["Beyond Tetris" is a usually biweekly column (except when it just doesn't show up one biweek) from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. This installment examines an omnipresent paper puzzle, the crossword.]

A few months ago, I got to play one of the biggest videogames I'd ever seen. The main screen was easily over ten feet tall (rear-projection), but there were other screens all over the place. In fact, it was more like I was inside the game, since there was an elaborate set around me.

There was only one button that hooked me directly into the computer, but there was speech recognition, and my location was important as well. There were four other players there with me, and the stakes were high: the winner could grab thousands of dollars, the other players would get a watch.

You might have seen me play a few weeks ago; it was an episode of Merv Griffin's Crosswords.

It was a lot of fun. The local coverage of the Southern California fires meant I didn't get to see my episode on the air, but it did play across the country. The basic rules of the videogame are that the host reads a crossword clue, you try to buzz in first, and if you get a chance, you announce and spell your answer. You can watch a little bit of me joining in the game on YouTube.

What's that? Crosswords is a game show, not a videogame? For you maybe. But for me—actually playing it—it was a very immersive computer-run game with innovative control mechanisms and a large crew of paid cast members and puppet masters to maintain immersion. A cross between a party game, a puzzle game and an ARG. For money.

But while it is a videogame, it's not a puzzle game under the strict definition of this column (the way clues are asked of the contestants, it's more like a trivia or party game), so I won't go into great detail about what it's like to play Merv Griffin's Crosswords. But my appearance on the show was, in many ways, the culmination of many, many years of solving crosswords, on paper and on computer.

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["Beyond Tetris" is a hopefully biweekly column from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. This installment examines the Mac masterpiece The Fool's Errand.]

While writing about The 7th Guest last week, I realized I'd mentioned The Fool's Errand again. I'm not surprised it happened, Cliff Johnson's 1987 game remains one of the greatest puzzle games in personal-computing history, eminently playable even twenty years later. I'd been procrastinating about it (for a reason I'll get to later), since I started (and restarted) this column. But there's only so long I can go on referencing a game that has had such a lasting impact on a whole generation of puzzlers. So, leaping without looking, let's begin.

Cliff Johnson, a monster builder and filmmaker, was first inspired by the elaborate puzzle-mysteries of the movies Sleuth and The Last of Sheila to stage "mystery game" parties where groups of players solve pencil puzzle to unearth clues to a mystery. Kit Williams' illustrated treasure hunt Masquerade was further inspiration for Johnson as he caught the puzzling bug. In 1984, Johnson put together a book similar to Masquerade as a Christmas present for his friends. This was the first incarnation of The Fool's Errand, a set of paper puzzles bound together with a jigsaw puzzle and a story to provide an unifying mystery. But having just purchased his first personal computer, he could already see the possiblities of expanding the puzzle as a computer for his new Macintosh.

Johnson began coding the next year, and The Fool's Errand was released by Miles Publishing in 1987. Though sales started slow, the game gained momentum as rave reviews started to trickle in. MacWorld inducted it into its Hall of Fame, and Games Magazine awarded it "Puzzle Game of the Year" as part of the Games 100. Electronic Arts took over the distribution, and over the next three years, The Fool's Errand would be ported from the Macintosh to DOS, the Amiga, and the Atari ST. And the game would continue circulating, on sites like The Underdogs until the present.

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["Beyond Tetris" is a no-longer-dormant column from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. This installment examines the high-budget puzzle collections The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour.]

It's been a while since I wrote one of these; a lot's happened in the past few months. Most importantly I've moved, with my fiancee, into the heart of Hollywood. (Not for any particular hey-let's-break-into-films reason, just because it's a nice neighborhood.) As I've been settling down to live my everyday life in an area that's idealized and vilified from around the world, I've had a lot of time to think about style and substance, puzzle and presentation. So I think it's appropriate that I restart this column with the blockbuster popcorn movie of computer puzzle games, The 7th Guest.

Guest Hosts

In 1990, Graeme Devine and Rob Landeros, two employees of Virgin Games, were thinking about Laura Palmer, viz. who killed her. They were also thinking about the board game Clue (the rights to which Virgin had acquired). But most importantly, they were thinking about CD-ROMs. Music CDs had taken over vinyl, and console manufacturers were just starting to release systems like the FM Towns Marty and the TurboGrafx CD that used CD-ROMs to hold game information. But on the PC, the CD-ROM was still mostly used for massive data storage for programs like the Microsoft Bookshelf. Landeros and Devine wanted to get ahead of the PC-gaming curve and use the power of the CD-ROM to give gamers a mystery to equal David Lynch's bizzarro serial.

