I keep a couple of sketchbooks for my illustrations, poems, songs and puzzle ideas. This works well for everything except puzzle ideas. Puzzle ideas in my sketchbooks are rarely revisited. So I've decided to start archiving them here so I can easily access them later. Yes, I'm aware that this means others can access them. That's fine. If you see a puzzle idea here (or any idea here) and want to use it, feel free. This is an open source blog. :)
Okay, here's a good example. Apparently I had a puzzle idea last June that was so awesome I had to jot it down. Nearly a year later I have no idea what I was trying to communicate. If you can make any sense of this, please write this awesome puzzle!
At least with this one, despite having no supporting text to describe puzzle mechanics, I know what I was trying to get across. This would be an installation puzzle that would look like a campfire. It would use the popular illusion of fire created with strips of silk fabric, blown by a fan, lit be colored lamps. In this case, the campfire is haunted so the strips would have hobo symbols on them or something. I think the idea here is interaction. You could have sensors that trigger the lights and the fans. People would need to 'solve' how to activate the fire before 'solving' the fire itself. It's kind of a neat idea but I doubt I'll ever use it.
However, this idea for a puzzle mechanic is really cool and I really like it. I was watching a show on the Discovery Channel called "Weird or What?" and they were talking about the Voynich Manuscript and how easy it would be to create as a hoax by using a system that creates semi-random words and letter orderings. To achieve it you would draw your symbols/syllables out on a large grid and then move a "grill" with randomly cut holes in it to create words. Leaving blanks on the grid creates words of different lengths and adds spaces. The puzzle idea would be sort of the opposite. You'd first solve a puzzle on where to cut the holes in your grill. That initial puzzle could be built into the larger grid. Then you'd position your grill over the grid to pick out solve coding. Coding could be in letter or images or a mix. How about this: Teams get the grill and a large grid, the grill has letters and images on it that match a location on the grid, when placed on that location on the grid, the surrounding letters and images on the grid would tell the teams where to cut the holes in their grill, they'd then have to figure out how to navigate the grid with the grill for the rest of the solve. As I mentioned in the drawing, there is a lot of opportunity for solve layering with this mechanic.So, yeah, I'm not good at writing the puzzle part of the puzzle but I think I have some pretty good ideas for puzzle mechanics that puzzlier people than myself could really run with.
