Last year, Deborah Ann Woll acted as Dungeon Master for Tales From Woodcreek, a tabletop actual play adventure in eight parts. But while most actual play games rely on a combination of vivid descriptions or miniature battle sets to immerse players in the story, Tales From Woodcreek took its players on location to Ontario’s Village at Black Creek transforming an entire historical village into the game’s haunted play area. The resulting production turned into something of an immersive sampler: a tabletop adventure at its core, but drawing on everything from immersive theater and Larp to escape rooms.

Tales From Woodcreek is looking to return for a second season, and the show seems to be adding an alternate reality game to the immersive sampler. Starting last week, the show’s Kickstarter campaign started slipping in narrative puzzles into their updates, teasing the new season’s setting and the threats to come.

The Session Zero is a Scavenger Hunt: Prelude to Woodcreek

Tales From Woodcreek set the stage and expectations for the show with its “Session Zero” for the tabletop game. Typically, these sessions help guide players through character creation, acclimate to the system, and familiarize themselves with safety mechanics before the adventure formally begins. Because much of that activity happened offscreen, Tales From Woodcreek‘s “Session Zero” instead focused on introducing players and viewers alike to the format, through a one-shot adventure.

For the first few minutes, the initial session started out normal, using the Dungeon Dudes’ studio to introduce the characters and the conceit of the one-shot. But at a critical juncture, the player characters are frozen and brought in to see a mob boss…at which point, the action transitions to a party limo, and the trip to their next destination is used to plan out a heist. Before the resulting scavenger hunt is through, the group follows a series of clues leading into the heart of a hedge maze on Toronto Island where a dramatic confrontation sets the stage for the main series.

The “Session Zero” preview set expectations for the main event: gameplay was just as dependent on escape room style puzzles and location-specific clues as it was on dice rolling, and the game’s core cast of players (Kelly McLaughlin, Montgomery Martin, and Anjali Bhimani) would be assisted along their way by a rotating cast of guest players, starting with Ginny Di.

Escaping Woodcreek’s Curse with Flair and Panache

According to Tales From Woodcreek‘s lore, the townsfolk of Woodcreek discovered a glowing gem that granted the town’s founding fathers magic and riches. But after a time, the magic turned into a curse that robbed the town’s descendants of love, luck, and prosperity. The events of the show’s first season see three victims of the curse returning, in hopes of freeing themselves from their collective fates.

Every couple of episodes, a new player rotates in to assist them in this task: Iman Villani, Jessica Henwick, Shaun Majumder, and Wil Wheaton. And each episode has at least one major set piece drawing on different immersive disciplines, to take full advantage of the show’s aesthetic setting.

Scenes that lean heavier on escape rooms might revolve around finding the right books on a bookshelf when viewed under the right light, or hunting through a space to find keys to open an elaborate locked box. Scenes pulling on immersive theater might provide instructions to one-on-one interactions at the bottom of a teacup or searching a space for hidden clues, while more Larp forward scenes might involve conversing with a sentient book or navigating a combat scenario on a maze of tiles. Even more traditional tabletop mechanics make an appearance, with multiple variants of miniature-based combat, adapted to suit the location. Watching Tales From Woodcreek felt more than a little like a tour of the various immersive art forms.

Session Zero as Massively Multiplayer Conference Game

The first season of Tales From Woodcreek wrapped things up nicely for our heroes, so when the team took over the main stage at Game Con Canada to offer a preview of the next installment, the story underwent a bit of a time skip. The survivors of Woodcreek flourished: one survivor in particular named Edna Bickell in particular went on to become fabulously wealthy and built a manor filled with all sorts of curious nooks and crannies. Shortly after her passing, a collection of four particularly detestable relatives gathered to conduct a seance to find the will, claim their ill-deserved fortune, and receive exactly what they deserve.

Because this adventure played out on a conference stage, the players couldn’t go on a scavenger hunt…but the team was still able to take advantage of one location-specific resource: the audience themselves. Early on in the adventure, a phone starts ringing in the audience, provoking a snarky comment from Deborah Ann Woll, who returned as dungeon master…before she suggested that someone actually answer the phone. This was only the beginning of a remarkable display of puzzles involving audience participation that had viewers checking under their chairs for pieces of ciphers, and sharing a light across an entire row of the audience to read a message.

Eventually, the four players got exactly what they deserved, and took permanent residence at Bickell Manor thanks to some supernatural intervention, setting the stage for the new season and its Kickstarter campaign.

When the first season’s “Session Zero” showed off what the show would bring, it focused on location specific storytelling, escape room style puzzles, and a rotating cast of high profile guest stars. The second season’s “Session Zero” made similar promises…but also introduced more overt audience participation into the mix, bringing ARGs into the immersive fold. And while this promise may not persist through the show itself, the Kickstarter campaign is already delivering.

Tales From Woodcreek Teases the New Season with an ARG

Even before the Kickstarter campaign officially launched, teaser materials hinted that something might be afoot. Archival images added to early Kickstarter updates discuss the surprising disappearance of silver screen ingenue Mary Axeford. Letters from the studio’s production secretary Martha Green encourages readers to dig deeper, leading to the studio’s website. Solving the page’s central puzzle unlocks an entreaty from Ms Green:

If you found your way here, I hope you can be trusted.

I cannot bear to keep this secret any longer, but revealing the truth has left my life in mortal peril.

The Bickell Brothers empire is not what it seems.

Friends have met foul fates and must be freed. They each hold one piece of a key. I’ve given you the first one below. If you can find nine more…I believe you can set them free.

I don’t know what they open or how to decipher them, but I’ll reach out as soon as I can. However, I must be discrete. They’re watching and I can’t risk being detected.

Taped to the letter: a symbol, the first of many. Additional pieces have appeared after noticing peculiar details in Kickstarter updates, completing online puzzles, or watching creepy parody cartoons to completion.

But the rabbit hole goes deeper: sift through the campaign updates, and you might find Ms Green’s email, or other coded messages teasing what to expect. There’s even a deeper narrative to untangle, as Tales From Woodcreek‘s Scooby Doo parody has an ending that should be eerily familiar to those who also watched the con exclusive game.

A Well Polished Evolution of the Format

This isn’t the first time an actual play session played around with other immersive formats. ARGNet previously wrote about Ivan Van Norman’s experiments with Sagas of Sundry, which played with similar questions about what an actual play session could look like if DMs drew upon a broader immersive toolkit. While the series centered around the tabletop format Dread, where pulling tiles from a Jenga tower controls players’ fates, the towers in question loomed over players in evocative locations, and frequently drew on escape room and Larp mechanics to progress, away from the tower.

