Lone Shark Games presents a new hardback collection of 400 full-color puzzles from its 20 years of puzzlehunts, plus an all-new collection of cryptic puzzles, a new variety crossword book, a poster map, and more!
This is a second-chance campaign for Lone Shark Games' new puzzle books The Hunting of the Shark, Mindspaces, and the Puzzlevania Map, which are in production now. It's your last opportunity to pledge for all our best puzzles! Plus, we've got an all-new cryptic puzzle PDF called The 12 Days of Cryptics, which cryptic fanatics will enjoy. See below for all the details!
For two decades, Lone Shark Games has been the go-to company for puzzlehunts across the country. We've run a couple hundred convention events, game launches, community events, escape rooms, and ARGs, all packed with puzzles by some of the world's finest puzzle creators. Now, we've put them all in a book.
We're putting hundreds of puzzles, many in full hunt form, into a full-color, 304-page hardcover coffee table book. There are more than 400 puzzles in The Hunting of the Shark: Twenty Years of Lone Shark Puzzlehunts, some of types you may have never seen. This collector's edition is one of the largest puzzle troves ever released, and we're excited to share it with you.
The Hunting of the Shark is only available in this printing. After we collect all the pledges, we'll print this once. That's it. We'll keep the remaining copies for our web store and conventions, but it won't be sent to distribution. If you want more than 400 of our coolest puzzles in a full-color hardcover book, pick it up here.
The title refers to a work by our patron saint, Lewis Carroll. His classic The Hunting of the Snarkis one of the most enigmatic tales ever written. Carroll was a puzzle master as well as an epic storyteller. Like Carroll's puzzles, ours have deeply woven stories and a wild sense of humor.
Pages from The Hunting of the Shark. Image not final.
Herein you'll find puzzlehunts such as our long-running Gen Con Puzzle Hunt, the escape room-style cases from Planet Word's Lexicon Lane, the JoCo Cruise's weeklong "escape boat," alternate reality games like Citizens of Virtue, Cards Against Humanity's island giveaway, our live manhunts like Vanish, community and charity events such as the Duck Hunt and The Hunt for Odin's Horse, and our videogame launch events. We thrust you into these environments, giving you an immersive taste of what it was like to be there.
You can get all this in digital form, made of the finest pixels on Earth, at the Sharkhunter (Digital) level, or in physical form, as a full-color hardback book printed on woodfree paper, at the Sharkhunter (Physical) level. As with every other book in this campaign, each physical book comes with a PDF version too. The Hunting of the Shark is included in The New Sharks level or All the Sharks level as well. If you'd like a preview, download The Sampling of the Shark here.
The 12 Days of Cryptics is an all-new-for-this-campaign collection of a dozen variety cryptic puzzles (some cryptic crosswords, some cryptic... other things). The PDFs will be given to you at this year's Christmas holidays, with a few side treks to Hanukkah and New Years along the way.
If you're not familiar with cryptic puzzles, they are esteemed among crossword fans as the best kinds of crossword puzzles ever invented. They are often known as "British crosswords," though they have a distinctly American feel thanks to (of all people) Stephen Sondheim and his puzzly friends. In these puzzles, you'll see all sorts of word games, such as anagrams, homophones, and much more. Every puzzle in The 12 Days of Cryptics has a bizarre holiday theme that will puzzle you aplenty.
A variety cryptic looks like this sampler puzzle from the project.
This extravaganza comes only in digital form. You'll receive a dozen puzzles, one puzzle per day, starting in December 2025. You can download the 12 Days Sampler here.
You can get the puzzles at our Yule Shark level, or have them wrapped into The New Sharks level or All the Sharks level as well.
Mindspaces is Lone Shark's new crossword variant book. This 160-page book contains 111 "marching bands" puzzles. A marching bands is a type of crossword where one set of words goes across two words per row, and another set of words goes spinning in four different directions—right, left, down, and up. They're normally 13x13, but in this book they get a lot bigger, with some being as large as 23x23 (still two words per row, though!).
Here's a sample 7x7 puzzle from the book, with instructions going around the outside.