Though inspired by the promise of multimedia, the pair were also keenly aware of its limitations; they didn't want to promise more than they could deliver. Landeros explained, "People get disappointed when they can't do something. Because it seems that you're saying there are endless possiblities, yet you're so restricted. So we wanted to restrict things—restrict the environment from the start." So instead of offering a wide-open puzzle space, they decided to focus on small discrete puzzles which would serve as the backbone for a mystery shown in video, music and animation. In the design spec for Guest, Devine and Landeros described a game with a structure similar to Cliff Johnson's The Fool's Errand, but with a plot that was "very strong, intricate, and full of dramatic content."

Devine and Landeros were amicably "fired" from Virgin to form their own company, Trilobyte, which would develop the game for Virgin to publish. It became The 7th Guest—and a major success. It sold more than two million copies and is credited with helping to push sales of CD-ROM drives for PCs. Today, it's hard to watch the videos without cringing at both the acting and the blocky video. But while the acting is probably the same as it ever was, the video and the 3-D pictures and animation were state-of-the-art in the early '90s. And what the game lacked in thespianism, it made up in grotesque imagery. The mansion of the demented toymaker Stauf was a playground of interactive horror. Even jaded techies wanted the game, if only to show off the Super VGA visuals.

But so far I've only talked about the "Hollywood" side of the game—the video, special effects, sales. What about the puzzles?

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["Beyond Tetris" is a column from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. This installment revisits an earlier topic with the release of Deadly Rooms of Death: The City Beneath.]

I didn't want this to happen. It was only a few months ago that I first wrote about Deadly Rooms of Death, and I didn't think I'd be writing about it again for at least a few months. My plan last weekend was to get The 7th Guest running again, so I could write about that today. But instead, in an oddly phrased announcement, Erik Hermansen and Caravel Games released DROD 3.0, or The City Beneath. And that's when my time disappeared.

The game was released on April 1 (which somewhat accounts for the logic-puzzle phrasing of the announcement), exactly two years after DROD 2.0, Journey to Rooted Hold. The downloadable game can be purchased for $20, with a CD version promised in the future. As with JtRH, there is also a demo which can be used to create and solve level sets (called holds). Caravel Games has not yet set up a page with links to the demo, so we'll link them here: Windows demo, Mac demo, and Linux demo.

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["Beyond Tetris" is a column from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. Today's unfortunately delayed installment looks at an overlooked handheld game: Nemesis Factor.]

It has been a staple of the adventure game since Zork. It burst into the public consciousness in Myst. It has been recreated countless times across the internet in room-escaping Flash games. It has many forms; it has no name; it is The Machine of Unknown Purpose with Buttons You Can Press.

The Machine of Unknown Purpose with Buttons You Can Press has opened doors, revealed clues, and even turned on other Machines of Unknown Purposes with Buttons You Can Also Press. Sometimes, it has no purpose other to be solved, for points or bragging rights. But for whatever reason, the buttons must be pressed, in the right order, at the right times, without making a mistake, in order to succeed.

Perhaps you have wondered what you would do if you were confronted by The Machine of Unknown Purpose with Buttons You Can Press in real life, a physical Machine with Buttons You Can Press using your fingers instead of with a mouse or keyboard.

wonder no more. The Machine of Unknown Purpose with Buttons You Can Press exists, and its name is Nemesis Factor.

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Posted by tablesaw at 6:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

["Beyond Tetris" is a column from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. This installment looks at an old and widely reviled videogame cliché: the Tower of Hanoi.]

I think it's safe to assume that anyone reading this blog has played a fair share of videogames. It is therefore safe to assume that you have seen the Tower of Hanoi at least once. And I'd also wager good money that you're sick of it. Frankly, I'm sick of it. I play too many puzzle and adventure games to have to deal with hoary mechanical exercises like this. But it does have an interesting history, which may give you some perspective on how it came to be such a cliché.

The End of the World as We Know It

In 1882, a mechanical puzzle appeared in Paris called "La Tour D'Hanoï," or "The Tower of Hanoi." It had three pegs, eight disks, and an instruction booklet telling of the game's history in China, Japan and Tonkin (northern Vietnam), where the disks were porcelain instead of wood. (An English translation by Paul K. Stockmeyer is available.) It also included the legend of "Indian Brahmins" who played the game with sixty-four disks of gold, in the belief that when the tower is completely moved, the universe will end.

All of this was a lie, or at the very leastmisleading advertising. The credited inventor "Professor N. Claus (De Siam)" was merely a pseudonym for "E. Lucas (D'Amiens)," the mathemetician Édouard Lucas. Previously, he had developed a method that could be used to verify if Mersenne numbers were prime, and in 1876, he verified that 2¹²⁷-1 was prime. (This number would be the largest known prime until 1951 and the age of computers). In 1880, he published the solution to the Baguenaudier or Chinese Rings puzzle. Both of these achievements will be important.

The Tower of Hanoi was a relatively popular mathematical curiosity; it was reproduced many times under different names (as can be seen in this collection at James Dalgety's Puzzle Museum). It also appeared outside of a physical form. Sam Loyd discussed the Tower in his Cyclopedia of Puzzles in 1914. It was mentioned in Martin Gardner's Scientific American column in 1957, and in Eric Frank Russell's science-fiction story "Now Inhale" in 1959. But these textual appearances weren't related to actually carrying out the mechanics of the puzzle, instead, they focused on the surprising math behind the device.