Van Norman continued to experiment with the space with “Off the Table” sessions at Dungeons and Dragons, taking players into a live recreation of Waterdeep for a hybrid mix of tabletop and Larp. That session was even teased with its own alternate reality game, Dungeons and Dragons’ No Stone Unturned.

But one of the things that makes Tales From Woodcreek feel so special is an intimate familiarity with the immersive fields it draws from. Moments drawn from immersive theater lean in on intimacy. Escape room style puzzles embrace tactile elements. Moments of audience participation are done with a focus on creating surprise and collective achievements as the proscenium wavers.

The Kickstarter campaign has already fully funded, but it’s worth following both to see how the ARG plays out, and to learn more of what’s to come for season two. So get caught up on the first season, and see what can be done to help solve the disappearance of Mary Axeford for season 2.

The post Tales From Woodcreek Turns Actual Play into an Immersive Sampler first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

Last week, one of the highlights of Marvel’s Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con centered around Ryan Reynolds ask a question in a full denim Deadpool cosplay, during the Avengers: Doomsday segment. Reynolds had apparently spent the day gallivanting around the convention center, anonymously meeting fans in the costume. But that wasn’t the only bit of Marvel fashion to catch fans’ attention at the panel, as Robert Downey Jr’s sartorial choices might have teased an alternate reality game.

Luckily, fans weren’t expected to unravel the threads of Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom themed jacket unassisted: early clues had already been seeded at a Latverian coffee popup months prior, at SXSW London.

Something Is Brewing: The Dom Latveria Coffee Popup

The Russo brothers started teasing that something would be happening at SXSW London shortly before their panels at the event, leading to the announcement that Dom Latveria Coffee would be serving small batch coffee and specialty drinks in Shoreditch, along with take-home bags of the brew. The popup was littered with easter eggs, ranging from a menu declaring “Richards was wrong”, to references to Latverian history like the Fortunov and Zefiro drinks, referencing the country’s former rulers and Victor Von Doom’s own clan, respectively.

The coffee branding also provided an early primer to Latveria’s runic script, with Dom Latveria Coffee transliterated in English and Latverian.

Decoding Latverian Fashion: The San Diego Comic-Con Panel

Which brings us back to San Diego Comic-Con. When Marvel’s panel started talking about Avengers: Doomsday, Robert Downey Jr walked out in a black suit jacket with neon green embroidery. The back of the jacket featured a minimalist depiction of Doctor Doom, while the cuffs, pockets, and lapel were covered in runic symbols expanding on the set introduced at SXSW London.

Using the previous Latverian coffee branding as a starting point, Christopher Millon (editwithego), was able to piece together the messages on Robert Downey Jr’s jacket, cracking all but one of the messages. Based on his best guesses, the runes translate to:

• “To The Victor” and “Go the Spoils” on the left and right cuffs;
• “Justice” and “Revenge” on the left and right pockets;
• “There is No Promise of Tomorrow” on the lapel; and
• An as-yet-untranslated word on the breast pocket that likely matches the pattern L?O?

Millon walked through the solving process on his social accounts, and then compiled the alphabet for future reference.

This effort has already proven helpful, since Robert Downey Jr subsequently posted on Instagram about his fashion choices for the weekend, including pairs of previously unseen shoes with Laverian messages written on them. Millon quickly translated the text to read “Valeria”, making yet another reference to Fantastic Four lore.

The Thin Line Between Easter Egg and Alternate Reality Game

While DC Comics might have more of a reputation for running ARGs for its movies, most notably with the multi-year campaign Why So Serious leading up to the release of The Dark Knight, Marvel properties have also been the subject of ARGs before. Mark of the Spider-Man set up multiple deaddrops of Peter Parker’s backpack in the lead-up to 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man. X-Men: Days of Future Past created websites and a mini-documentary depicting an alternate US history integrating the existence of mutants in the lead-up to release. But it’s also admittedly hard to tell when a teaser campaign is trying to layer in a little narrative and interactivity into its mystique, leveling up from easter eggs into a full on alternate reality game.

And as it stands, it’s hard to describe what’s transpired so far with Avengers: Doomsday as an alternate reality game. Learning Latveria’s runic script and checking out an in-universe coffee shop has given fans a moodboard of vaguely thematic words relevant to the MCU, but little more. And often, campaigns stop here because the goal of the campaign is to get fans speculating and engaged with the cryptic goings-on.

A fictional script doesn’t rise to the level of an alternate reality game on its own. Star Wars has long established fictional scripts like Aurebesh and Huttese that are used for everything from inserting easter eggs into cinematic signage to labeling trash cans in Disney Parks. Lord of the Rings and Star Trek famously established entire conlangs like Sindarin and Klingon, which are largely used to add richness to their respective stories. And it’s entirely possible that this campaign was just a cheeky way to introduce Latveria’s own script so that Avengers super-fans can catch the film’s visual easter eggs in theaters.

But when fictional scripts are deployed as part of marketing campaigns, it’s often with the intent to use it for something bigger. And the practice has become more common than you might think.

DC vs Marvel: A Tale of Two Fictional Scripts

Two of the more recent uses of fictional scripts in marketing come ripped from the pages of comic books. Back in 2022, Robert Pattinson’s stint as Batman gave early trailer viewers a riddle: “what does a liar say when he’s dead?” For those not familiar with the riddle, the answer was spelled out in a cipher text: “he lies still”.

This evolved into the Rata Alada ARG. Every few weeks, a new batch of riddles would be posted to the game’s central website, paired with a new message in cipher text gradually expanding fans’ familiarity with the script. The campaign culminated in the realization that the website fans were solving riddles on was actually canon to the film. Many of the riddles we needed to tackle through the ARG were challenges Pattinson’s Batman needed to tackle, including decoding the script itself.

Within the ARG, the Riddler’s script played second fiddle to the riddles themselves, largely serving as a way for the Riddler to taunt players along the way. But unlocking the full alphabet was still the central task to be completed, and served as a way for players to measure their progress along the way.

Later that same year, Disney Parks set up an in-universe booth at New York Comic-Con for Cosmic Rewind, their Guardians of the Galaxy ride. The ride itself is presented as an “Other-world Pavilion” at EPCOT, with the in-line entertainment leaning in on the intergalactic tourism theming. Accordingly, their NYCC booth was framed as the Wonders of Xandar, a cultural exchange booth where visitors are encouraged to exchange Earthly trinkets before sneaking into the Xandarian break room.

Scattered throughout the booth signage was a translation guide for the Xandarian language, helpful for piecing together a mini-narrative playing out through the messages scattered throughout the alien break room. The same language appears throughout the Disney Parks ride, offering additional nods to the broader franchise.

