A long, long time ago, I got sick and tired of people asking me “Hey, Angry, how do I do traps right?” and I wrote an article entitled Traps Suck which explained the major issues with the implementation of traps in most table-top, fantasy role-playing games and then offered a grab bag of advice for doing traps that didn’t suck quite so bad. After that, I still got lots of questions about how to do traps right. But instead of just ignoring them, I was able to shoot back “Read this article, dumba$&, that’s why I wrote it!” and then ignore them. So, I call that a partial success.

And that illustrates one of the two best ways to get me to answer a question. You can submit your question and hope that I find it interesting enough to answer in my NEWLY REVIVED weekly advice column, Ask Angry. But that’s hard. I get a LOT of questions and most people ask boring, stupid questions and I don’t like spending time answering boring, stupid questions. And, statistically speaking, it’s very likely your question is boring and stupid because you’re not me and therefore very unlikely to be an interesting genius. So, that leaves you with the other way to get me to answer a question. You can ask the same question as a thousand other people until I get so sick of the question that I decide to put the matter to bed and slap together a quick, ranty article.

Speaking of questions I have been asked a thousand f$&%ing times and am totally sick of, let’s talk about why puzzles in table-top RPGs suck and what to do about that.

Puzzles Suck, But Not for the Reason You Think

Whenever anyone broaches the topic of puzzles in fantasy, table-top role-playing games, a bunch of mouth breathing gamer morons will instantly appear to spew mental diarrhea all over the conversation in the form of “conventional wisdom”. Seriously. If you’re ever stranded on a desert island, just say aloud “I am trying to design a good puzzle for my dungeon adventure” and wait. In a moment, a dozen morons will appear and start screaming about how “puzzles are terrible” or how “you have to challenge the characters, not the players”. You can then bash them over the heads with coconuts, lash the bodies together with jungle vines, and then sail that macabre raft back to civilization.

A lot of GMs will readily admit that puzzles are terrible. And they will explain that most puzzles involve most of the players sitting around watching the one interested person solve a sudoku puzzle or play minesweeper and gradually growing more bored until the barbarian starts throwing open doors and trying to draw all of the encounters in the dungeon to the party’s location just for something to do. And that’s assuming the players aren’t just gormlessly sitting around struggling to solve the puzzle in the first place. And those GMs, applying all two of their brain cells, reach the conclusion that the problem with such puzzles is that they rely on the players to solve them. The players should solve the puzzles. Hell, Dungeon Magazine even briefly tried to sell that bulls$&% back when it was still printed on paper and delivered by a mailman to my home.

Now, here is the thing, those scenes CAN suck. They DO suck. But the conclusion is wrong. And stupid.

There are two kinds of players in the world. Well, there are lots of kinds of players in the world. But, for the purposes of this discussion, all of the players in the world can be broken into two groups based on a single relevant criterion: whether they enjoy solving puzzles or not.

Players who enjoy solving puzzles like having their brains challenged. I’m one of them. When I’m a player. But I’m too clever and creative and witty to be a player. Also, I’m too handsome. They like to stop for a moment and try to work out a complex puzzle lock or rune lock or solve the sphinx’s riddle or whatever. Which is great. Because that s$&% is a staple of fantasy. Frodo Baggins riddled with Gollum. Dumbledore solved the puzzle lock on the door to the Mines of Moria. Perseus solved the riddle of the Sphinx before his daughter cut out his eyes. Indiana Jones figured out that the shadow of the Independence Hall clock would lead them to King Solomon’s Mine. Nicholas Cage figured out that X marked the spot and found the teleporter from the Venetian library to the Roman Catacombs. And so on.

Generally speaking, it’s rare for a group to include more than one or two players who actually like puzzles. And GMs make a lot of that issue. But, come the f$&% on, that’s not a new problem. Think about all the aspects of D&D and the players who like and hate them. Does everyone enjoy long, drawn-out social interaction scenes? Does everyone love combat equally? No. Of course not. GMing has always been about giving everyone a chance to enjoy their favorite elements of the game while the rest of the party selflessly goes along with it without being a bunch of d$&%s and waits for their favorite element to show up. That’s part of the group experience. Unless your players are a bunch of selfish d$&%nozzles.

The idea that the party has to sit around for the five to ten minutes it takes for the one or two players to have a good time once out of every second or third four-hour session is making a f$&%ing mountain out of a cow pie.

