Enigmarch - Week 1

 As mentioned in my previous post, during March I am taking part in #Enigmarch, a daily puzzle creation challenge.

Each day there is a new prompt, and each day the challenge is to create a puzzle in response to it. At the time of writing, we are three days in (although by the time I actually post this, we'll be a lot further) and I am already LOVING it.

I have been making puzzles for about a year or so now. I've always quite enjoyed solving them, and during Covid lockdowns I found myself getting involved in several quite separate online events and communities which, for various reasons, reminded me just how much fun that can be. So I decided to have a go at making them too, and it turns out that's also quite a lot of fun. In the past year or so I've published four themed puzzle hunts - collections of puzzles which, once solved, give a set of answers which themselves feed into one final 'meta-puzzle'.  I'm currently working on the next one, but for now, thanks to #EnigMarch, I'm getting plenty of extra puzzle-writing  practice.  

I plan to write one of these posts every week or so, for anyone who is interested (which I am fully aware may be no-one!) explaining a little bit about the process of creating the the puzzles and the prompts which inspired them.  These posts will, by their nature, almost certainly contain spoilers for the puzzles mentioned. If you'd like to try solving them first, they can all be found here.

Day 1  
Prompt:  initials

I was super curious about what the first prompt was going to be, and have to admit I gave a big sigh of a relief when I saw this was it.  Initials are nice and puzzle-y; often it's first letters of a set of answers which need to be extracted for a final solution, for instance, and so this felt like a fairly gentle way in. I hadn't realised just how nervous I'd been about the potential to see a prompt and draw a complete blank, but apparently I was.  

Book titles and their authors came as an idea fairly quickly (they are the kind of punny jokes I live for ), so I set about coming up with a few potential names, and then realised I should probably make sure that the initials  I was choosing did actually form a word, or words. I also knew I wanted to put the titles onto images of books, so went off searching for free  clip art, and realised that the final solution would also be driven, to a certain extent, by the image I found and how many books were in it. So I established it was going to be two five letter words, played around with the letters I already had to try and make something, and then filled in the gaps with more names. The last step was then creating the titles, which was the silly fun part. 

This puzzle actually went through two iterations - something I almost certainly won't  have time to do every day, but on this occasion the change felt important enough to make. The early version  involved matching surnames and first initials to make the authors, but then  I realised that by doing this  I was taking away the opportunity to have an 'a-ha!' moment. Those moments when  the penny finally drops (and in this case, the penny is the  realisation that it's only the initials, and not the full first names of the authors which needed to be used) are often the best part of solving a puzzle, and it seemed a shame not to let solvers experience that for themselves. So I swapped initials for full first names.  I think this updated version is much stronger; both can be seen in the folder, for anyone who is really interested.

Day 2
Prompt: rhymes

This  felt like another nice, safe, puzzle-friendly topic. Rhyme makes things predictable, and pattern spotting and making predictions is often what sits at the heart of being able to solve a puzzle. My puzzle was fairly straight forward to make; I generated lots of pairs of rhyming words and chose one pair to be the final answer I wanted. I liked the idea of doing what you've just been doing, again, to get this final answer, so I knew I wanted the clues to generate another riddle or definition, rather than directly give solvers the rhyming pair directly. This meant that it needed to be something obvious - there's nothing worse than doing all of the groundwork to solve a puzzle and then falling at the last hurdle thanks to a slightly too obscure reference or riddle.

Some of the other clues did feel a little difficult, but I felt confident enough that the hidden message was long enough  for it to be easy to be able to guess some of the letters if needed, and then work back from those to fill in any missing rhyming pairs.

Day 3 
Prompt: shadow

This one worried me a little bit, because to me 'shadows' instantly made me think of physical puzzles or, at the very least, the kinds of puzzles which involve visual reasoning and spatial awareness - which are very much not my strong point. Wordplay, logic, lateral thinking and codes are all much more in my wheel-house, and although more visual puzzles are something I should probably try and get better at, my design skills are also fairly non-existent, so I settled this time for a word puzzle instead.  And who knew just how many words and phrases involving shadows there are! As other people's responses to the prompt started to appear it was fun to notice some of those words and phrases - eye shadow, shadow puppets, etc - being used as themes.  

Day 4
Prompt: locks. 

It's fair to say this one got a little out of hand!  I'm a big fan of both Escape this Podcast and The Infinite Escape Room, two podcasts where the hosts create and play through virtual escape rooms. I've had a few attempts at designing these myself, and have come quite close to finishing a couple, but never quite managed to tie together all of the loose ends.  When I saw 'locks' as a prompt escape rooms were the first thing which came to mind - for the simple reason that they are places where you inevitably find lots of them. And thinking about other meanings of 'locks' led me fairly quickly to a decision about the setting - it was going to have to be a hairdressing salon. 

Normally I see the prompt first thing in the morning - they are posted at about 1am in my local time -  but as it happens I was up late the night before and saw this one as soon as it appeared. I had a day off the next day, so I knew I'd have a bit of time. Which is how I ended up finding myself at 3 in the morning having accidentally written half of a virtual escape room.

 Escape this podcast have done a couple of episodes on room and puzzle design (which can be found here, in the list of bonus episodes)  and can tell you a lot more than I can about the process; they also publish write-ups of all of their rooms and I used their format as a model for writing mine. 