In both examples, it’s not the existence of the language that’s the point: it’s the in-universe application of that language, and the introduction of a literal secret language enabling communicating directly with super-fans. And so far with Avengers: Doomsday, we’ve only just learned how to read. So, the question remains: why did the Russo brothers find it necessary to teach us a new script?

Avengers: Doomsday is scheduled for release on December 18th of this year, so there’s still a few months to see whether we’ll be seeing more Latverian in the future. The first phase dropped at SXSW London and Marvel followed it up with a San Diego Comic-Con update, so it’s worth keeping an eye out at major conventions over the next few months.

The post Prelude to Doomsday: Are We Getting an Avengers ARG? first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

Every summer, Knott’s Berry Farms transforms its cobbled together collection of historic buildings into the thriving mining town of Calico, California in Ghost Town Alive. For the price of a day pass to the park guests can live out a day in the twilight of the nineteenth century, helping shape events in the town. And while the event isn’t explicitly billed as a live action role playing game it nonetheless serves as one of the best introductions to the space I’ve seen, for children and adults alike.

What sets Ghost Town Alive apart is how permissive it is in letting guests’ imaginations run wild. When I went in 2024, our group finished the day off having successfully convinced the town to switch their currency to a button-based economy, rigged an election for bandit leadership, cycled multiple members through the coveted role of mayor-for-the-hour, and also had a few members spend some less coveted time behind bars.

A Bit of Ghost Town History to Set the Stage

Ghost Town Alive started in 2016 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the park’s iconic ghost town. Knott’s Berry Farm started out as a farm stand, and expanded into a restaurant known for its fried chicken dinner. Once the wait times for the chicken dinner started to stretch into hours, Walter Knott started displaying Wild West memorabilia and transplanting actual historical buildings from nearby farms and mining towns to create the ghost town that became the focal point of the amusement park that would eventually emerge.

So, for 2016, Ghost Town Alive did just that – it populated the town of Calico with a series of colorful characters, and played out a drama that played out across the historic buildings. And the event was enough of a rousing success that it was brought back every year since, save for two years during the pandemic. Notably, every summer Ghost Town Alive plays out a different story set in the town, centered around a different day in the fictionalized town’s history.

Early Introductions to the Mechanics of Ghost Town Alive

While the exact events of Ghost Town Alive vary from year to year, the core structure remains the same: guests are welcomed to the town for Founders Day at a ribbon cutting, followed by an introduction to the various factions that make up the town. Individual characters might enlist guests to help them with anything from planning bank robberies to helping collect news for the town’s paper. The newspaper itself is released multiple times a day, serving as both periodic record of the day’s events and as a source of quests.

My particular adventure started off with a visit to Town Hall, where I was sworn in as an honorary citizen of Calico and asked to sign the town register. After doing that, our small group of newly minted citizens were shown a scale model of the town to help us get our bearings, with a stray button resting on it. Our guide helpfully explained that this was left by Willow “Buttons” McKitrick, whose clothes are adorned with all sorts of buttons and keeps dropping them around town. We were told she’d be happy if we returned any buttons we found to her, but also encouraged to consider using them as leverage: if we wanted to, we could demand rewards for their return, threaten to blackmail her with the buttons…practically anything we could imagine.

Shortly after, another member of our group proved how flexibly the buttons were used, as they discovered a stray button in the Calico bank and the teller insisted that Buttons should pay a fee for leaving the buttons there, leading our group to conspire to get buttons introduced as legal tender so the bank would owe interest for the button-based deposit. The townsfolk of Calico entertained this ludicrous idea, but didn’t make it easy to accomplish. In order to enact our plans of establishing a “Button Standard”, we needed to get signoff from one of the town’s lawyers Herbert Bird, convince the bank it was in their best interest to corner the market on the new alternative currency before it was formalized, and elect one of our cohort as mayor-for-the-hour.

While our particular situation was unique, much of Ghost Town Alive acts under similar models of escalation. Guests start out ingratiating themselves with townsfolk through small acts: an ad in the town paper might recommend checking out the Post Office to help with deliveries, joining the Calico Gazette to help report on all the news that’s fit to print in town, or joining the bank. And the initial requests are straightforward: pass a note to another townsperson (but don’t read it!), deliver a package, or find out if a character might be interested in sharing a dance at the hoe-down. But soon enough, things spiral until you’re trusted with bigger tasks to advance the day’s events like helping figure out how to safely crack a bank vault, or figuring out how to weaponize electricity to turn potato batteries into impromptu explosives.

It’s absolute and utter chaos, but the actors manage it surprisingly well. Certain narrative beats are established for the day, and characters enlist guests to help them hit those marks, by nudging tasks towards those key moments. But enough space is left in the day’s events to allow characters to enable and amplify emergent narratives driven by guest choices. And since tasks and missions frequently involved hunting down other cast members and passing on messages about what’s going on, the guests themselves are helping keep the cast abreast of the day’s progress.

From Smaller Stories to Larger Plotlines: Weaving It Together

Dozens of micro-narratives play out over the course of Ghost Town Alive, but typically there are a handful of plots that pull the whole town together for dramatic encounters and staged performances. For the year I attended, there were three central narratives that intertwined to form the core of the year’s hijinks and misadventures. Professor Watts came to town to showcase his innovations in electricity, and the town’s various bandit factions soon learned his technology could be used to help them break into the bank.

Watts himself wasn’t quite without fault himself, as he used the resulting bank heist and gunfight as an excuse to abscond with the town’s giant fish for scientific research purposes. The back half of the event became something of an investigation to determine who stole the fish, and to orchestrate its return. Relationships between the reluctantly allied bandit gangs frayed, leading to a democratic election to determine who would assume leadership of the crew.

Practically every character touched these major plot points in some way, like when Buttons was pulled in to support the bandits in hiding away the ill-gotten gains of a robbery, and gossip around town provided clear indications of when and where the next big narrative moment would be taking place, making it relatively easy to follow along even if you left Calico to hop on a roller coaster or two.

The Importance of Developing Immersive Herd Competence

In an article describing his experience at the 2024 Immersion Larp festival in Finland, Adrian Hon notes that within the Larp community, there’s a concept known as “herd competence”, where the presence of experienced Larpers can help novices adjust to the space quicker and more effectively, by modeling what good behavior looks like. What impresses me so much about Ghost Town Alive is how much of that behavioral modeling is handled by the structure of the experience itself.

The year I went, Ghost Town Alive was populated by a cast of almost 50 townsfolk experienced in role-playing and improv, guiding an audience that skews heavily towards children through how to dive into role-playing in a way that makes things fun for everyone. The day starts out with simple tasks to show how easy it can be to take an active role in storytelling, and rewards that early participation with recognition and deeper involvement in later tasks. Later, when major events like a shoot-out or bank robbery happen, guests can see how their involvement made that happen.