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["Beyond Tetris" is a column from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. This installment looks at one of the most commonly available PC puzzle games: Minesweeper.]

Though Microsoft claims that Vista will usher in a new age of PC gaming, the first thing it will do is usher in the old age of PC gaming. Despite hardcore clamoring for high-end graphics-card-melting titles, the only games that the majority of people care about are the ones they've been playing for years, the ones that are ready with no complications whenever the urge to do something other than work arises, the ones that are packed in with Windows—Hearts, Klondike, Mah Jongg Solitaire, etc. Of the common games that come with Vista, two are true puzzle games; FreeCell will have to wait until another time, because today I'm talking about Minesweeper.

Mining the Past

Minesweeper has its origins in the earliest mainframe games of the '60s and '70s. Wikipedia cites the earliest ancestor of Minesweeper as Jerimac Ratliff's Cube. But although Cube features "landmines," it's hard to consider this a predecessor of Minesweeper. In Cube, the mines are placed randomly and the only way to discover where they ends the game. You walk over a landmine and you die; you can't avoid the landmines or know where they are before you take a chance.

However, there are a number of very early "hide and seek" games about locating hidden spots on a grid. For example, in Bob Albrecht's Hurkle, you have to find a creature hiding on a ten-by-ten grid. After each guess, you're told in what general direction the Hurkle lies. Dana Noftle's Depth Charge is the same, but in three dimensions. Bud Valenti's Mugwump has multiple hidden targets, and after each guess, you get the approximate distance to each of them. Unlike Cube, these games match the general pattern of Minesweeper more closely: make a random guess to start, then start using the information provided by that first guess to uncover the hidden items. Of course, unlike Minesweeper (or Cube), the was no danger of "explosion," the only constraint was finding the secret locations in a limited number of guesses.

The closest ancestor to Minesweeper is probably Gregory Yob's Hunt the Wumpus. Although it used an unorthodox grid (the original game used the vertices of a dodecahedron, and a later version used Möbius strips and other unlikely patterns), the Wumpus evolved from its predecessors in many other ways.

Like the previous hide-and-seek games, the goal was to figure out where randomly placed locations were on the grid. But there was no time limit for exploration. Instead, like in Cube, the locations in Wumpus were hazardous: entering those rooms would put you at risk of losing. And most importantly, the only way to figure out where these hazards were was to be one space away. The key to solving Wumpus was getting as close as possible, backing off, and shooting your "crooked arrow" from a distance after definitively locating your prey.

When games like Quicksilva's Mined Out; Virgin Interactive's Yomp; and Conway, Hong and Smith's Reletless Logic appeared in the '80s, they looked like Cube on the surface: move from one point to another avoiding randomly placed mines. But in terms of solving, the games played more like Wumpus: move along safe areas, then put all the information to use locating the hidden dangers. Tom Anderson's Mines later added a feature that let you mark suspected mines with flags. And the stage was finally set for the Minesweeper to (ahem) explode onto the scene.

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Posted by tablesaw at 7:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

["Beyond Tetris" is a column from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. This installment looks at the multi-state maze Theseus and the Minotaur.]

Theseus and the Minotaur is a puzzle that has been trememndously popular across the internet. Like other popular puzzles, many people are unaware of its origins. But unlike many of the puzzles I've been writing about, the history of this particular maze is pretty well documented, from its creation by Robert Abbott as a pencil-and-paper maze, through its first appearance on the web, all the way up to its current incarnations as PopCap's Mummy Maze.

Logical Mazes

Robert Abbott is the inventor of a particular type of maze called, variably, "mazes with rules," "logic mazes," and "multi-state mazes." The first one appeared in Martin Gardner's Scientific American column in 1962. What makes the mazes different from what you would generally find in a children's activity book is that there are any number of rules that apply to the puzzle. In a common maze, you have to simply move spatially from one point to another. In a logic maze, there are rules that restrict or modify how you move. For example, in The Farmer Goes to Market, the maze published in Scientific American forty-five years ago, there are arrows that limit which way you can move, and you are not allowed to make a U-turn. As a result, the location isn't the only thing that matters in the maze, you also have to keep track of a particular state of the game: which direction you just came from.

Over the years, Abbott refined the idea of these mazes. For example, in the Alice Mazes, (taken from his 1990 book Mad Mazes), you can see the state quite clearly. As you move through the maze, the definition "d=1" will change, indicating how many spaces each move is permitted to be. In the Sliding Door Maze (from the later SuperMazes), the state of the maze is incorporated into the maze; the doors that open and close define how you can move. What's most important about these puzzles from a puzzling perspective is that when a maze has multiple states, a relatively simple layout can be incredibly complex. If you don't believe me, you should take a look at Ed Pegg, Jr.'s "Multi-State Mazes" article at MAA Online. It shows a state diagram for a simplified version of The Farmer Goes to Market, and you can see how quickly a simple maze becomes a difficult one. (The article also has a fantastic list of interactive and static multi-state mazes that I adivse you to try.)