Meanwhile, the players who don’t like puzzles? They don’t like puzzles. They have no interest in solving them. They really don’t. They roll their eyes when the door is covered with a five-by-five grid of color-coded, runic tiles. “Oh, damn, it’s a puzzle. All right, Alice, Bob, you handle this. I’m going to take a s$&%.”. And when I have a player that says that, I immediately slap the s$&% out of them. “You know,” I remind them, “Alice and Bob didn’t belittle you, roll their eyes, and leave the table when you insisted on spending fifteen minutes on your bardic lute solo scene, so you just shut the f$&% up and sit the f$&% down and act like a goddamned adult if you want to play this game with these people.”. If I get lucky, that player gets so apoplectic that I dared to call them on their selfishness that they leave forever.

The idea of creating puzzles solved by the characters – that is, puzzles that are solved by players saying “I solve the puzzle” and the GM saying “make an Arcana check” and the player saying “18” and the GM saying “you solved it” – the idea of creating puzzles solved by the characters DOES NOTHING FOR EITHER TYPE OF PLAYER. Players who like solving puzzles will feel cheated. Players who don’t like solving puzzles won’t really care because they could have spent the same die roll using their Arcana skill to disable a magical runelock. Just as satisfying.

Am I saying there shouldn’t be situations that involve the players using their skills to overcome obstacles in the game world? OF COURSE NOT. That’s literally what the game mostly is. But you need to recognize that that puzzle is not satisfying as a puzzle. In fact, it’s not even satisfying as role-playing. It’s basically just “make this skill check to proceed,” which is basically “press A to continue” except with a random chance that pressing “A” will kick you back to the last checkpoint because you failed.

Here’s the point: before you start talking about puzzles in your game and how to design them, make sure you know why you’re doing it. If you’re doing it because you like creating puzzles, neat, but you sure as hell had better make sure you’ve got a couple of players who will want to engage with them. If you’re doing it because you have some players who genuinely like solving puzzles and you want to give them a few minutes to shine just like you give the barbarian player a horde of weak goblins to cut through and give the rogue traps to disarm and give the rest of the players damage for the cleric to heal, great! That’s a good reason. If you’re doing it because you feel obligated to, don’t.

For the rest of this article, I’m not talking about puzzles that can be solved with a single die roll and the right skill. I’m not talking about puzzles that amount to Intelligence checks. And if you think that crap counts as a puzzle, get lost. Don’t comment. Don’t argue. Just go away. You’re wrong and you have nothing useful to contribute. And if your entire group hates puzzles and so you’ve stopped including them in your game, I don’t need to hear that either. Congratulations, you have enough functioning brain cells not to run a game your players don’t hate. You’ve hit the lowest bar possible. Don’t brag in my comment section about it.

No, we’re talking about puzzles that the players actually have to think about. That they have to solve. And how to do them right.

Puzzles Suck

Here’s the thing: puzzles suck. In table-top role-playing games, puzzles almost always suck. Even if you like them, they usually suck. And there’s a good reason for that. Two good reasons actually. And it has to do with all of the various ways we encounter puzzles in various media.

We should probably start by agreeing on some sort of definition of “puzzle.” A puzzle is basically just a test of cleverness or ingenuity. There is a goal that must be achieved or a question that must be answered, and the way to achieve the goal, or answer the question, isn’t obvious. Most puzzles involve some degree of logical deduction. Though some involve recognizing a trick, deception, or obfuscation. Some puzzles involve different subsets of intelligence, like spatial reasoning, pattern recognition, verbal skills, or mathematical skills.

That sounds fine, right? And if you read that description above and think “that sounds fun, I like doing stuff like that,” you like puzzles. If you roll your eyes and say, “that’s why puzzles are terrible,” you actually don’t like puzzles. Probably for the same reason that weak, uncoordinated people don’t like doing sports. But I won’t speculate about your intellect.

But here’s the thing: most puzzles are contrived. That is, they are specifically designed as little games or tests of cleverness. And so, they put constraints around themselves. Hell, most puzzles are constrained merely in the way they are presented. Sudoku puzzles and Jumbles are very constrained. There are tight rules about how you can and can’t solve them. Why does that matter? Well, consider one of the most classic fantasy puzzle formats, the “knights and knaves” format. In such puzzles, you are presented with two or more characters and told that some number of them always tell the truth and some number of them always lie. You are then presented with a specific piece of information you need to obtain and asked to determine what one question you could ask of any member of the group to get the information. You know, this old gem:

Yonder see thou a pair of doors. Verily does one lead thee unto certain death whereas the other shall lead thee to riches untold. Behold my two twin guardians, identical in every way save for one. One speaks only truth while only falsehoods fall from the other’s lips. Which is which, I cannot say. Choose but one and pose one singular missive and, from the answer, choose a door and discover whether they fate is riches or death.