At the same time, more experienced role-players can push the boundaries of how much the experience allows, carving out spaces in the story for new and unexpected ways of getting from Founders Day ribbon cutting to hoe-down. It’s also an experience that builds with time, with the events from the prior year’s Ghost Town Alive echoing through the next.

These entry-level experiences are essential to the health of the immersive space – both as a way of inoculating younger fans with the herd competence necessary to support the space, and as a way of giving formative experiences that create fans that actively seek out this kind of experience. In the same way that Gravity Falls helped introduce a generation to alternate reality games, Ghost Town Alive is introducing a generation to live action role playing games.

An Expanding Market For Large Scale Play

Disney’s Galactic Starcruiser experience may have closed, but there’s an expanding number of alternatives that explore similar corners of large scale roleplay. People Make Games documented their experience with Wasteland Weekend, a Mad Max style Larp in the Mojave Desert back in 2023, and the same company expanded into a cyberpunk sister experience called Neotropolis that has been adopted by corners of the escape room industry. Secret City in Toronto has also been testing the waters with the horror experience Where Dark Things Dwell, as well as the recent edition of Lost & Found, also set in a historic village.

And while this isn’t a new thing – organizations like the Society for Creative Anachronism, large scale Larps like Bicolline, and even interactive installations like MagiQuest have been around for decades. But there does seem to be a rise in this sort of collective play, as even minigolf courses are getting narrative layers to interact with. And early experiences with games like Ghost Town Alive make it easier to adopt to the broader array of experiences available.

Getting the Most Out of Your Ghost Town Alive Trip

Participation in Ghost Town Alive is included in the price of admission to the parks, so all that’s necessary is to buy a park pass – there’s a considerable discount for buying tickets in advance (with day pass tickets ranging from $65-$70, as long as you buy early enough), but you’ll likely want to consider the all day dining upsell priced at $35 for the day, which entitles parkgoers to an entree and a side every 90 minutes for the length of the day. Make sure to bring a water bottle and hat because it can get hot.

For the best experience, try and get there in time for park opening to catch the ribbon cutting at 10am, and if you find yourself out of sorts, feel free to ask one of the costumed characters about the gossip around town – they’ll likely point you in the direction of some fun, and even offer a reminder of the next big narrative event coming up. Also stop by the Calico Gazette office at regular intervals, because the paper is a great way to get up to speed on the hijinks fellow attendees are up to. Beyond that, get creative with your interactions, as the cast is there to play along.

A Purely Optional Primer on Past Founders Day Past

Every Founders Day is different, so there’s no expectation going into the experience that visitors have any history of the town. But one of the perks of Ghost Town Alive using an amusement park as its setting is that past events are incredibly well documented, making it possible to experience its full run, vicariously. It’s only been a few days since the 2026 season began, and there are already more than a few hour long videos featuring the new plotline, as the town of Calico eagerly awaits the opening of a time capsule from the town’s founding 100 years prior. So if this article piqued your curiosity, here are a few resources to dive into the town’s fictional past.

2016 – A Forged Deed Indeed
The first Ghost Town Alive saw the Mayfield gang roll into town with a deed for the town, leading to a mayoral race for the fate of the city. In the finale, Ox Mayfield rolls into town, breaks his family out of jail, and hijacks a locomotive to escape the town. (Westcoaster coverage) (Westcoaster finale coverage)

2017 – The Raven’s Chase
The Mayfields are trying to take over the town yet again, and steal the deed to the town…and the Mayfields actually are the town’s real owners? Someone hid a series of mysterious markings across the town of Calico, and piecing together the clues leads to Tiny Mayfield’s diary where he admits to framing his family. The season ends with Peg Leg Cinch finding gold (Westcoaster coverage) (Westcoaster finale coverage)

2018 – The Case of the Fool’s Gold
The year prior, the town discovered a giant gold nugget, which was used to – you guessed it, purchase the deed to Calico. Over the course of Founders Day, townsfolk realize it was pyrite, all along leaving ownership of the town up to a vote. Meanwhile, the bank teller was secretly a bandit himself, and provided greedy townsfolk with puzzle-laden instructions on how to rob the bank. The season ended with the discovery of a list of the town’s seven founders, including Hop Wing Lee, the sole survivor. (Westcoaster coverage) (Westcoaster finale coverage)

2019 – The Cavalry Arrives
The Mayfields are back, but this time it’s not the town sheriff stopping them: the US Cavalry is in town, scouting out locations for a new fort. They warn the town of the Mad Bucks gang, and convince the town to trust their valuables to their care…unfortunately, the cavalry turns out to be Mad Bucks gang in disguise, and the Mayfields help capture the Mad Bucks, returning everyone’s property. A multi-month scavenger hunt led the town of Calico to finding “Pop” Wing Lee’s treasure…a picture of his granddaughter, Hop Wing Lee. (Westcoaster coverage) (Westcoaster finale coverage)

2022 – X Marks the Spot…But For What?
With its post-pandemic return, Calico Founders Day starts off as the actual cavalry arrives, and discovers a treasure chest left by the bandit Black Bart. Before even tracking down what the map leads to, the town splits into factions fighting over possession of the buried treasure, with townsfolk competing in mini-games to score points for their faction of choice. This also marks the beginning of park guests getting to throw their cowboy hats in the ring for the role of mayor of Calico. For the finale, a scavenger hunt leads to Black Bart’s treasure: two coins that serve as map to the real treasure. (Westcoaster coverage) (Westcoaster finale coverage) (FunnelcakeBlog video)

2023 – The Electoral Circus is in Town
The town sheriff and mayor are both missing for the season, leaving law and order in question in the town of Calico. The sheriff retired, while the former mayor left to try and catch a giant catfish nicknamed “The Admiral”. As a result, law and order is up for a vote, because Calico believes firmly in the democratic process. Taking advantage of that gap in leadership, the circus is in town without getting a single permit to perform.
(Inside Universal coverage) (FunnelcakeBlog video)

2024 – Catfish Burglary
The year featured in this article centered around the theft of the former mayor’s prized catfish “The Admiral”, caught and mounted for all the town to see. Professor Watts turned out to be the culprit, hoping to use the fish for his experiments. The Mayfields got jealous about all the electioneering from prior years, and held their own election for leader of the gang. (Inside Universal coverage) (FunnelcakeBlog video)

2025 – The Gold Mine Dried Up?
After years of rotating through hourly mayors by election, Sacramento sent in a new mayor from the town…and it turns out, it’s the old mayor, finally back from his fishing expedition! Only this time, he’s serving as deputy mayor under Pearl Parnell. The town also has to grapple with the Calico gold mine running dry. (Inside Universal coverage) (FunnelcakeBlog video)

Thanks to Reality Escape Convention, for helping assemble the crew for my first Ghost Town Alive experience.