Mindspaces is also a book about creativity. It contains little crossword-embedded essays about how to create when your brain doesn't let you. It's a fun, helpful read that goes along with some great puzzles.
Check out Mindspaces in digital and physical form at our Space Shark levels, or as part of The New Sharks level or All the Sharks level.
While The Hunting of the Shark is big, some puzzles are TOO big to fit inside it. We've turned the entire 2009 Gen Con Puzzle Hunt into the Puzzlevania Map, a 20"x30" poster of puzzlement. It's a mammoth optimization puzzle, similar to The Maze of Games's Maze Map. We brought back the same design team as the Maze Map, spearheaded by puzzle designer Eric Harshbarger and artist Corey Macourek, to make you another giant poster map. This time, you'll try to find the crown jewels in the town of Qwerty, capital of the quizzical nation of Puzzlevania. Here's Corey's teaser image that shows you both how puzzling and how ADORABLE this map will be.
Puzzlevania Poster Map folded. Image not final.
The map will be double-sided and will contain a cut-out crown so that you can become the monarch of Puzzlevania!
You can get the Puzzlevania Map as an add-on or at The New Sharks level and the All the Sharks level.
Chums is a new puzzle site developed just for our fans. It's where we'll put a monthly series of puzzles — some mini-hunts, others just random weirdness to puzzle through.
We've planned for a download site and an answer checker. We'll add features as we think of them. You'll get puzzles from our Gen Con Puzzle Hunts and many other hunts. Each month after the site launch, we'll add a minimum of ten monthly puzzles to the site. Our plan is to charge a $5/month for access, but everyone who backs the project at any pledge level with a digital or physical copy of The Hunting of the Shark will get the first 12 months included with their pledge. Thank you to all our chums!
Over the last 20 years, we've made a lot of puzzlehunts — but not just puzzlehunts! There are lots more puzzles and games of all kinds in this campaign!
The Maze of Games is our interactive puzzle novel, a thrilling Victorian tale where the pages are in the wrong order and you have to solve the puzzles to put the book back together. The Maze of Games also comes with the bonus chapbook The Theseus Guide to the Final Maze, the aforementioned 20"x30" Maze Map, and the hand-annotated answer book The Keymaster's Tome. There are also two audiobooks narrated by Wil Wheaton and a soundtrack by Austin Wintory and friends. Everything Maze is available as a digital or physical bundle add-on or in our All the Sharks level.
You can also get Puzzlecraft: How to Make Every Kind of Puzzle.Puzzlecraft is the indispensable 250-page guide to puzzle making in all its forms. In 100 sections, you solve a puzzle then learn how it was created, with step-by-step instructions for making your own. It is available as a digital or softcover add-on or in our All the Sharks level.
You can also get our crossword graphic novel, Letters to Margaret. The 128-page softcover comic book is totally solvable, with New York Times-style crosswords preceding every chapter. There's also You Can't Make Up This Stuf, an 8-page minicomic bonus chapter of the book. You can get all the crossword comic fun in a digital or physical bundle add-on or in our All the Sharks level.
We also feature all the PDFs in our Puzzle Vault: nine awesome Puzzlepacksin one Puzzleback Bundle, and the wordgame book Wordwerx, the cryptic crossword book Killer Cryptics, and both volumes of Crosswords of Wisdom in a Puzzle Vault Bundle. All in all, that All the Sharks level contains something north of 800 puzzles, we guess? We've never counted. It's a ton. You can get it all for pennies a puzzle now.
YULE SHARK (digital)—$15: A PDF of The 12 Days of Cryptics.
SPACE SHARK (digital)—$15: A PDF of Mindspaces.
SPACE SHARK (physical)—$33: A softcover and PDF of Mindspaces.
SHARKHUNTER (digital)—$33: A PDF of The Hunting of the Shark and a year's subscription to Chums.
SHARKHUNTER (physical)—$66: A full-color hardcover and PDF of The Hunting of the Shark and a year's subscription to Chums
THE NEW SHARKS (digital)—$66: PDFs of The Hunting of the Shark, Mindspaces, the Puzzlevania Map, and The 12 Days of Cryptics, and a year's subscription to Chums.