Classic, right? The sort of thing you find in a book of logic puzzles. But let me ask you a question. What would you do if it were real life? Would it look something like this?

In case you can’t watch that, a warrior encounters two gargoyles, one who always lies and the other who always tells the truth. He kills one and the other immediately starts saying things like “holy crap, you totally DIDN’T just kill that guy” and “please, hurt me, because I want to die, I’m begging you to not spare my life!”

Most puzzles – that is to say traditional puzzles – involve constraints on what the player can do. Text-based puzzles provide a specific question to answer. Even video game puzzles, like the brilliant puzzles in various Lucas Arts adventure games of the 90’s and the sucky puzzles in every adventure game ever published since, including those by that Tom Schafer hack, rely on constraints. You can only use one object or verb on a given thing, for example. And you can only use the commands the game provides.

Table-top role-playing games offer exactly the opposite experience. They are, by their nature, open-ended. In order to make puzzles like those gargoyles work, you have to add a lot of constraints to prevent the players from just killing the gargoyles and seeing what happesakens next. Or just walking away. Or casting a spell that invalidates the whole puzzle. I mean, just check out my own Infamous Riddle Contest and Solution I ran a few years ago. The whole thing was designed to f$&% with people who – like me – enjoy solving puzzles in games. And it needed a lot of rules and contrivances to make it work.

Now, the thing is, most players who LIKE puzzles will go along with the contrivances. They enjoy solving the puzzles, so they suspend their disbelief and accept that crap. And smart GMs who are designing puzzles for puzzle fans also suspend their disbelief so they can just create fun puzzles. But the players who don’t like puzzles aren’t willing to suspend their disbelief and will start to f$&% with the puzzle. And clueless GMs who are afraid of players f$&%ing with the puzzle will run themselves in circles trying to protect the puzzle from being f$&%ed with. And the GMs who don’t really like puzzles at all look at all of this crap and say “why should I even bother; puzzles suck.”.

But there’s a second problem with puzzles. And that problem is with context. It’s the problem that people refer to as the “solve the soup cans” problem after the classic PC adventure game “The 7th Guest” or the “pull lever” problem after the classic PC adventure game “Myst”. Those games were basically about navigating from puzzle to puzzle and then solving those puzzles. But the puzzles themselves made barely any sense in the game world. Why, for f$&%’s sake, would you ever have to rearrange soup cans in a haunted house to spell a particular word? Why would ghosts care? And who the f$&% decided that the best way to construct an underground tram was to build a maze of passages, most of which were deadly, but some of which were safe and then use obscure sound codes to reveal the safe path? Yes, I understand it’s a security arrangement. But it’s a terrible security arrangement. I mean, why not use a f$&%ing padlock? Or keys. A set of keys – the things we use now to prevent unauthorized use of our vehicles – would also prevent anyone from using your underground tram. Hell, it’d prevent more people. The problem with puzzles as security measures is that they are basically saying “I’m willing to be robbed by anyone who could do really well on an I.Q. test” instead of the more sensible “I’d like not to be robbed by anyone, thank you.” And the whole excuse that the puzzle is actually just meant to be a lock, but that the owner wanted to make sure he could get through the puzzle without having to remember the solution so he designed a lock he knew he could solve? That’s exactly the same stupid security as writing down your password on a sticky note next to your computer. Except it requires infinitely more complexity and expense. Do you know how expensive it was to have a lettered combination lock built in medieval Europe?

Again: padlock and keys.

So, puzzles have to be contrived if they are going to work. And that poses problems in an open-ended table-top roleplaying game. Unless the players and the GM are willing to buy-in to the whole puzzle thing, it feels contrived and stupid. And most of the GMs who ask me “how do I design good puzzles that don’t feel contrived and stupid” are really just not willing to allow some contrivance in their games for the sake of making a couple of their players happy. And those same GMs also have a lot of trouble with fitting puzzles into the world that don’t feel like arbitrarily stupid security or tests of worthiness or whatever.

In short, without the players and the GM willing to accept that puzzles are places that are more gamey than role-playey – like dungeons and combats – puzzles just don’t fit well into the open-ended world of table-top role-playing games.