One day, while playing the 1980 arcade game Berzerk, Abbott imagined a maze where the solver would have to avoid a robotic opponent. To make the maze a puzzle, rather than an action game, Abbott made the process turn based. The player would move, then the robot would move. "It's like I took a frenzied video game and slowed it down to one thousandth of its normal speed," said Abbott in his notes. Combining the as-the-crow-flies pathfinding of Berzerk's robots with the speed and invincibility of robot gang leader Evil Otto, Abbot had what would become "Theseus and the Minotaur" in Mad Mazes. For every step you (Theseus) took, the Minotaur would move two spaces toward you (preferring to move horizontally before veritcally). With a framing story about a robotically programmed monster, a paper grid, and movable markers for Theseus and the Minotaur, the puzzle took six weeks to design.

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["Beyond Tetris" is a column from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. This installment looks at the classic handheld puzzle game Lights Out.]

The best puzzles hide great complexity in simple packages, but Lights Out turned out to have more surprises than I bargained for. I thought I'd write a bit about the handhelds, write a bit about the puzzle appearing in videogames, and be done with it. When I sat down to do the research, though, I discovered that the small game was tied up in some big things like linear algebra, patent law, and the collectors of rare mechanical games.

Lights Up

Lights Out was first produced by Tiger Electronics in 1995 (Tiger was bought by Hasbro in 1998). It was a very simple device with a simple puzzle. You were given a 5x5 grid of buttons, each of which concealed an LED. Some buttons were lit, and others were not. The goal, as one might expect, was to turn all the lights out. But every time you pressed a button, you wouldn't just toggle on or off that one button, you would toggle the buttons above it, below it, and to its sides. If you pressed a button that wasn't on an edge, it would create a pattern like a cross or plus sign. Every button had undesired consequences, and going from a given pattern to lights out became difficult. The game contained a set of fifty patterns of increasing difficulty, and another set of one thousand solvable patterns.

Tiger developed several version over the years. There was Mini Lights Out, which used a 4x4 grid. Lights Out Deluxe had a 6x6 grid, and had puzzles where the buttons you were allowed to press were limited. On the Lights Out Cube, the edges weren't boundaries, so the cross pattern applied everywhere (sometimes wrapping to an adjacent face). Lights Out 2000 added a third state to each button (that is, instead of going from off to on to off, you cycled through off to red to green to off). Lights Out even appeared as an actual, honest-to-goodness, console-based videogame. In 1997, Tiger released the Game.Com to compete with the Gameboy, Lights Out was available as a pack-in for the system.

Unsurprisingly, Lights Out became a quick hit among puzzle fans. And since puzzle fans make puzzle games, it didn't take long before imitations appeared in videogames. Clones and solvers hit the web quickly, and they continue to be popular. Sigil of Binding, a popular entrant into the first Jay Is Games Game Design Competition, is simply Mini Lights Out with a new skin. Lights Out was also incorporated as a puzzle in puzzle-oriented adventure games; one of its most recent appearances was as the green wall in Mystery of Time and Space. By 1998, the interactive fiction Usenet groups considered it a cliché and encouraged authors to avoid it. In fact, it became a puzzle standard so quickly, I stopped noticing it years and years ago. And when doing the research, I was surprised that such an old chestnut had only surfaced twelve years ago. I should have expected that the truth would lay much farther back.

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["Beyond Tetris" is a column from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. Today is the conclusion of a two-part article on one of the most grueling puzzle marathons available, the MIT Mystery Hunt.]

(In Part I, I gave a brief overview of the MIT Mystery Hunt, written while I was still in the middle of helping to run it. Since then, Dr. Awkward won at 2:14 a.m. Sunday morning, and the puzzles were made available. And now, the rest of the article, about the 2007 Mystery Hunt itself.)

Welcome to Other-People.com

To open this year's Hunt, teams gathered in Lobby 7 to watch a badly planned introduction. But before teams could be roped into tedious groupwork, Michael Fauntleroy, a dashing man with infomercial panache, told them there was an easier way. By signing a simple contract, all teams would be able to find the location of the hidden coin after solving only five puzzles. And sure enough, the teams were given access to a set of five relatively easy puzzles that led to a location on campus.

But when they arrived, Fauntleroy was there to tell them the truth. The contract that they'd signed only told them to the location of the coin (safe inside his own pocket); it didn't give them the right to take it. And in return, each team had bargained its collective soul, which now belonged to Mr. Michael Fauntleroy (M.F.) Stopheles. They were working for Hell now, and so they had to complete M.F. Stopheles's infernal instructional videos to become "really, really evil," find their way into Hell proper, and maybe have a slight chance of becoming as evil as the Devil himself.

