Campaign done! Thanks to everyone who backed it!

This was our first campaign of any sort on BackerKit, and we weren't sure what to expect. We were welcomed by the staff at BackerKit, who gave us all sorts of tips and tricks we'd never thought of. (That Riddle Poll feature, for example. How cool was that?)

Then of course we met all of you! We really appreciate the support and engagement. It's been a delight to get to know you, at least a little bit. Such a great community over here.

We even hit an achievement, adding the Con Cryptic Bonus Pack to every pledge that gets The 12 Days of Cryptics. Yay!

Now that the campaign's done, here's what you can expect.

Over the next two weeks, BackerKit will charge your credit card for the amount of your pledge. If it goes through the first time, great! If it doesn't, BackerKit will try again. You may hear from us if it doesn't go through, asking for a different source of payment. We should get your pledge info from BackerKit around the end of the first week of August.

After we have the data of who you are and what you pledged for, you'll be invited by email to the pledge manager here on BackerKit. That's where you'll enter your address and be charged an appropriate amount for shipping and handling. We cannot fulfill any of your rewards if you don't answer the pledge manager survey. The pledge manager will only be open for a few weeks, so please get your information in as soon as possible after it launches. You'll have the opportunity to upgrade your pledge and to add more add-ons as you desire.

The new physical products for this campaign — The Hunting of the Shark, Mindspaces, and the Puzzlevania Map — are approved and underway in production. Once they're done, then they will be sent from China to our facility in Florida.

The new material printed for this campaign should arrive in our warehouse in the late summer or early autumn. By then, we'll have closed the pledge manager and will send the shipping spreadsheets to our fulfillment center. They'll be catalogued and readied for shipment.

Assuming all of that goes according to plan (and to be honest, it rarely does, but we can hope), then we'll wait until our fulfillment center can find a slot to send out our shipments. It could be right away, or it could take some time thereafter if other shipments are in front of ours. The first indication of this will be when the fulfillment center sends you an address confirmation by email. You'll have a brief period to reply to that email, then the center will lock in all addresses. Shipping will happen not long after that.

We're exploring whether to use the pledge manager for fulfillment of digital goods or our store website. Either way, we'll likely get you your digital downloads when they're ready. That means things like The Maze of Games and the Puzzlepacks will go out not too long after we get your pledge manager data. The Hunting of the Shark and Mindspaces will wait until the books are shipped out. The 12 Days of Cryptics will start in December to sync up with the holiday season, and the Con Cryptic Bonus Pack will follow on its heels. (The Chums site is a separate project, and will launch when we have it together. Those of you who get Chums will get 12 months' subscription from the month it launches.)

That's a lot to keep track of, so we're going to focus on it as the months slide by. We won't be anywhere near as chatty during that period, but we'll still reply to messages we get. We'll let you know how everything goes from here.

Thanks for attending our puzzle party!

Sharky

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!

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!

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!

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 Discord and sign up in our puzzletesting channel. We'll hook you up! 

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!

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!

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!

Sharky

Hey puzzle friends! We're into the last full week of the campaign. We appreciate all your support so far! Here are some updates.

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.

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!

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.

Sharky

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. Exciting stuff! Today, we're gonna highlight one of our favorite new items in this campaign.

One of our favorite elements of this project is the Puzzlevania Map, a 20"x30", double-sided full-color poster map. Here's a look at how it came together.

We've done a puzzle map before. That's the Maze Map, which you can get in the Maze of Games Bundle add-on or as part of your The New Sharks or All the Sharks level. It's a very cool thing called an "optimization puzzle," where you run around the map trying to manipulate your discoveries to get a final score. The important thing is that we don't know what the highest possible score is. Over the years, we've gotten many submissions on the Maze Map, with long detailed lists of puzzle processes. The current known high score for the Maze Map is held by legendary game designer Steve Jackson, whose six-page solution beat even our puzzle designers' best.

The two leaders of the Maze Map were puzzle designer Eric Harshbarger and artist Corey Macourek, who incorporated story and art from the novel in their creation. More than a decade later, we brought Eric and Corey back for the Puzzlevania Map.

We started by reviving the 2009 Gen Con Puzzle Hunt, called The Jewels of Puzzylvania, in which hundreds of players tried to find gems to become the monarch of a fantasy city. The Gen Con Puzzle Hunt is made out of almost two dozen 22"x28" foamcore placards spread around the Indianapolis Convention Center. That means there are hundreds of Eric's words on each placard. Here's an example.

That wasn't all gonna fit on a double-sided poster. For the current version, Mike and Chad took a meat cleaver to all that text, boiling it does to its essentials. Quite a few puzzles were redone from scratch, but we kept most of the journey the same. You can tour all of the city of Qwerty in the land of Puzzlevania, flipping the map over in different orientations when you find special places to explore.

For the art, we asked Corey to create the most adorable thing we've ever published. He did not disappoint. Here are some of his creations for the Puzzlevania Map.

He built into a fold-out double-sided version that looks like this:

But we weren't done there. We mentioned that the goal is to find gems to become a monarch of the nation of Puzzlevania. You can't be a monarch without a crown, right? Designer Elisa Teague had made us a punch-out crown from a different event, the Witchlight Carnival from 2020's D&D Celebration. So, working from Elisa's Illustration, Corey made you a gem-studdable crown you can wear. Here he is modeling it.

That's the Puzzlevania Map! If you don't have one in your pledge yet, we'd love you to add it on as either a digital or physical item. Or upgrade to The New Sharks or All the Sharks level.  We think you'll be glad you did!

We're excited to be bringing you all this puzzle fun! Enjoy the riddle below and we'll talk to you soon!

Sharky

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 for this update, have you tried our riddle polls? We've passed the halfway point in the "Twelve Days of Christmas" riddles. You can see the latest attached to this update.

Mindspaces is our new book of marching bands puzzles. It's not your average collection of variety crossword puzzles, for a couple of reasons.

A marching bands is a typically 13x13 square, where the clue answers are entered in two ways. In each row, you enter two answers consecutively. In each band, you enter a string of answers reading clockwise, starting in the upper left corner of the band. So, your row answers might be crossed by answers reading to the right, down, to the left, and up. Here's a sampler to show how it's solved.

Here's a typically sized 13x13 for you to solve.

We pushed this familiar puzzle type well beyond its typical limits. The grids in this book range from the 7x7 sampler above all the way up to 23x23. The rule of two answers per row never changes, so whereas a 13x13 might have a 6-letter answer followed by a 7-letter answer in a given row, a 23x23 might have a 9-letter answer followed by a 14-letter answer. They get harder to make and solve when they get bigger. Here's a much bigger puzzle, on two pages.

The other feature of Mindspaces is Mike's puzzle essays on creativity. These were written to share a process for being creative when your brain doesn't let you. It's a process that allowed Mike to create all these puzzles as a form of mental adaptation. If you're a creative person, and you have some issues with getting your mind to cooperate with your creative goals, this approach might help you.

As you can see, Mindspaces is an odd book. It combines puzzles and creative thoughts into a unique mix. If you'd like 111 very cool puzzles plus some helpful creative tips, add a copy to your pledge. You can either pledge at the Space Shark (Digital) or Space Shark (Physical) level for a copy, add it as an add-on, or go all out and get it as part of The New Sharks or All the Sharks. However you get it, we think you'll enjoy it for quite a while.

Thanks for all your support!

Sharky