Problem identified. Now, how do you make puzzles not suck?

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

Let’s suppose you just want to include standard puzzles of the sort I’ve discussed above. You want “knights and knaves” or “Mastermind” or riddles or those logic puzzles where four adventures of four different classes each discover a different treasure in the dungeon and you have to deduce everyone’s class and treasure from clues like “neither Artania nor the person who found the bag of holding are proficient in heavy armor.” But you’re concerned that they are contrived and that the players will take them apart if you don’t build a whole bunch of limits around them. What do you do to unsuck your favorite soup can or pull lever puzzle?

Well, nothing. You just don’t sweat it. Like I said, if you have the buy-in and the players who like puzzles have the buy-in and you’re willing to let those players have a turn at the fun just like everyone else, you just make the puzzle, shove it in with an excuse, and let suspension of disbelief do the rest of the work. The players who LIKE puzzles will recognize the puzzle and they will want to solve it. The rest of the players should shut their gobs for ten minutes and wait for the next brainless combat. And if they aren’t, call them out on that s$&%.

What if the players break the puzzle with clever use of spells or out-of-the-box thinking? Well, assuming the player isn’t doing it to be malicious and steal the fun from the puzzle-solvers, you let them. So, what? They solved the puzzle using a different solution than the one you intended. Do you want to test their ingenuity, or do you want to test their ability to regurgitate a solution at you? It’s fine. Breaking the puzzle with cleverness is just another term for “solving the puzzle.”

GMs live in constant terror of players “ruining” their encounters and obstacles and challenges by finding ways to “break” them. “What if the players cast sleep on all of the goblins?” I’ll tell you what: they will high-five the wizard and be happy they found a better way to beat the goblins than the combat you planned. Yes, the combat you planned is gone. Sorry. Them’s the breaks of being a GM. What are you mad about anyway? Aren’t the players supposed to win? Or are they only allowed to win after you’ve knocked them around enough to make them earn it? Does it bother you that the players outsmarted you because they thought of something you didn’t? There’s no room behind the GM screen for a sore loser. Because the GM ALWAYS LOSES!

So, that’s my first piece of advice. If you want to drop your favorite puzzle or riddle into D&D and you know some players will enjoy it, just drop it in. The players will generally accept the constraints because it’s just part of the genre expectation. They usually don’t even notice they are constraining themselves. That’s part of why my Infamous Riddle Contest frustrated so many people. Because people played by what they saw as the rules. That’s what you do.

Just chill the f$&% out.

Non-Optional Puzzles and Forever Puzzles

One of the biggest issues with puzzles, in general, is that there is no way to gauge the difficulty of a puzzle. I mean, it’s kind of a lie that you can gauge the difficulty of a combat beyond a very vague, general measure. But it’s a lie we pretend to believe. Or really believe, if we’re dumb. Whether the party can solve a proper puzzle is reliant entirely on the player’s abilities to figure s$&% out. Or mostly. That means that puzzles are very unpredictable. You never know whether the party can solve them at all, let alone how long it might take them to work it out. And that leads to some interesting problems that you have to design around.

First, if the success or failure of the entire adventure hinges on a puzzle – that is, the puzzle is non-optional – you’re taking a big chance. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that, by the way. I know most people will say “just never do that,” but those people are f$&%wits. If the final scene in the adventure – the climax – is about arranging the magical keys in the proper order to close the portal before it allows Shrub Niggurath to emerge from the Forest Realm of Noneuclidia, then it’s fine for success or failure to hinge on that puzzle. The whole adventure has built up to that moment. It’s no different than the adventure about defeating the dragon to come down to the fight with the dragon. In fact, if the players can’t solve the puzzle in time, they will generally chalk it up to their own failure and they will feel like they got exactly what they earned.

Unless they hate puzzles. If you have a group of people who all hate puzzles – or a group that has only one person who likes puzzles – there’s a chance that they WILL feel like that’s a sucky, unfair ending. Of course, these are the same idiots who will be fine if the fight with the dragon comes down to one last attack roll and the player misses on the attack and the party ends up imprisoned or dead and the village is destroyed. But that’s life. And you can’t make players behave differently.

So, non-optional puzzles should be used with care and placed with care. Don’t place a puzzle on the only door to the dungeon unless you really want to risk not running an entire adventure if the party just can’t handle your acrostic.

