about it. And there's a lot of similarities between designing games and designing puzzles,

as hopefully you learned today. So I think if you enjoy game design, that hopefully you enjoy an episode on puzzle design. Anyway, guys, I'm now at work. So although that means instead of talking magic, it means it's the end of my drive to work, sorry. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.