Homogeneous Puzzle Games

[mathbrush (Brian Rushton)]

I wrote an essay about puzzle design a few years ago and I thought it had been published but can’t find it anywhere, so I decided to repost it.

Here’s a link to it:

What makes a 'best puzzle'?

What makes a ‘Best Puzzle’? (Edit: this is a repost of a several-years-old article) Every year, public voters award the XYZZY Best Individual Puzzle award to one puzzle in one game. These are the puzzles that most captured the community’s fancy in some way, whether through complexity, inventiveness, or even emotion. Of all the XYZZY, the Best Individual Puzzle award seemed at first to me the most like a grab-bag of random games, with little connection between different winners. However, I was …

For other homogeneous puzzles, there’s 15 Minutes by Ade Mctavish (entirely based around 1 time puzzle), Suveh Nux (which is a great 1-room game about learning a magic language), Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder and Sugarlawn (timed optimization puzzles), pretty much all of Andrew Schultz’s wordplay games (Shuffling Around and Threediopolis are my favorites), Gun Mute (focusing on one-on-one gunfights). Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head!