Thanks to some great questions from a reader, I have a whole series of new LARP design posts to write, which brings me great joy. In this one, I’ll be talking about specific puzzle types and applications of puzzles in campaign-length boffer LARPs – the only LARP style I’m really qualified to talk about.

Disclaimer

Just to get this out of the way: puzzles aren’t for everyone, and many hardcore puzzle junkies only cover a specific span of puzzle types, while having no particular love for other puzzle types. There are players who are just not going to engage with puzzles and will always leave them to someone else. And that’s okay. But it creates some complications in implementation, which I’ll try to cover as thoroughly as possible.

If you find that puzzles challenge the player rather than challenging the character, I’ll just say: that’s normal in LARPing. That’s the live-action part: you take as much of the action as possible, within the bounds of safety and general propriety.

Puzzle Situations

You know how there are a lot of situations that you can spice up with a good scrap? Same is true for puzzles, and the two aren’t mutually exclusive for some puzzle types. I’ll get to that.

• Modules. You can definitely hang a whole module on the players either acquiring a puzzle and taking it home with them (home might mean “back into the main game area” or “to work on between events”), or reaching a puzzle and solving it under some time pressure. That assumes the module requires any NPCs or a marshal; if the puzzle is unmarshaled (a technique I’ll talk about in a minute), you can go for a slightly harder puzzle and cut out the time pressure.
• In-town entertainment. Weekend events have 36 to 48 hours to fill, and solving a puzzle with reduced or no time pressure is a great way to do it. Alliance Atlanta has gone especially hard for the tavern always having a broad array of different puzzles and art projects: jigsaw puzzles, mandala patterns with colored markers (meditative calm is also a great way to fill time), marshaled puzzles, and large numbers of low-difficulty encryptions.
• Field battles, but really more like climactic action scenes. The battle part is common but not obligatory. I’ve already written three huge posts on field battle design, and there’s always an imminent danger (stay alert!) that I’ll write more. In those posts, the structure that I call Gather Materials lends itself especially well to puzzles. Climactic action scenes are time pressure, so you’re (usually) controlling the puzzle pressure and the combat pressure with the same dial. I’ve seen that done in some really interesting ways.
• Wake-up/wind-down. This is a very narrow use case, but Kainenchen pointed out that there’s a specific type of puzzle for either the very end of an evening, while you’re at your cabin winding down for bed, or first thing in the morning. It’s a marshal delivering dreams and visions, which are a puzzle of a sort, if one that is hard to interact with directly.

Puzzle Types

This list is incomplete. You can help Harbinger of Doom by expanding it.