They were then given their first video course, and a link to the Hunt's real puzzles on the website of Hell: http://www.other-people.com.

By watching the instructional videos and solving the puzzles, teams would learn what really, really evil actions they would have to perform to prove their worthiness to the minions of Hell. For example, after the course that taught teams "How to Succeed at the Performing Arts by Being Really Really Evil," they were given the instruction to "Create a bad sequel to Wordplay." (Wordplay, of course, is last year's documentary about another yearly puzzle event, the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Several of the major and minor characters in the film also attend the Mystery Hunt every year.) The "Writing" round told teams to "Almost plagiarize Dan Brown work," and the "Mass Manipulation" round asked teams to create an Illuminati card for the current president of MIT.

Adding to the theme was a schedule of special "sin events," each thematically tied to one of the seven deadly sins, where team members would take part in a real-time puzzle event. At Lust, "dominants" given cheesy pick-up lines had to find "submissives" who'd been given irreverent responses. ("Baby, you take my breath away." "Finally, somebody else into erotic asphyxiation!") At Sloth, solvers had to lie down in a dark room at 4 a.m. and listen to someone spell "somnambulist" very, very slowly in between a bad MIDI version of "Rock a Bye Baby."

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Beyond Tetris' - The MIT Mystery Hunt (Part II)" »

Posted by tablesaw at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is Tablesaw, popping in on a non-Monday to clear up some mistakes and changes regarding my most recent Beyond Tetris articles.

First, in Part I of my MIT Mystery Hunt article, I mentioned the definitive article about the Hunt: "The Great Annual MIT Mystery Hunt," from the July 1991 issue of Games Magazine. I also talked about the author of that article, how he had run the Hunt in 1988, and how this year he was on Dr. Awkward, the winning team.

Unfortunately, instead of correctly identifying that person as Eric Albert, I incorrectly identified him as Eric Berlin, a different member of Dr. Awkward. Fearless editor Simon Carless made some quick deletions to preserve my integrity, but since I've known both of these Erics over the past few years, my chagrin goes beyond a mere revision. They are talented puzzlers, and I've enjoyed my time with them both, and I have no excuse for my mental typo other than a lack of sleep.

Second, one week after it was featured in the article on Deadly Rooms of Death, and on the same day that article was noted by the DROD forum, my record for the room in "Halph Has a Bad Day" was beaten. A player with the handle Rabscuttle bested my solution of 48 moves by turning in his own 47-move demo on January 8. The original entry has been modified to reflect this. I wanted to make special mention of it because I discussed the room and the record in particular; I do not intend to make further updates about people being better than me at DROD.

Rabscuttle's accomplishment is appropriate, though. In the article, I also included a screenshot of a room I hold the record for in "King Dugan's Dungeon." The previous record for that room had been held by Rabscuttle, and I had beaten it by a single move.

Finally, not an erratum but an important addendum: there will be an official release of an easy DROD hold called "Smitemastery 101." Intended as a version of DROD suitable for kids, "Smitemastery 101" will likely also be a good opportunity for older puzzle gamers who want a more gentle introduction to the game. It will be released as a Smitemaster's Selection, which means it will available with a CaravelNet subscription for a limited time, and it will be available for individual purchase thereafter.

I am still recovering from the Hunt and preparing for the GameSetWatch synopsis, so Part II of the article should appear shortly. I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

Posted by tablesaw at 7:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

["Beyond Tetris" is a column from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. Today is the beginning of a two-part article on one of the most grueling puzzle marathons available, the MIT Mystery Hunt.]

In 1980, a graduate student at the Masschusetts Institute of Technology named Brad Schaefer hid a valuable coin on the campus of his Boston college and wrote a few devious riddles leading to its location on a sheet of paper. Since then, the IAP Mystery Hunt has grown in size scope and importance; and while the puzzles were once bound on paper, the growing intricacies of the puzzles have turned the game into something increasingly dependent on computers.

Today, the Mystery Hunt has some unusual traditions. Puzzles are distinct, and lead to an answer that is a word or a phrase. Then, all of the answers in a round feed into another puzzle called a metapuzzle. Completing these metapuzzles help a team progress through the Hunt until they can find the location of a "coin," which has recently been anything from a small disk to a snowglobe. And Mystery Hunt puzzles tend to have very unusual twists to them. Something that appears to be a crossword might be something totally different. The unsual text introducing a puzzle (called "flavor text") can hold critical, if abstract, clues. And sometimes, you just need to know the MIT campus.

This article is going to be a little weird. When this Part I goes live, the Hunt will be over. But right now, as I write it, I'm in the headquarters of the team running the Hunt. In 2006, my Hunt team, The Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb at Midnight, won the Hunt and consequently was awarded the duty of running the 2007 Hunt. Since that time, we've been frantically planning the game and writing the puzzles, and now thirty-eight teams and hundreds of players are finding their way through our maze of enigmas.