The post One of the Best Larps I Ever Played Was at a Theme Park first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

The new Game Changer ARG just launched, but it’s not tied to the newly released season of the show. Instead, it’s a community challenge for backers of the Game Changer Home Edition Kickstarter campaign, which is itself playing out as a play-at-home edition of Game Changer, where the points actually do matter because they unlock additional upgrades to the game.

The current challenge: figure out how to leave a voicemail on the Game Changer Hotline. Sounds simple enough…but the challenge is actually a multi-layered puzzle adventure that asks players to do everything from escaping a virtual greenroom to identifying randomized clips from past episodes, on the fly.

…and yes, if you’re looking for answers, scroll to the bottom of the article and you’ll find a few.

Wait, “Welcome Back?” This Isn’t Game Changer’s First ARG?

Dropout’s hit variety show Game Changer is structured so that its players are presented with a completely different game show every episode, so it’s no surprise that this isn’t Game Changer‘s first puzzle rodeo. For the show’s fifth season, the show’s host Sam Reich (or rather, his evil magician counterpart Sam Dalton) locked three contestants in the show’s greenroom, forcing them to complete an escape room to free the real Sam Reich and escape with their lives intact.

Over the next few seasons, fans picked up on suspicious details and thought the show was running an alternate reality game on multiple occasions…a trend that continued until near the end of season 7, when the show finally did run an ARG by hiding a series of puzzles in playable minigames featured in prior episodes.

As players progressed through the game, they learned that frequent guest Brennan Lee Mulligan conspired with the video game developers to hide secret easter eggs in each of the games, culminating in the discovery of a secret phrase that would unlock a secret final episode after it was entered 100,000 times on a website. The result: the episode Samalamadingdong, where Sam Reich was subjected to an escape room of his own, riddled with references to past shows.

Game Changer Home Edition and the Game Within a Campaign

Shortly before Game Changer launched its eighth season, the Dropout team presented fans with yet another surprise: a crowdfunding campaign for a “home edition” of the game, featuring playable versions of three particularly beloved episodes of the show:

• Bingo (s06 e05), where players are trying to guess how other people will respond to prompts;
• Name a Number (s05 e04), where players bid on challenges before knowing what the numbered bids actually mean; and
• Sam Says (s04 e01, s05 e01, and s06 e03), a modified game of Simon Says designed to catch players in all sorts of clever loopholes.

Smosh and Parlor Room ran playthroughs of the home edition games to give fans a chance to see the home edition versions in action, and the campaign has already raised over $5.5M from over 38,000 backers as the campaign nears its June 6th cutoff date.

What makes this campaign particularly notable is that it acts as its own version of Game Changer, with daily prompts providing backers with multiple opportunities to play along at home. One early prompt, for example, asked something fairly simple: at least 300 players needed to give their name and phone number, no questions asked. Players who responded to that prompt were given a follow-up task yesterday, informing them that they would be getting phone calls from a number ending in -GAME within the next 24 hours. In order to score points, at least half of those called would need to answer the phone by saying, “Hello Game Changer, I’ve been here the whole time.” Over the past month fans have created edible arrangements of the Game Changer logo, submitted fake bird calls, written Sherlock Holmes fanfiction, and even replayed some of the minigames used for the original alternate reality game.

One of the key challenges with Kickstarter campaigns for projects with built-in audiences is the vast majority of the project’s most die-hard fans are going to back on day one…and while stretch goals offering new perks can help incentivize sharing the campaign, the most ardent supporters are left on the sidelines with nothing left to do.

Luckily, a number of crowdfunding campaigns solved this problem, by turning the campaign itself into a spectacle. Machine of Death did it by offering comedic backer tiers like the “Goat Stare” level (where goats would stare at your copy of the game before it’s mailed), while campaigns like Exploding Kittens gave fans lighthearted achievements to unlock. Many of the puzzle Kickstarter campaigns featured on ARGNet have used puzzles to keep early backers engaged, with Maze of Games hiding puzzles in interviews, and PostCurious added secret puzzle perks rewarding solvers with free pins or even a chance to get written into the game as a minor character.

The Game Changer Home Edition campaign has dabbled in a little of everything: to date, three backers have supported the campaign at the “Cuck” tier of support, where for $2,500 they get absolutely nothing from Dropout. At the same time, a number of challenges have tasked players with writing game prompts for Kickstarter Community expansions to the game. And then, there’s the puzzles. Which brings us to the Game Changer: Home Edition Challenge Hotline ARG itself.

How Hard Can It Be To Leave A Simple Voicemail?

Earlier today, the Game Changer: Home Edition campaign dropped a deceptively simple challenge: before Friday at 8pm PT, someone needs to leave a voicemail message on the Game Changer Challenge Hotline, available at US/Canada phone numbers, or through an online portal. As a reward for completion, players will earn 10 points to upgrade the final Game Changer take-home experience. Typically, Game Changer: Home Edition challenges have been worth between 1-3 points and are only intended to last for a single business day, so it can’t be as easy as calling up the number and getting patched through immediately.

So far, players have managed to penetrate three layers of the experience, with no strong sense of how far the rabbit hole goes. Again: if you’re looking for answers, they will be included at the bottom of the article.

The First Phase: Navigating the Phone Tree
The first layer is relatively straightforward, and can be tackled solo by most players. The phone tree presents a number of comedic options: a daily horoscope, a sincere apology from Grant O’Brien, samples of bird calls, a number of lighthearted operator help desks, and “behind the scenes access”.

The “Behind the Scenes Access” option provides a series of three factual questions drawing upon information scattered throughout the other menu options. Getting all three questions correct unlocks additional phone tree options.

The Second Phase: If At First You Don’t Succeed…

The next phase of the experience is a bit more open-ended, with three puzzles themed around the Aviary, Deja Vu, and the Greenroom. Completing each of these puzzles unlocks one third of a message that spells out the next step of the puzzle trail.

The Greenroom is a particularly poignant phase of the experience, as it recreates the Escape the Greenroom in audio format, tasking players with guiding Lily Du through a series of three virtual puzzle rooms that resolve to three-digit answers. It even has a surprise appearance from a tied up Sam Reich, reprising his role as damsel (or dapper dude) in distress. Putting together these clues gives a floor to hand off to the Elevator Operator, to reach the Top Floor.

The Third Phase: Name That Clip

After reaching the top floor, Game Changer fans are presented with a rapid-fire series of audio clips from prior episodes of the show, and are asked to identify which season and episode each clip came from. Only after getting three correct answers in a row are players…placed in “hold routing”.

