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