To maintain secrecy, I cannot reveal much about the meat of the 2007 Hunt at this time, so I'll be writing more about it later this week, when I return from Boston. You can look at the address of the current hunt, but I can't guarantee that there'll be anything there. It could be all of the puzzles from the 2007 Hunt, it could be none of them. But in the meantime, I'm going to talk a bit about Hunts past with an eye, of course, toward videogames

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Posted by tablesaw at 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

["Beyond Tetris" is a column from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. This installment looks at a collection of the best puzzle game of all time: Deadly Rooms of Death.]

This is the story of a puzzle game with the unlikeliest name ever: Deadly Rooms of Death.

You are Beethro Budkin, dungeon exterminator extraordinaire, and you take up one square of a grid. You have a "really big sword," which takes up one of the eight squares of the grid adjacent to you. You are tasked with removing the vermin that has infested the grid-arranged dungeons beneath the castle of King Dugan. Once there, you meet a horde of monsters closing in on you: roaches, spiders, wraithwings (bats), goblins, golems, snakes, and other terrible beasts that defy simple categorization. Your goal is simple: kill everything and move on. You can see it all from overhead, and the whole thing looks a bit like Gauntlet. A garden-variety hack-and-slash is imminent, swinging your sword as quickly as possible while weathering hits from the host that will slowly chip away at your life force.

Except that there is no life bar, the moment a single creature reaches you, you're dead. And, more curiously, the horde isn't attacking. They're just waiting for you to move.

DROD is turn-based. Every turn, you may take one step or rotate your sword one square. Then, all of the monsters can make one move. And their moves are predictable: a roach will always take the most direct route to you, even if that means getting itself stuck behind a wall. A goblin will always avoid your sword and try to attack from behind. A wraithwing will always stay a safe distance away from you, until it can find a friend with which to gang up on you. And they'll all wait while you figure out how best to kill them before they kill you.

The frantic button pushing of Diablo or Gauntlet is gone. The random layouts and capricious behaviors of NetHack are stipped away. All that's left beneath the dungeon-crawl veneer is the most inventive pure puzzle-solving computer game ever written.

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["Beyond Tetris" is a column from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. This installment looks at a collection of eye-bending mindbenders: Heaven and Earth.]

In 1992, the newly reestablished Games Magazine published a puzzle by Scott Kim called Convex Concave. There were several 2-D images of 3-D blocks to be punched out and arranged to form other 2-D images of 3-D blocks. But while the component images were simple, the goal images were complex Escherian monstrosities. But by laying the flat pictures on top of each other in ways that their 3-D representations could never allow, the impossible was created.

The Games puzzle was a promotion for the upcoming game Heaven and Earth, developed (though ironically not published) by Publishing International. The game had three parts: a pendulum toy; a solitaire card game; and The Illusions. The Illusions were designed by Scott Kim and comprised twelve puzzle games, each with forty-eight puzzles in four variations. In keeping with the Buddhist trappings of the game, the puzzles were all meant to challenge the mind by challenging the eye. The Convex Concave puzzle (which was, of course, one of the Illusions) was only the beginning.

Into the Labyrinth

One-third of the Illusions are mazes of different sorts. The most basic is the Antimaze; instead of following a path between lines, you have to send your cursor across the lines. In the Identity Maze, you maneuver multiple cursors simultaneously through the maze. Sometimes the cursors all move in the same directions, sometimes their movements are rotated or flipped; and in order for one cursor to move in a given direction, all of the cursors must be free to move appropriately. Both of these mazes are essentially no different from basic, single-state labyrinths. But in keeping with the theme of illusion, these puzzles recast simple mazes in an unfamiliar presentation. And in some of the more complex wrap-around Identity Maze puzzles, a "simplified" representation of the maze would be much larger than the original puzzle.

The other mazes, Changing Bodies and Gaining Losing, are more complicated. In these you control a fleet of active cursors that move in sync across a field filled with "frozen" cursors. The frozen cursors lie dormant until touched by an active cursor. In Gaining Losing, touching a frozen cursor activates it. By adding cursors in this way (and by skillfully removing cursors using "pits" on the field), you have to make sure that you fleet makes it to the goal in the correct formation. In Changing Bodies, if an active cursor hits one of these frozen squares, its "consciousness" leaps into the new cursor. The frozen cursor becomes an active cursor, and the active cursor becomes an impassable wall. These two puzzles are more than mere illusions; they are far, far more difficult than the other mazes.

Block Parties

The next third of the games involve moving shapes around the screen into the correct positions. The most basic is Sliding Graphics, where Kim has drawn upon the long history of sliding-block puzzles. The new addition for the game is sliding-block puzzles where unconnected blocks must be moved as a unit. Fit Fall has some twists on polyominoes, including infinite blocks and "blocks" made of unconnected cubes. While these variations aren't particularly illusory, they do allow for puzzles impossible for their non-computerized predecessors.