Likewise, you have to be careful about the Forever Puzzle. The puzzle is the one that the party tries to solve forever. They can’t get it, but they won’t give up. See, one of the most important things about failure in RPGs – any failure – is that the players will never admit defeat as long as they are allowed to keep trying. If they fail to pick a lock, for example, they will keep rolling checks as long as you let them. Or try to break down the door. They will not accept that a door is beyond them. Unless you force them to accept it. And even then, they will keep trying.

GM: The lock is too complex to pick and the door is too strong to bash down. You’ve all tried.
Alice: Is there something we can use as a prybar? Does anyone have any oil, flint, and steel? Is the door flammable?

Many GMs design puzzles with no failure state and no consequences for failure. So, the players will sit there for hours. And because most GMs don’t bother with things like random encounters, they can sit in front of a puzzle lock unmolested for the entire session. And that’s what leads to the problem that I mentioned above where the players who aren’t engaged with the puzzle get bored and annoyed. Conversations and combats come to end, win or lose, but puzzles are there forever.

You need to treat your puzzles a bit like a website login page. Fail, and you get locked out. The puzzle breaks itself. Or it electrocutes someone. Or sounds an alarm. Something to make failure obvious and costly. If it hurts the party, they can keep choosing to pay the cost as long as they keep fiddling with the puzzle. But even that can be risky. The cost of failure should ramp up over time.

Long story short, you have to consider what happens when the party CAN’T solve the puzzle. What’s at stake? Is the entire adventure at stake? Some optional treasure? Useful information? A helpful shortcut? And how will the party know when they have failed for good? How will you encourage them to walk away from failure? How will you keep them from simply rubbing every item in their inventory on the puzzle until one of them solves it?

Floundering and Flailing

Now, suppose the party really is floundering. They are trying to solve the puzzle and they are dedicated to it, and they engaged, but they just aren’t getting anywhere. They are barking up the wrong tree. Or they can’t even find any trees to bark up. Can you help them?

This is a hotly contested topic amongst GMs who like arguing and being right more than they care about running games or not being stupid. And even smart GMs argue about this from time to time. And their arguments usually boil down to statements like “well, what about players playing characters smarter than themselves” and “you should be challenging the characters, not the players” and “that’s why I don’t use puzzles in my game; puzzles suck.” Those arguments are all a load of crap.

You have to decide whether you want to offer the party clues or let them succeed or fail on your own. There’s no moral judgment, no objective argument, no criteria on which to base the decision. It’s all a matter of personal style. And once you’ve decided that you will help a struggling party, you have to decide when and how to help. Will you only help if they ask? Will you only help after they get started and start floundering? Will you offer them clues right from the get-go?

Whatever you decide, you have to prepare some clues in advance. And if you need help figuring out how to build clues, I encourage you to look at the Universal Hint System entry for your favorite game and see how they do it. Because UHS is f$&%ing brilliant. Well, some of them are brilliant. I suggest you check out the ones for old adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island. In fact, let me give you an example.

In the Secret of Monkey Island, the player encounters a troll guarding a bridge at one point. The troll demands a toll. The solution is to interrogate the troll until he explains he wants something that looks important but has no real value. The solution is to give the troll a red herring you found on the fishing dock in town. Now, let’s say you’re stuck at the troll. You go to the UHS page and find the section called “how do I get past the troll.” And the first thing it says is “have you tried talking to it?” So, you realize you didn’t think of that, talk to the troll, and maybe that’s the only cue you needed. But maybe that clue isn’t enough. You can click again and get another hint. It says, “you should ask him what he wants as a toll.” Maybe you did that. You click again, and it says, “he wants something of perceived importance with no real value.” Okay, fine. You got that. Click, “in other words, he wants something blatant yet misleading.” Still no help? Fine. Click. “is there a literary device in games and books that refers to something like that?” Keep clicking and eventually it tells you that it’s called a red herring. Which is a type of fish. Which you might find on a fishing dock. Which is right behind the bar in town. Just give the troll the fish.

The clues ramp up in how much they reveal. The early clues simply make sure the player understands the puzzle and the constraints and has exhausted their options to gain information. Later clues try to help guide the player’s thinking in the right direction. And later clues just outright give the answer.

THAT is how you design clues for a puzzle THAT is also how you design clues in a mystery adventure.