Players are currently trying to puzzle through what to do next. At least one prior mission hinted that there might be something hidden, as the Survive the Maze challenge helpfully noted “while you’re escaping the maze, keep an eye o0ut for hidden secrets…there might still be something you missed the last time you went down there.”

Players are actively solving puzzles in the comments section of the Game Changer challenge, and on the r/Dropout subreddit. Both sources have been beyond helpful in compiling some of the below information, for those of you looking for solutions.

Note: in the time it took to write this article, a solution was found in the snares. However, additional audio clips have been added, and it now takes five correct answers to proceed.

Solutions and Helpful Resources

Phase 1:
Horoscope: the daily horoscope instructs you to transform all of the answers below.

Challenge 1: sum up Grant’s apologies to 12, and reverse it for 21
Challenge 2: check out the Surgical Operator and get 39 cc’s, reversed for 93
Challenge 3: check out the Forklift Operator and get the answer in pounds: convert to kilograms and get 298, and then reverse for 892

Phase 2:
The puzzles here can be found in Deja Vu (1 of 3), the Aviary (2 of 3), and the Greenroom (3 of 3).

Deja Vu: dial 66-71, and trigger “deja vu” messages with one word missing. Track what was removed and get the instruction switch / board / 4 / 1 / 2 / 8.
Enter that number with the Switchboard Operator and get go / top / is / zero / repeat / at

Aviary: Match the numbers mentioned in Bird Calls from the first phase with the birdcalls in the Aviary to get 6243.
Dial that in at The Aviary and get to / floor / nine / one / first / the

Greenroom: This is a series of three number based puzzles.
Room one: count the sides to get 586
Room two: follow the directions as indicated to spell out 926
Room three: use the T9 phone code to spell out ONE ZERO SEVEN
After that, Lily finds a slip of paper with the / it / two / and / digit / end

Stitching those parts as directed spells out go to the top floor it is nine two zero one and repeat first digit at end. Follow those directions and give the Elevator Operator the number 92019

Phase 3:
Below is an incomplete cheat sheet to work through the clip challenge, for the words that appeared in the first phase.

– …love child between The Grinch and Jared Kushner: 0104
– …how bad are Sam’s impressions: 0105
– …you can eat glue: 0202
– …cut this part so I sound cool: 0405
-…these motherfuckers have glasses: 0407
– …he best flavor: fruit punch: 0507
– …the finished product is disappointing but we had a good run: 0513
– …the 90s called they want a challenge tramp stamp
– …Christmas throne: 0703
– …getting fed grapes: 0708
– …Chainsmokers: 0710
– …I’m busting: 0801

Calacene created a more robust collaborative Google Doc collecting the full list posted to the Kickstarter comments, which appears to be drawing on the full Game Changer catalog of episodes.

I’ve been able to confirm that “2324” is the answer to the next step after making it through the hold music, unlocking the ability to leave a voicemail message, and the following congratulatory message.

The post Close Enough: Welcome Back, Game Changer ARG first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

Last month, people started noticing a an advertisement for Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire popping up across the internet, advertising amazing deals on furniture. The only indication this wasn’t a low-budget, grainy commercial for a local furniture store is an A24 logo that pops up in the lower right corner of the spot towards the tail end of its run. This video kicked off the viral marketing campaign for the studio’s upcoming film The Backrooms, which releases this coming Friday. And over the past few weeks, the campaign has offered a number of chances for fans to “noclip” into the film’s world.

The Quick Backstory For The Backrooms

The Backrooms started its life as a creepy internet photograph of unknown provenance. The image depicts a seemingly abandoned retail space with yellowed wallpaper and carpeted flooring lit by the harsh fluorescent glare of the overhead lights. And for years, the photograph was passed around message boards without context as shorthand for “creepy liminal spaces”.

Eventually, the image would be posted to 4chan with the accompanying text, creating a basic vocabulary for The Backrooms:

If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in

God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you

A number of creators would return to this concept, but Kane Parsons (posting under Kane Pixels) in particular went on to create a series of videos expanding on the concept that would help define the aesthetic and rules of the world for fans. In this interpretation, The Backrooms is a parallel dimension filled with a seemingly endless maze of hallways and corridors, dotted with “Null Zones” that serve as semi-permeable barriers to clip in and out of the real world. The rules of time and space don’t behave the same in the Backrooms, and objects flowing through the Backrooms might reappear in our world at incongruous times.

According to Parsons’ interpretation, an organization known as the Async Research Institute discovered how to access The Backrooms decades ago. Over the years, the company sent employees in hazmat suits to explore the spaces, in much the same way the SCP Foundation uses Class-D personnel to research otherworldly dangers. Getting lost in the liminal spaces isn’t the only threat to these employees, as a number of dangerous lifeforms stalk the hallways of the Backrooms, including a bacterial entity often referred to as “The Lifeform”.

Finding the Backrooms, and the Move to the Silver Screen

While the original Backrooms photograph went unidentified for years, lost media fans gradually pieced together the photograph’s history, which appears to have been incorporated into the film itself. And that story starts in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, at 807 Oregon Street. Between 1958 – 1994, the address was home to Rohner’s Furniture, a small business that was a fixture in the town since as early as 1928. Rohner’s abandoned their furniture business in 1994 and the building was acquired by Hobbytown USA in 2003, when the company started blogging about their renovations efforts. One of those progress photos was the now iconic Backrooms photo. Recently, the Oshkosh Public Library created a video going through their own archives to help flesh out this story.

And so, when A24 partnered with Kane Parsons to turn his take on the Backrooms into a feature length film, he drew upon the photograph’s newly resurfaced provenance to place the film’s Null Zone bridge to the Backrooms inside Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a struggling furniture business. Transplanted from Oshkosh to San Jose California, the adaptation is nonetheless paying homage to the image’s history…a theme that comes up quite a bit, in the viral marketing campaign to follow.

The Viral Marketing Begins: Faxed Flyers and BBS Servers

A curious detail you might have picked up on from the Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire advertisement mentioned at the start of this article is that the icon number next to the phone number wasn’t a normal telephone. Instead, it was the icon for a fax machine. Dialing up the number with a fax machine printed out a flyer for The Backrooms‘ furniture store, dated May 17th, 1990, along with instructions to the store’s exact cross streets.

The address actually exists, and a few players took pilgrimages to the location to see if there was anything there. Somewhat fittingly, all they found was an abandoned building that used to be a Spirit Halloween. But at least at first, this particular trail seems to have been abandoned.

However, a few weeks later, the A24 store released a t-shirt for Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire featuring the same fax number. And after checking a second time, fans realized that the message printout changed to an advertisement for the South Bay Bulletin Board. The message, now dated May 18th, 1990, provided yet another number to call.