• Encrypted text props. Short texts – up to a few sentences – are more difficult; longer texts are more time-consuming. Simple substitution ciphers are the most common, and the logic of solving them is such that the greatest number of players can get involved. Anything more demanding than that – Playfair, Vigenère – shuts out many or all of your players, unless they take the text home and solve it with a computer. (One of our players at DtD brute-force solved a Playfair encryption. What the f*ck, y’all.)
  • Encrypted text props are great for in-town entertainment, as the players who like that kind of thing have the greatest opportunity to gravitate toward the puzzles. They’re good for modules only if you’re sure that a serious encryption junkie is going on that module and they work fast – even then, shoot for lower difficulty than you otherwise might. Unless you’ve given the PCs a key text, encryption puzzles are unlikely to be a good fit for a field battle.
  • Best not to spend a lot of your players’ time on “BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE,” though.
• Logic puzzles. I’m talking about reskins of the logic puzzles, many of them grid-based, that you can buy from magazine racks at the grocery store. There are websites full of these, but I have tons of these books already and haven’t needed to go hunting. Anyway, the core best-practice here is making each of the clues and answers something true about your campaign’s lore. It can be hard to turn a logic puzzle’s negative statements into something remotely naturalistic, so you do need players who accept that as a convention of the puzzle style.
  • Logic puzzles are great for in-town entertainment and module usage. You can use the puzzle’s clues as widgets the players need to find during the module. You can have an NPC walk into the tavern with a problem they’re too much of an NPC to solve on their own.
  • We did this in Dust to Dust with spell research modules – the marshal led the players to a cabin that was decorated as a library, with lots of bulk books (you can buy hardback books in bulk for this kind of thing) as both set dressing and what the players were searching. We had taped or just inserted the clues in each book, so the players needed to page through the books to find them.
  • A friend of mine ran a logic puzzle in Resurgence where the PCs had to figure out the order of operations of an alchemy recipe, based on clues. If they got the order wrong, the magical wall they were mixing the alchemy to get them through would zap them or whatever. It was great because it was handled with face-down cards that explained each possible outcome, so no marshal needed to stay by the puzzle to explain anything.
  • If you feel really strong about your players’ knowledge of your lore, leave some clues out, as things that they just have to know already.
  • Very Important Note: Remember that you have to let players know each item in the grid, and it’s best to let them know when they have gathered 100% of the clues.
• Wooden block puzzles. You can buy a dizzying variety of these at any toy store or Barnes & Noble. In my experience, players either know how to solve (or at least make progress) on this category of puzzle, or they very much do not – it takes an incredible amount of time and brainpower to reason the puzzles out on study alone, especially if you haven’t gotten to see the completed puzzle beforehand. You should expect this type of puzzle to be very divisive, as a result.
  • Mostly I’ve seen games use this type of puzzle for in-town entertainment or modules. A wooden block puzzle with time pressure is a great way to engineer a failure by the PCs, because pressure makes our brains and hands less able to do this kind of stuff.
  • In the last Eclipse event, another player and I had to solve one of these during a field battle, with additional pressure from the field battle boss. It was harrowing, and I contributed very little other than buying the other player space to work from time to time. We succeeded, but only through the marshal accepting some of our desperate efforts to slow the boss’s advance.
  • In another case, some of the most gifted puzzle-solvers I know were on a DtD module with time pressure, in the form of a long and slow death countdown (“Fire Death 15… Fire Death 14…” and so on.) We weren’t trying to make them fail, but that’s what happened.
  • Making PCs gather all of the pieces of the puzzle from a module, multiple modules, or off of enemies in a field battle is fine, but please tell them how many pieces they need before they get too deep in trying to solve it. Guessing wrong there, in either direction, can only generate bad times.
• Riddles. It’s hard to use riddles well in games, because I think a lot of us handle riddles through rote memorization and pattern recognition rather than actually reasoning out the riddle (since riddles are designed to resist that form of solution). If you’ve written good, clever, poetic riddles, by all means prove me wrong! But have a backup plan, because there’s very little to interact with in this type of puzzle, so you can’t try something, see if it changes anything (it won’t), and gain new information. Adding pressure makes riddles even worse (probably the only reason Bilbo had as much trouble as he had).
• Pipe Dream. It’s a physical version of the old NES game (which has since been used in BioShock and plenty of other places). To make this work, you build a frame for tiles, with a way to mark the starting section and the ending point or points. The tiles include straight, curved, dead-end, and forking sections. Use this for narratives around technology or arcane technology in particular. (Or just buy a copy of Tsuro and use that, I don’t know your life.)
  • The players have to gather the tiles in the course of the module, field battle, or even multiple modules that end in bringing the pieces back to town – so they benefit from solving the puzzle with as few tiles as possible. Individual puzzles are fast and people generally understand what to do, so it’s a great puzzle for general use.
• Text completion. This is one I used for Dust to Dust, and again in Altera Awakens. I bought a couple of these stone wall tile things from a local home improvement store and wrote a text prop on them, sized so that the smallest squares have part of two rows of text. Then I took a little over half of the tiles off the backing and scattered them around the area for PCs to find. The PCs had to place them on the backing in a way that made sense.
  • My players had very little difficulty with this puzzle, but I think they enjoyed it because the payoff for completion is lore on a pretty cool prop – and the whole thing fits a narrative of inscriptions on the wall of a crumbling ruin.
  • Remember that it isn’t necessary for every puzzle to push players to the limit of their puzzle-solving ability. I particularly like puzzles where the players intuitively understand what the puzzle wants from them.
