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.
Unfolding the Puzzlevania Map
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!