Figure Ground and Regrouping are the more complicated puzzles. Instead of staying discrete, the "blocks" that are moved around in these puzzles tend to merge into each other and become new shapes. In Figure Ground, when a group of similar-colored squares is moved, they uncover squares of a different color. And when two shapes of the same color are put next to each other, they become a single shape. In Regrouping, you manipulate groups of lines on a grid, but the lines you can move depend on the conditions of the round. Sometimes it's squares of a certain size, sometimes it's L shapes. In both of these games, it can be impossible to know how far you are from reaching your goal; the simplest mistake can make success impossible, and it's easy to convince yourself that the correct path won't work.

More than Meets the Eye Ai Ai!

The last four games are unique and extremely hard to explain. One game, Cursor Warping, relies too much on skillful mouse manipulation to fall within the scope of this column, and I've already touched on Concave Convex (which is expanded in the Heaven and Earth). But it would take separate articles to explain both the mechanics and the subtleties of Flip Turn and Multiple Cursors. And those articles will never exist because those games, like most of the other puzzle types from Heaven and Earth haven't been duplicated. They have to be played to be understood. Luckily, both Scott Kim and Ian Gilman (one of the main programmers of the game) encourage you to play the original game.

I've been playing this game, off and on, since it was first released nearly fifteen years ago, and I still haven't finished it. There are puzzles (like some of the more complex Gaining Losing scenarios) that I've never come close to solving, and there are puzzles (like Convex Concave) that I've enjoyed solving over and over and over again. Even if the screenshots in this article don't seem appealing, I suggest you play the game yourself. As you might suspect, looks will be deceiving.

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["Beyond Tetris" is a column from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. This installment looks at a fondly remembered reincarnation of a pencil puzzle: Mario's Picross.]

Computers get into everything, even puzzles that seem more suited to the page. Crosswords, cryptograms, word scrambles, acrostics, and all manner of pencil-and-paper–based have been implemented on computers. Usually, these puzzles only appeal to the kind of people (like me) who are already fans of the static puzzles. But occasionally, a print puzzle makes a flying leap into videogames, and very occasionally, that game can be considered "hardcore." Mario's Picross is one such puzzle game.

Mario's Picross is Nintendo's version of a puzzle that goes by many names. It was independently invented in 1988 by both Non Ishida, who called hers "Window Art Puzzles," and Tetsuya Nishio, who called his "Oekaki-Logic." When James Dalgety brought Ishida's puzzles to the Sunday Telegraph in the United Kingdom in 1990, he renamed them "Nonograms." The Telegraph later changed the name again, to "Griddlers." As other publishers across the world started printing their own versions, more names were born for the same puzzle: Edel, Pic-a-Pix, Tsunami, and others. But when the puzzle was brought to the U.S. (and to me) by Games Magazine, it was called Paint by Numbers.

[Click through for more.]

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["Beyond Tetris" is a new column from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. This second installment looks at a puzzle game that just hit American shelves, Polarium Advance.]

This month, while most gamers are focused on the generation gap, North America will finally see a brilliant puzzle game. Polarium Advance has been brought to America by Atlus, several months after a European release and over a year since the game was first released in Japan as Tsuukin Hitofude. It is a puzzle game spawned in the ashes of a "puzzle" game, and it should be celebrated by all right-thinking lovers of mental challenges.

Behind Tetris

Perhaps you can tell from the title of my column (and from the italicized, square-bracketed introduction to this article, and perhaps even from the obtuse opening paragraph of this article) that I have a bone to pick with Tetris. I agree that it's a fine game, a fun game, a successful game, but it's not really a puzzle game. That is, it's not a game about solving puzzles with careful thought; it's a game of quick reflexes and abstract strategy. But despite my personal semantic quibbles, Tetris defined the "puzzle game" genre, and consequently inspired legions of potential successors.

One such aspirant was Polarium, from the Japanese developer Mitchell. It had simple graphics. It featured falling blocks that had to be cleared in lines. It was even released at the launch of a Nintendo handheld system, the DS. And Polarium was designed to showcase the DS's brand-spanking innovative touchscreen—to clear lines, you had to draw a path over the lines that appeared on the screen.

But the problem with Polarium's "Challenge Mode" was that it was terrible—not merely from a puzzling standpoint, but from a gaming standpoint. The lines that had to be cleared fell in huge screen-clogging chunks, and simple mistakes with the stylus were extremely difficult to correct. Instead of evoking Tetris's exhilarating addiction, Polarium only inspired frustration.

Lucky for Mitchell, they had included a "Puzzle Mode" with Polarium. This was undoubtedly inspired by the similar mode from another top-tier puzzle game, Tetris Attack (or Panel de Pon or Pokemon Puzzle League, etc.). Puzzle Mode was small at only 100 levels (Tetris Attack had 120), but it was definitely a better fit for the line-drawing concpets that Mitchell was introducing.