• Sudoku. Shattered Isles used a sudoku puzzle with colored tiles, rather than numbered, to great effect near the end of the second campaign. Getting numbered sudoku puzzles to fit into your game narrative at all can be a significant lift for gamerunners. In general, though, a lot of your players probably love sudoku puzzles and would be quite happy to solve a stack of them for a reward of some kind at the end, so if you crack the narrative problem, they’re wonderful in-town entertainment.
• Jigsaw puzzles. I hadn’t seen this done… really ever, until Alliance Atlanta, but it’s a common thing there. A jigsaw puzzle of some particularly obscene degree of difficulty (small, transparent pieces was a recent one) is set out, with a note to inform a marshal when it’s done, as long as it’s done before Saturday around dinner. This is great for eating up time with something multiple players can contribute to, one or two people at a time.
  • On the other hand, serious bad feelings happen if one or two pieces go mysteriously missing. Did someone take them so they can swoop in at the last minute and claim whatever reward there might be, without having done any of the work? At that point, you hope it’s ordinary entropy, rather than such crass troll behavior.
• Food-coloring color matching. One of the staffers at Alliance Atlanta ran a delightful color-matching puzzle with food coloring and water. Hard-to-impossible for some colorblind players, though one of the colorblind players on my team managed it. Anyway, this is great for an immersive brewing/alchemy experience. This was in-town entertainment, with no failure condition or time pressure other than “you get tired of trying and go do something else.” The reward for matching one of the colors was some in-game cash.
  • Would have been reasonably doable in a module situation, though probably not with eight different colors to match.
• Dreams. I said I’d talk about this; here we are. When a marshal delivers dreams, there’s an optional up-front challenge of how well the player remembers a spoken briefing. You can always write the dream down and give it to them on an index card or something – especially if you’ve also woken them up early to deliver the dream. (Some players will hate you for that so… move carefully.) Anyway, the real puzzle of dreams is a comparable to a riddle: there’s a message delivered with intent, usually of something happening now or soon, and the more you can grasp the references of the marshal’s symbolic language, the more clues you come away with.
  • Much like riddles, too, there’s nothing to act upon or experiment with directly, so if you don’t understand it, you might be out of luck. Ideally, you’d talk to other players about it and stir up some roleplay and lore interaction, and when the event that the dream describes comes to pass, you finish putting the pieces together and get something useful out of it.
  • In Dust to Dust, visions and dreams were largely restricted to new players, because we wanted the experienced players to have reasons to engage with them. I don’t remember how consistent we were with dreams, though.
• Operation. This is one I built for Dust to Dust and only used once. I’d give it, or something like it, another shot. I used a flat-bottomed wicker basket, then wove a few thick, vine-like strands over the top – I think they had wire core (something like pipe cleaners would work here). Inside the basket, I had placed a few domino bones. I think I gave the players a pair of chopsticks, but it’s possible that I just made them use their thieves’ tools; they had to move the bones into a particular ritual pattern. If the chopsticks/tools touched the vines, the PC took damage. Not a lot of damage, just enough that they had to be careful.
  • The great thing about a puzzle like this is that it’s 100% clear what needs to happen, and the player has the tools to succeed, so it’s just a matter of working at it carefully and cleverly. My extremely armchair-psych read on why some folks hate puzzles in games is that the time they spend feeling stumped on what to do is a deeper negative for them than the expected positive emotional reward of success. This removes feeling stumped almost completely.
  • At DtD I used this for an in-town encounter, which was good because the players could bring in other people to work on the puzzle if they got frustrated. It would generally work very well for modules, and with some amount of additional work (maybe multiple of these that different players need to work on simultaneously), I’m confident it could work for field battles.
• Chess and other strategy games. If you’re not using chess puzzles – you know, “White to checkmate in 2 moves” kind of puzzles, which are available in vast numbers online – then you’re sitting a marshal, NPC, or other PC down across from the PC and just having them play through a game. It definitely eats up time, but skill levels at chess, Go, checkers, and similar games vary so widely that a lopsided challenge is too likely (and not fun). Prep for this accordingly, or stick to chess puzzles.
  • Altera Awakens used chess (Kainenchen as the PC, the marshal as the other side) as the timer for a very hard fight in a module. That went well; it helped that Kainenchen had coincidentally been playing a lot of chess against our 10yo prior to the event.
  • Altera Awakens is also using an event-over-event Go match as the crux of a character storyline. That’s an interesting story, and I like that the player involved is getting time between events to improve her Go skills (the marshal in that situation is an experienced Go player). I’m also glad I’m not the player in question.
  • In addition to chess, Go, and checkers, there are lots of other kinds of abstract strategy games. Othello and the whole vast family of tafl games come to mind here.

What Makes Puzzles Work Well?

A great puzzle breaks immersion as little as possible. In my Operation puzzle example, the wicker of the basket and the vines fit with the source of the whole puzzle: an animated wickerwoman, whose magical programming they were altering. There are so many single-player puzzle board games (often marketed to kids) that make amazing module puzzles.

You’re saving everyone a lot of time and stress if it’s probably not the player’s first encounter with that style of puzzle and they already know the rules. Chess puzzles are intensely rules-focused, for example, but a very large percentage of the population (and an even larger percentage of likely LARPers) have at least been learned the basics of chess. The tolerance for learning new rules is much greater with in-town entertainment.

Put some thought into whether a puzzle needs time pressure and/or to punish error or failure. Some do, some don’t. Sometimes the stakes are just that the possibility of reward expires. In field battles, it’s often enough to just keep the beatings going until the puzzle is done, but other times you might have each failure trigger an area effect that is bad for the PCs or cost them a resource of some kind.

Some puzzle types admit to the possibility of marshals giving clues, but many do not. Often the clues can only come from someone who designed the puzzle, which might stretch your marshal availability pretty thin.

I hope you gamerunners out there find this helpful!