48 hours to go, books approved, and the Maze of Games
There are about 48 hours to go on our Puzzle Party campaign! If you want to add some add-ons or upgrade your pledge, this is an excellent time to do so!
All books finalized a...
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Lone Shark Games
8 days ago
An NPL puzzle, our first achievement, and Puzzlecraft
Hey puzzle friends! We're into the last full week of the campaign. We appreciate all your support so far! Here are some updates.
A puzzle from the National Puzzler's League c...
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Lone Shark Games
12 days ago
Have you checked out Mindspaces?
We're pleased to have reached more than ten times our goal for this BackerKit campaign! Thank you for all your support of our puzzle antics.
Before we get into our feature ...
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Lone Shark Games
18 days ago
Unfolding the Puzzlevania Map
Hey folks! The campaign's going good. We're just about at ten times our funding goal, which is amazing. And we've signed up a bunch of people for our upcoming puzzle projects...
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Lone Shark Games
19 days ago
The Hunting of the Shark, cryptics progress, and more riddles!
We're thrilled to have so many backers on BackerKit. Almost $10,000 too! That's better than we thought we'd be doing at this point. So, thanks for coming on board the puzzle ...
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Lone Shark Games
24 days ago
What puzzle types would you like us to make?
We're fans of all kinds of puzzles here at Lone Shark. As you may have seen in our books Puzzlecraft and The Maze of Games, we make a whole lot of different types. As we look forward, what types of puzzles and puzzle books would you like to see from us? If you tell us, we migh...
There are about 48 hours to go on our Puzzle Party campaign! If you want to add some add-ons or upgrade your pledge, this is an excellent time to do so!
All books finalized and approved
At the National Puzzlers' League con in Minneapolis this week, the Sharks received final bound copies of MIndspaces, the Puzzlevania Map, and The Hunting of the Shark. We approved them and gave the green light for full production. The presses should be running shortly.
Here's what they look like!
These are real.
Everything just looks great. The Hunting of the Shark is especially hefty and colorful. We love the coil binding on Mindspaces. And we had a blast unfolding the Puzzlevania Map and punching out the crown for the first time.
These books will be done soon. We're excited to bring them to you not long from now!
Testsolving begins on The 12 Days of Cryptics
Mike finished the first draft of The 12 Days of Cryptics last week. It's been sent to some testsolvers for initial impressions. If you're interested in being one of our puzzle testsolvers, you can go to our Discordand sign up in our puzzletesting channel. We'll hook you up!
Making progress toward the Con Cryptic Bonus Pack
With all your help, we're just a few hundred bucks away from hitting our first achievement: the Con Cryptic Bonus Pack, a collection of our cryptics that have appeared in NPL convention games and magazines. If we reach $12,500 in pledges, everyone who pledges for a copy of The 12 Days of Cryptics will get this bonus pack. We hope we'll get there!
The riddle polls come to a close
We just posted the last of our "Twelve Days of Christmas" riddle polls! We hope you've enjoyed them! If you want to see the whole set, just click on "Trivia Challenge" here or at the top of this campaign and you'll see them.
Let us know which riddles you liked best!
ExploringThe Maze of Games
We're shining a spotlight on one of our favorite add-ons in this campaign. If you haven't reserved a copy, we highly encourage you to take a look at our most popular puzzle book: The Maze of Games, now in its fifth printing.
The Maze of Games is a puzzle novel written by Mike and illustrated by Pete Venters. It's the story of two teenagers in 1897 England who are kidnapped by the skeletal Gatekeeper and subjected to a series of ever-more-dangerous mazes filled with monsters, villains, and gods. Which would all be a simple thing to follow if the pages weren't in the wrong order.
That's right, the pages are in the wrong order. To make the narrative make sense, you have to solve a challenging set of puzzles that will provide an order to the book. Each two-page spread has a story on one side and a puzzle on the other.
Along the way, you'll help the teenagers, Colleen and Samuel Quaice, escape from the maze. That's a tall order, because the book went unsolved for four years after we released it in 2014. Then a group of a dozen solvers banded together to take the final chapter down, and many more people have solved it since. You can join all the victorious solvers by getting your own copy.
There are also forty pages of extra puzzles by some of the greatest puzzle makers of all time. All are written as if the puzzle makers were in the 1890s, which leads to some fascinating results. Here's a spread of those now.
There's a lot more to the Maze of Games experience. The Theseus Guide to the Final Maze is a bonus chapter that fits inside the last chapter. The Maze Map is a poster-sized optimization puzzle of the Quaice children's escape. The Keymaster's Tome is a hand-written answer book from the children's perspective. There are two audiobooks narrated by Wil Wheaton, a soundtrack by Austin Wintory, and a suite of audio puzzles called the Gatekeeper Variety Hour.
All of this can be found in the Maze of Games Bundle in physical and digital form. Or you can get it all as part of the All the Sharks level. That's a great deal if you want all our puzzle stuff.
We hope you check out The Maze of Games and all we have to offer. Thanks for supporting the Lone Shark Puzzle Party!
Hey puzzle friends! We're into the last full week of the campaign. We appreciate all your support so far! Here are some updates.
A puzzle from the National Puzzler's League con
This week is the National Puzzler's League convention in Minneapolis , also known as SPAMCon (short for "St. Paul and Minneapolis Convention"). Your Lone Shark puzzle team will be there with games and puzzles for the whole con to play. If you're in Minneapolis between Wednesday and Sunday, you can attend one evening for free. We'd love to meet you!
The Hunting of the Shark contains this puzzle by musician Kid Beyond, celebrating our game Link 26. We hope you enjoy it.
Our first BackerKit Achievement: Con Cryptic Bonus Pack
To celebrate the NPL con, we've put in an achievement for backers of this campaign who get The 12 Days of Cryptics. If we reach $12,500, every backer of The 12 Days of Cryptics gets a PDF copy of a bonus pack of Mike's cryptics that originally appeared at the NPL con or in the NPL magazine, The Enigma. It's a "regift" of some or most fun puzzles of this type over the years. If this gets achieved, we'll consider some more regifts for future achievements!
Here's a grid from one of those puzzles, "Send Off Copies."
We'd love to bring this bonus pack to you! If we reach $12,500, we will!
Puzzlecraft
If you're at the con, you'll also meet the co-authors of Puzzlecraft: How to Design Every Kind of Puzzle. This 256-page, softcover, spiral-bound book is the go-to handbook on puzzle design, used in many classrooms across the country. It contains more than 100 puzzle design sections, each with an example puzzle that you can solve and then take a crack at designing a puzzle of that type.
Here's what an article and puzzle from the book looks like:
You can get Puzzlecraft in the Puzzlecraft Bundle, which includes the main book plus a PDF copy of our Puzzlecraft Workbook. That's a 32-page primer divided into two parts. Part 1 gives you prompts to create specific kinds of puzzles and questions to consider while designing. Part 2 gives you a weeklong challenge to create a birthday puzzlehunt, with specific puzzle templates for you to design within. This will put your puzzling brain to good use.
Or you can get the Puzzlecraft Bundle as part of the All the Sharks level, where you get all our new puzzle projects plus Puzzlecraft, The Maze of Games, and a lot more. Check it out!
Thanks for backing this project. And if you're in Minneapolis this week, we hope to see you there.