[Click through for more!]

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["Beyond Tetris" is a new column from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. This first installment looks at one of the most persistent puzzle games, Soko-Ban.]

In 1982, puzzles about moving squares around weren't new. A hundred years previous, the world had been captivated by sliding squares around the 15 puzzle, and Rubik's Cube had just recently brought square-relocation into the third dimension. But the time was ripe for computers to revolutionize pushing of squares from their initial locations to other, different locations (preferably in a minimum number of moves).

Soko-Ban was published by Thinking Rabbit games in 1982, and was released to the West by Spectrum Holobyte in 1984. It featured a titular warehouseman pushing boxes around grid. And it was revolutionary. It moved mechanical puzzles into the virtual world, and established crate-pushing as one of the most fundamental videogame puzzles, a paradigm that continues to this day.

The Warehouse Revolution

It seems odd that an avatar would be such a revolution in videogames, even as early as 1982. But videogames were young and mechanical puzzles were old, and the love child of the two couldn't help but be influential. Soko-Ban's top-down perspective seemed like any other block-slider, but with a "man on the inside," puzzlers had to think in entirely new ways. Extreme foresight is needed to make sure that the warehouseman can get behind every box when he needs to—a box along a wall will stay along that wall until the end of the game. And since these massive crates are apt to completely block off key passages, it is disturbingly easy to trap oneself behind a line of boxes. The real puzzle is getting the warehouseman around the labyrinthine storage space, pushing around the crates is simple after that.

The videogame is enables another important rule: the warehouseman can only push one block at a time. Remember that in sliding puzzles, like the 15 puzzle, you can move any number of squares at the same time, as long as they're not blocked by a wall. A square can't be movable from one position and then immovable from another. But the computer can keep track of changes like that, and two blocks forming an immovable deadlock was a novel twist that was much easier to keep track of in a virtual space.

When you consider all of these blocked passages and impossible-to-move boxes, the generally small puzzle grid starts to unfold into a massive maze of possibilities. The first level of Soko-Ban (shown above) takes over two hundred moves to complete. Others of Soko-Ban's original fifty levels take more than a thousand.

Attack of the Soko-Fans (Also, Clones)

The level editor was another key feature of Soko-Ban, and dedicated players have been using it ever since. Many of Thinking Rabbit's sequels to Soko-Ban (Sokoban Perfect and Sokoban Revenge for PCs; Boxxle and Boxxle II for the Gameboy; and even a few releases on consoles like the Playstation) have featured levels designed by fans. Today, excellent amateur designers like David W. Skinner make their creations available over the internet.

Like most puzzle games with simple rules and low graphical demands, Soko-Ban has been cloned over and over and over again. One webpage has listed over eighty different implementations of Sokoban, which has become the name of the generic puzzle. Some of these programs, like SokoSave are designed to aid in the sharing of Sokoban levels and solutions. But many of the clones aren't just Sokoban, they're Soko-Ban with different skins. While it's considered questionable but generally kosher to clone a game mechanic, the level design is a different matter, and a number of these clones take Thinking Rabbit's original fifty levels with neither permission nor attribution.

The Sokoban community has gone beyond designing new levels to design new variants. David W. Skinner also created Hexoban, which is Sokoban on a hexagonal field. Trioban (Sokoban on a triangular field, where triangular boxes are pivoted instead of outright pushed) came from François Marques. And then there's Malcolm Tyrell's Multiban, in which the lonely avatar has finally hired some more warehousemen to help move the boxes. Other games like Cyberbox and Block-O-Mania add gimmick blocks and grid spaces (one-way spaces, teleporters, etc.) to create new challenges.

Crates to Seconds

Even beyond the clones and variants, Soko-Ban inspired a number of item-pushing puzzle games. In 1985, the Eggerland series (known in America as The Adventures of Lolo and its sequels) began using crate-pushing as the core of its puzzles, which also involved collecting items and dealing with enemies. Even action games have incorporated Sokoban. Link invariably has to push crates into position somewhere in each Legend of Zelda game (The Wind Waker even featured an elementary Trioban segment). And the action-packed roguelike NetHack sports a Sokoban sidequest.

In today's more immersive games, crates aren't just for pushing; they're for pulling and climbing and smashing and gravity-gunning. In the mainstream, crate-pushing has become cliché. But that's only because the crates of first-person shooters and adventure games don't get pushed around enough. Action-game blocks are usually present only as an annoyance for a few minutes, but a difficult, well-designed Sokoban level can take hours of work over the course of days. It's far more frustrating, but on the other hand, it's far more rewarding to finish a level and know that you're done, not just moving on to better-designed parts of the game.

[Tony Delgado is a member of the National Puzzlers' League, and a solver and creater of puzzles of all sorts. He also works as the Copy Chief of The Gamer's Quarter.]

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