But basically, the process was to come up with a chain of events - getting into the store room lets you get into the cash register, getting into the cash register lets you unlock the store room cupboard, and getting into the store room cupboard gives you what you need to make your final escape.  Essentially this means  there are three puzzles to be solved - the directional lock (combining the post-its and the sign to get a series of directions), the  shelves/cash register (working out how product codes are created, and applying this) and the final door lock (working out the top selling products from the inventory data). 

All of these were fairly straight forward - I had to do a bit of research to find names of hairstyles and products, and the inventory puzzle, which was the last thing I wrote, caused me more problems than it should have done, but otherwise they were fairly easy to create. 

And then it was just a case of writing everything up, thinking through all of the objects and possible interactions with them.

 I'm really proud of it and was thrilled to hear from a few people over the course of the day who had enjoyed playing through it and managed to escape. It has definitely made me want to go back and try and finish some of the longer, more complex rooms I've previously tried to design.

Day 5
Prompt: present

I do love a logic puzzle - I have just realised there is at least one (and sometimes more than one!) in every puzzle hunt I've published so far. So using logic to work out who gave which gift to who in a Secret Santa seemed like a fairly easy way to use this prompt.  I don't really have any advice to give on constructing a puzzle like this, other than to say that they do get a little easier with practice! The first few I made were really hard work, and I could feel myself getting tied up in knots - this time around it felt a little more manageable. 

My working document has three grids on it, with columns labelled 'giver', 'recipient' and 'gift'.  The first grid contains  the full solution, so I had it to work backwards from. The second one started out blank, and as I wrote clues* which revealed bits of information, I filled that information in, until the whole grid had been filled. The third grid also started out blank, and is the one I used as a final check - once I had what I thought was a complete set of clues, I worked through them and used them to fill in the grid, to make sure it was in fact solvable.

*The only real way I know how to create these clues is just to write a bunch of stuff down, and worry about whether or not it is actually useful afterwards. So I just keep coming  up with true statements which could be made about the scenario (Ashley didn't buy a present for Bob, Chris was given the play station, neither Don nor Ed bought the fondue set, etc.)  and then go back and combine some, delete others, and fill in any gaps. I'm not sure it's the most efficient process, but it's the one which works for me and, as I said, with practice is getting slightly easier to manage.

Day 6
Prompt: island

I've actually written an island-themed puzzle before, as part of  a puzzle hunt which was was inspired by the most recent series of John Finnemore's Souvenir Program One of the characters, Patrick Nightingale, makes a somewhat memorable appearance on Desert Island Discs, and so as an homage to that, for his puzzle I created a word search full of hidden islands; the crux of that puzzle, really, is simply working out that it's islands you should be looking for, and that they all intersect with numbers, to give you a order to put them in. 

Wanting to do something a little different this time, I played around for a while with the idea of of mine-sweeper type grid featuring islands (the numbered squares) and having to find sharks (the mines) in the water around them, but I couldn't quite make it work, so I found myself abandoning plans and going back to look at names of islands again.   I liked the idea of creating general knowledge clues ( (although I did also think about making them cryptic clues, for a while) pointing to specific islands, and then flags being used to put them in the correct order.  But I didn't want it to feel too much like a straight trivia quiz, and so in the end another word search seemed like the best option - it's a handy way to provide a set of answers, so it's essentially a case of matching the clue to the correct island, but doing that in a less obvious way. I much prefer this puzzle to the Patrick Nightingale one, but probably needed to have made that earlier puzzle for this one to exist. 

Day 7
Prompt: translate

This was a tricky one. To me 'translate' meant one of two options - something language based, or something which involving moving shapes in a straight line. And the latter, for reasons I've already mentioned, wasn't a very viable option. 

But language translation also posed some problems. I'm very conscious that being a native English speaker carries with it no small amount of privilege, and I didn't feel particularly comfortable with the idea of treating a real, non-English language as a puzzle to be solved. I toyed with ideas around trying to work out and apply the rules of an invented language (something I've seen done to great effect in various puzzle hunts, as well, of course, in the game Heaven's Vault but on a much greater scale than I had time for); in hindsight doing something with spelling or word  variations between  US  and UK English would have made perfect sense, but isn't something which occurred to me at the time.

Eventually I settled on mistranslations - looking at what happens when Google Translate takes a phrase (in this case a song title - I actually started out with proverbs, but soon realised songs worked a lot better), puts it into a different language, then converts it back to English again. It took a little bit of experimenting to find titles and languages where the difference between the 'before' and 'after'  was enough to present some degree of challenge but didn't make it too impossible to recognise the original. 

I like it as a puzzle, but still have some mixed feelings about it as an idea. Hopefully it's clear that the target of the joke, if there is one, is Google translate and the limitations of auto-translate technology, rather than the languages themselves, which would feel a bit icky.  (Incidentally, I saw lots of great puzzles submitted on this theme which worked around the issue perfectly well; it's a fine line to tread, is my point, but most people seemed to tread it carefully and respectfully.) 

The other thing to say about this puzzle, of course, is that my choice of artists tells you everything you need to know, I think, about my cutting-edge knowledge of the current music scene... 

And that was week one!  We're now well into week two (I've been writing this over the course of a few days) which has already thrown up some equally interesting challenges - but more on those next time. If you'd like to see more puzzles I can recommend searching the #EnigMarch hashtag on Twitter, where you'll find all sorts of entries. And if you want to have a go at making a few yourself, follow @EnigmarchHQ for the daily prompts.