What you have to decide, though, is how far along that progression you want to go. Should you just hand the players the answer if they plow through all the clues? Or should you stop at guiding their thinking? Or should you stop at just making sure they have all the information? And that choice should be based on two things: how important is it for the players to feel like they solved the puzzle themselves and how optional is the puzzle. If the players love solving puzzles and want to feel like they solved it themselves, giving them too many layers of clues will actually turn into a form of railroading because it amounts to not allowing the players to fail. And it will also condescend to players who like solving puzzles. Many people who like to solve puzzles would rather fail on their own than succeed with too many clues. On the other hand, the more important a puzzle is to the success or failure of the entire adventure, the more layers of clues you might want to have available.

As to how you hand out those clues, well, the tendency is to gate them behind Intelligence checks. This is the famous mechanic called the “get a clue” roll. There’s a logical fallacy with that approach though. As much as it feels mechanically sound, the thing is that you’ve based the availability of clues based on how much the players WANT and NEED them, right? That’s what that last paragraph was about. So if you are making clues available based on WANTS and NEEDS, why the hell would you gate them behind random die rolls. “This situation is so important and the party is so desperate, I’d better be prepared to give them help to avoid frustration and a ruined adventure… IF THEY CAN ROLL AN EIGHTEEN! HAHAHAHA!!!!”

That’s f$&%ed up, isn’t it?

Me, I tend to stick to clues along the lines of “ensuring the players understand the puzzle” and “gently guiding their thinking.” After I create my clues, I try to connect them to skills the party has. A clue that guides the players’ thinking to ignore the runes themselves and focus only on the colors of those runes might be tied to Arcana, for example. A clue that suggests that Sphinxes love puns and double-meanings might be tied to Nature or History or Bardic Lore or some s$&%. I tend to give the first layer of clues out the moment the party encounters the puzzle and I always frame them as “because of your training with magical locks thanks to your Arcana skill, you can figure out that you have to press a certain sequence of colored rune tiles in a proper order and that you probably won’t have to press all of the tiles nor will have you press any tile more than once.” The rest of the clues sit quietly and wait until the players start asking questions about the puzzle. “Do these runes actually mean anything?” “Yes, but they seem to be gibberish. Based on your magical training, you’d guess that it’s the colors that are important and the runes are just decorative. Or designed to throw people off the puzzle.”

Notice first that I do hand out the first layer of clues right away. That layer – the ensuring the players understand the puzzles constraints – is generally not needed. It really only works as a clarification. So, there’s no harm in handing it out early. The second layer only starts showing up when the players start asking for help. And if they ask for help, I will give them a clue, even if it’s not directly related to their question. “Do sphinxes worship any particular gods? Is she looking for the name of a god?” “No, you don’t recall anything about sphinxes worshipping particular gods. But, now that you think about it, you remember from some story you read once that sphinxes do focus a lot on food. They are always hungry. Maybe food is involved somehow?” You can always swerve from a question to a clue.

Notice also that I don’t require die rolls. Because, as I said, since I’ve made the choice to offer clues based on the party’s WANTS and NEEDS, hiding them behind a lottery is a pretty f$&%ed up thing to do. I just call out people who have particular skills and explain that their particular skill grants them a tidbit of information. “No, the colors aren’t really associated with particular schools of magic. But, Bob, being trained as a painter, might start to suspect something odd about the layout of primary and secondary colors. That is, colors that can be mixed to form other colors.”

And that’s what I do. Two layers of clues. Always tied to skills or abilities, but never rolled. The first layer is handed out when the party encounters the puzzle as part of setting up the puzzle. The second layer stays up my sleeve until a player starts asking questions.

But you’ll have to find your own way.

Still Hate Puzzles?

Honestly, except for actually trying to teach people how to BUILD puzzles like Jumbles and Sudoku Puzzles and Knights and Knaves Puzzles and Logical Deduction Puzzles – and I doubt anyone wants that crap – except for nuts and bolts puzzle building, I really don’t have a lot of advice for unsucking puzzles. The problem is, puzzles have a niche appeal. They are either something players like or dislike. And they are always constrained and contrived and require a lot of buy-in and willing disbelief suspension. Simply put, if you’re not already inclined to like puzzles for what they are and enjoy their flaws, you probably don’t want them in your game. Nothing I’ve said here will make you like puzzles if you hate them.

But if you DO still hate puzzles, but you LIKE players figuring s$&% out, may I suggest that there is another way? Allow me to explain the difference between Solving Puzzles and Solving P…

Oh, s$&%. This article has gone on far too long. I guess I’ll have to finish this in another article. Sorry about that. Meanwhile, maybe you can figure out what I was about to say.