This second number led to an automated recording explaining that the South Bay bulletin board has been down since 1991, but an archived version could be found at 408bbsarchive.net. Just as the initial furniture ad referenced the Backrooms origin story as a renovated furniture store, this abandoned archived bulletin board quite literally called back to the image’s history of floating around message boards as creepypasta. And again, the fandom hit a dead-end, as the archived page only gave fans the chance to enter their contact information.

The Bulletin Board Expands, Tying in South Bay History to the Backrooms

Fans didn’t have to wait too long, however, as the 408 BBS Archive messaged registrants letting them know they were approved for access to the original message boards and directory. Some of the messages contained within provided hints about objects that “noclipped” into the Backrooms. Trash is popping up in the Fremont parking lot, and it’s attracting seagulls. A concerned citizen reported the repeated disappearance of a local stop sign. There’s even an invitation to a meeting at the Santa Clara City Hall that makes passing reference to “Reverchon Ventures”, an easter egg for Parsons’ other YouTube series, The Oldest View.

The centerpiece of the BBS update, however, was the events schedule for Recycle Bookstore, where Dr Mary Kline has a signing for her new book The Window Within scheduled. Recycle Bookstore still exists, BBS event listing references its old location, as that location was vacated in 1998.

Numerous hints have been made that Dr Mary Kline (played by Renate Reinsve) will be significant to the film, including a freeze-frame image of her book inserted into the film’s first trailer.

Backrooms Popups, Zines, and Async Null Zones (Oh My!)

A slightly more actionable discovery from the revised BBS site are two .TXT files, listed in the site directory: enter.txt, and access.txt. The former file became available with the site’s refresh, providing a link to enter.backrooms.mov, with no further context. The link led to a registration site for a Los Angeles area popup where fans could explore an immersive popup for the film. Shortly after, access.txt encouraged fans to buy tickets for the film at backrooms.mov, with the chance to purchase an exclusive “local 408” hat as a reward for using the secret link.

The special hat isn’t the only exclusive Backrooms merch on offer, as AAA24 members will be receiving The Yellow Wallpaper Zine, an A24 zine that hints it will feature a “surprise you’ll get to piece together”. There have even been reports of people dressed up in Async hazmat suits, marking up walls with tape to indicate the presence of Null Zones. The most recent of these sightings even featured another famous liminal space, photographed in 2019. In the video, an Async employee is taping up a wall at the real world location digitally recreated in Kane Parsons’ first Backrooms upload.

Hearkening Back to An Earlier Era in More Ways Than One

The viral campaign for The Backrooms has gone to great lengths to pay homage to the history of its source material, as well as the aesthetic of the time we’re noclipping into. Referencing the original photograph, The Backrooms promotions center around a struggling furniture store in the 1990s. As a nod to the photograph’s initial spread, fans are asked to explore an archived BBS server. And leaning in on the ephemeral nature of the internet, practically every location referenced has changed. The address for Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire might have been intended to point towards a Spirit Halloween. The bookstore featured in the BBS moved locations is now a cannoli catering company. Even the fax number itself has changed its output.

But the campaign also hearkens back to an earlier era of viral marketing. The Backrooms may not have used its promotional efforts to tell its own narrative, but it did invite fans to explore the aesthetic and world of the film while maintaining an in-universe facade. We’ve seen this quite a few times in the past…from the time Prometheus teased its film in 2012 by having Peter Weyland deliver a TED Talk in the far future that was 2023. And we’ve seen it when Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hid paintings from the film around the world. Both of these campaigns happened during the peak of MovieViral.com‘s operations, which focused just as much on campaigns looking to slightly extend the world of their films as ones looking to make full-blown alternate reality games.

And it seems like, at least in horror, we’re starting to see a resurgence of this type of marketing campaign, ranging from Undertone‘s narrative puzzle trail to Exit 8’s hunt for the Smiling Man through NYC subway stations.

And even if projects like this don’t rise to the level of alternate reality game, it’s exciting to see teams blending the line between fiction and reality a little, to help their stories come alive.

The post The Backrooms Viral Marketing Noclips Into An Earlier Era first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

Jack Rogers and Norah Lane are getting married, and I was invited to attend their wedding reception! I don’t quite remember how I initially met them (it’s probably not important), but who can turn down a three-course dinner at Boston’s W Hotel to catch up with old friends. There’s even a few rumors going around that the bride might have designed a puzzle hunt for attendees, in lieu of a whirl around the dance floor.

Jack and Norah’s wedding reception is the central event for The Wedding Party, a dinner theater escape room initially created by Canadian Caper, as a popup event in 2015. The show has been running in Toronto since 2023 when Secret City Adventures adapted it into a more persistent experience, and recently expanded the show’s theatrical footprint to Vancouver and Boston. The show uses the structure of a wedding reception to deliver an experience that’s one part immersive theater, one part escape room with just a hint of live action roleplaying for attendees looking to lean into the experience.

Meeting (and Exceeding) Expectations: Building Narrative Scaffolding Around A Wedding

Most people reading this article have been to a wedding reception before, so the narrative beats and expectations of a wedding reception should be familiar. The evening starts out with the key members of the wedding party greeting attendees at the door, graciously accepting well wishes and engaging in light banter before ushering them into the banquet hall, offering hints of their highly distinct personalities.

Guests are encouraged to grab a drink at the cash bar, or settle in for the appetizer course before the wedding party offers up impassionate (and informative) wedding speeches that cement their characters in attendees’ minds, before the main course is served. While attendees eat, the wedding party runs a circuit across the tables engaging in light banter, before the main event: a puzzle hunt designed by the bride, with the goal of finishing up an hour later for dessert and the traditional cake cutting. If teams found themselves stuck at any point, the wedding party was on hand to offer the occasional nudge.

The Wedding Party‘s structure did an exceptional job of easing attendees into the experience. Brief introductions to the wedding party set the stage for a show that encouraged interactions with the cast, while the wedding speeches set up a few clues for the central narrative without asking much of attendees beyond enjoying the show. And the tableside visits provided a purely optional low-stakes opportunity to test the cast’s improv skills before the puzzle event commences.

Norah’s Puzzle Hunt: Elegant Puzzles That Promise Something For Everyone

Norah’s puzzle hunt is the central activity for the evening, challenging attendees to work together as tables of six to solve a series of seven puzzles. Each puzzle is unlocked by approaching a member of the wedding party and greeting them with the codephrase, “that was a lovely ceremony“, once the puzzle hunt begins. Some wedding party members have pen-and-paper puzzles to complete, while others might give a challenge for participants to complete.