THE NEW SHARKS (physical)—$100: A hardcover of The Hunting of the Shark, a softcover of Mindspaces, the 20"x30" Puzzlevania Map, PDFs of all those and The 12 Days of Cryptics, and a year's subscription to Chums.
ALL THE SHARKS (digital)—$120: Everything in our digital puzzle collection: The digital versions of The Hunting of the Shark, the Puzzlevania Map, Mindspaces, The 12 Days of Cryptics, Chums, TheMaze of Games, The Theseus Guide to the Final Maze,The Keymaster's Tome, the Maze Map, Puzzlecraft, Letters to Margaret,You Can't Make Up This Stuf, the audiobooks and soundtracks for The Maze of Games, the Puzzle Vault Bundle (Crosswords of Wisdom Volume 1 and 2, Killer Cryptics, and WoRDWeRX), and the Puzzlepack Bundle (Puzzlepack 1 through Puzzlepack 9).
ALL THE SHARKS (physical)—$133: Every puzzle project we've ever made in physical and digital form: the hardcover of The Hunting of the Shark, the Puzzlevania Map, the softcover of Mindspaces, the hardcover of TheMaze of Games, the softcovers of The Theseus Guide to the Final Maze and The Keymaster's Tome, the poster Maze Map, the softcover of Puzzlecraft, the crossword comics Letters to Margaret and You Can't Make Up This Stuf, and digital files for those projects and The 12 Days of Cryptics, Chums, the audiobooks and soundtracks for The Maze of Games, the Puzzle Vault Bundle (Crosswords of Wisdom Volume 1 and 2, Killer Cryptics, and WoRDWeRX), and the Puzzlepack Bundle (Puzzlepack 1 through Puzzlepack 9).
Shipping and handling costs are not listed in the pledge levels, because you’ll add those on in our pledge manager after the campaign ends. We've put our estimates above, but of course things can change. We’re sad to say that puzzle books cannot be shipped Media Mail, because the U.S. Postal Service doesn’t like fun. The physical goods can only be sent to the U.S. and Canada, as shipping and handling costs elsewhere are prohibitive.
The Hunting of the Shark has more than 100 creators. Many are designed by the Lone Shark Games puzzle designers over the past 20 years. We've also got some of the finest art by the best puzzle artists on the planet. Our puzzle event managers shaped these amazing creations. It's a project whose teamwork is noted in credits throughout the book.
The book is dedicated to our late creative director, Teeuwynn Woodruff. Tey passed away in 2023, a real blow to the Lone Shark family. We wanted to show off just how clever and bizarre her puzzle creations were. You'll see her finest work for us here. We hope you'll take a look.
There are lots of puzzles embedded in this campaign. Most are part of Sharky's Puzzlehunt, a special puzzlehunt that's available for you now in its entirety. It's the same one as in our last Kickstarter campaign, but with the added bonus that you can binge right through it today. It's just some of the many freebie puzzles on our site.
In Sharky's Puzzlehunt, our customer service shark Sharky McSharkerson has foolishly agreed to a deal with marketing consultant Butcher T. Billiard-Marker. Butch has concocted a whole bunch of terrible ideas he wants Sharky to include in the campaign. He'll provide Apex Marketing's incredibly marketable ideas. You can help Sharky get out of his deal by solving the puzzles.
To start out, find six hidden puzzles on this campaign page, each of which leads to a shark-friendly word or phrase that is five to ten letters. One, for example, can be found by fgnegvat ng Arcghar'f jrncba naq ernqvat yrsg gb evtug. Find and solve all six hidden puzzles on this page and you can solve the Day 1 puzzle. If you want some help, check out our puzzle help page or join our Lone Shark Discord.
Enter your answers on the Sharky's Puzzlehunt site. Each puzzle leads to a badge. That's a digital puzzle trophy that you can use as your social media avatar, or just hoard them in your computer somewhere. Enjoy puzzling with us, and help Sharky get free from Butch's marketing clutches!
