Greetings puzzlers and gamers! I hope you are weathering the… well, the weather well.
First of all, congrats to Lauren Bello for having the best score of the month on Endangered Rescue: Galápagos Penguin. And not a surprise: I remember that name from oh-so-many Hincks Gazette leaderboards. Great work!
Convention Season
The summer months bring tons of exciting and important gatherings. Recently gamers flocked to Origins. I wasn’t in attendance, but I got some snaps of the Grand Gamers Guild booth along the way, where many of my games were showcased.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by!
I just got back from my favorite summer gathering, Protospiel Michigan. This is the longest-running Protospiel event, bringing designers and playtesters from far and wide to play each others’ works-in-progress and provide critical feedback. I made great strides with several designs (codenames given to protect the innocent):
Project Snowball, a climbing-style trick-taking game
Project Homeward, a push-your-luck deck-building game
Project Cantina, a spelling game for people who can’t spell
An upcoming Holiday Hijinks title
An upcoming Artemis Universe title
Lots of exciting things coming!
And finally, the biggest one: Gen Con is fast approaching, and I’ll have new releases there. If you have a BoardGameGeek account, it would make a big difference to me if you gave a thumbs-up to The Marriage Mix-Up and Endangered Rescue, as well as any other games that strike your fancy. It impacts visibility in a meaningful way.
What I’ve Been Playing
This month I can’t stop talking about DroPolter, one of the latest batch of titles from Oink Games.
This is a dexterity game in a tiny box. Every player gets five distinctly-shaped items (like a ring and a shell), and holds them in one hand. A card is revealed with some of the items and the challenge is to drop those—and only those—items onto the table, without using your other hand.
The genius of the design comes from the scoring mechanism. When you win a round, you get a point. But these points are tracked as little bells, which you need to hold in the same hand as all the items. This means that the better you do, the more difficult the task gets. And if you drop a bell, you lose it! The whole concept is a supremely elegant take on “catch up” mechanisms, and worthy of play and analysis.
Your Monthly Puzzle Treat
If you are a member of the Discord server, you may have noticed me workshopping a new word puzzle genre. I’m calling this “No-Guess Wordle.”
In case you’re somehow not familiar with Wordle because you slept through the 2022 craze, here’s a quick primer. It’s a riff on the concepts in Jotto, Mastermind, and the TV game show Lingo, in which you try to guess a 5-letter word. Each time you guess, you are told how many letters are correct and in the correct positon, and how many are correct but in the wrong position.
In this twist on the concept, I’m going to give you some guesses that have already been made, and you need to find the answer with no more guesses. There is (if I’ve done my job correctly) only one possible word that fits all the information given. And to give you a little boost, the guesses are each related in meaning somehow to the answer.
I’ve got these in many sizes, so let’s start small and get bigger! For each one, you can click the link to check your answer when you’ve got it.
More Puzzles
If you’re hungry for more, I’ve got you covered! Join the Discord server where I’m posting puzzles of all sorts every few days. It’s also a great place to get hints, and to discuss games, puzzles, and anything else that strikes your fancy.
Happy puzzling!
There was a typo in the fourth puzzle when this issue was first published. It has since been corrected. Apologies!