After completing each of the seven challenges, tables are encouraged to enter their answers on a custom website, at which point…something happens that answers a few lingering questions about the event, and a new series of puzzles are unlocked. The night I attended, practically every table reached that first checkpoint, and at least half of all tables made it through the full suite of puzzles – a particularly impressive accomplishment considering this was a media night, and familiarity with puzzles varied from table to table.

Knowing the city’s reputation for puzzle fans, the Boston location also featured an extra set of bonus puzzles to uncover one final reveal before the cake-cutting so that even the most die-hard puzzlers barely finished in time.

For those who don’t consider themselves to be puzzle inclined, it’s worth noting that when I’m using the term “puzzles” to describe The Wedding Party‘s challenges, that definition is highly flexible. Before the night was over, I found myself investigating event decor, grilling wedding party members for information, and even delivering an impromptu speech myself to help get all the information our table needed to arrive at the correct answer at the end. And it is possible to see The Wedding Party on your own, but as the puzzle hunt’s teams of six are determined by your table, it’ll likely be more fun if you take at least one friend along for the ride.

A Taste of Drosselmeyer: The Green Door Labs Connection

If The Wedding Party sounds structurally similar to Boston’s other marquis immersive puzzle event Club Drosselmeyer, that’s no coincidence. While Secret City Adventures initially created the event for the Toronto market, they partnered with Club Drosselmeyer creators Green Door Labs to bring the show stateside, and there’s considerable overlap in casts between the two shows. In explaining the collaboration’s origin story, Kellian Adams Pletcher notes,

The Wedding Party was not written by me. It was written by our friend Errol Elumir, and it’s a great show…and actually, the show is an awful lot like Drosselmeyer in the way that it’s set up. And so there’s this sort of puzzle-play format that is starting to coalesce that I’m really excited about. And the thing that I’m even more excited about, this puzzle-play format can’t live if I’m the only person in the world who writes it…

…which is why I’m really excited when other people build beautiful work that I care about and I’m excited about and that I want to produce. And Errol is only the first of many other people whose work I would really like to produce here in Boston.

Club Drosselmeyer‘s take on that puzzle-play format is a bit more open-ended in its design than The Wedding Party. Attendees of the former event can choose to treat the World War II era Nutcracker adaptation as a themed period party, joining a dance floor filled with swing dancers as they dance to a live band, or sitting back and enjoying a series of live performances. At the same time, puzzlers chase down a cast of over a dozen characters, solving puzzles and completing tasks to influence the night’s events at a breakneck pace.

The Wedding Party guides its attendees through a more linear experience, focusing on an immersive theater experience for the first half of the evening followed by a puzzle event for the second half. But with slightly larger teams and a three-course dinner to break things up, The Wedding Party ultimately feels a bit more leisurely an experience, even if it does have enough puzzles to keep even the most voracious solvers occupied and surprised until the final moment.

I’ve always viewed Club Drosselmeyer as the perfect way to introduce puzzle fans to live action role playing, as the format leans heavily on puzzles but stealthily rewards players for leaning in on the role-playing. The Wedding Party is targeting a slightly different crowd, by delivering an alternative to the murder mystery dinner party format. Deductive reasoning and investigation is still a major part of the gameplay experience, but leaning more heavily on puzzles to reveal a carefully constructed scenario makes for something that can fairly and reliably be solved over the course of an evening.

There aren’t many shows like The Wedding Party, and it’s worth checking out to experience a fresh take on the murder mystery dinner party format. It’s also an important experiment in socializing access to immersive puzzle events. Immersive theater has seen some of its main shows franchised out in the past, with Punchdrunk shows like Viola’s Room making its way from London to the United States and Sleep No More franchising out to Shanghai and Seoul. Escape rooms have expanded to multiple locations through franchise expansions and location transplants.

But the “puzzle-play” format hasn’t had many opportunities to build out local markets with multiple offerings. And hopefully this will be one of many to come.

Bookings Available For a Limited Time…For Now

While The Wedding Party has been running in Toronto since 2023, Boston’s engagement at the W Hotel is currently limited, with showtimes most Friday and Saturday nights through June 13th. And while the $149 price point is on the pricier side for immersive experiences, there aren’t many shows that bundle a three-course meal into the ticket price and the event ends up feeling like an intimate affair by the time the grand finale takes place.

Toronto and Vancouver have been extended to run through August 30th with showtimes on Saturday and Sunday. Reservations for all three locations can be made at Secret City Adventures’ dedicated page for The Wedding Party.

Note: ARGNet received a comped ticket to The Wedding Party.

EDITED 05/19 TO ADD: The Wedding Party has been extended through August 2nd, in Boston.

The post This Boston Wedding Party Takes “Save the Date” Literally first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

Back in November, ARGNet covered Searching for a World That Doesn’t Exist, a modern reinterpretation of Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow through the lens of a Minecraft Let’s Play video. This reframing of the classic horror story is particularly fitting, as the titular King in Yellow isn’t a typical eldritch horror. Instead, it’s a play capable of driving those exposed to it mad, serving as an early instance of cognitohazards.

Searching for a World That Doesn’t Exist ended with the protagonist Derek (playing under the handle d3rlord3) encountering the King in Yellow offscreen, and offering one final warning to protect Avery (TheMostMayo) from repeating his mistakes. And for a few months, that was where the series creator Wifies left things. But earlier this month, Wifies released the second part of his duology, Destroying A World That Doesn’t Exist.

As with the prior installation, Wifies’ two hour long video offered a summary of a considerably longer source material – this time, a fifteen hour long upload to Avery’s YouTube channel. But while the prior video was primarily told through Derek’s perspective, the first half of Destroying A World That Doesn’t Exist is told from a considerably more naive perspective.

Avery’s Perspective: Following in D3rlord3’s Footsteps

The first installment of Wifies’ King in Yellow reimagining starts with the warning, “whatever you do, at the crossroads, don’t turn left.” And as we finally begin to see Avery’s exploration of the world, he ignores these instructions and attempts to follow in D3rlord3’s footsteps. But when Avery crosses the threshold of the giant golden door, instead of being confronted with unseen horrors, he’s confronted by a single gold block…until turning around and finding himself in a room filled with doors.

Behind each door, Avery finds himself thrust into a different world, littered with signs of D3rlord3’s prior passage – items from his inventory appear like a trail of breadcrumbs, guiding Avery through puzzles he doesn’t quite understand. The first world he stumble across, for example, is a series of precarious mountain spires connected by wooden bridges. Upon crossing each bridge, mountains appear and disappear with no explanation. On one occasion, the only thing saving Avery from falling to his virtual death is a series of blocks previously placed by D3rlord3.

That is not to say that Avery isn’t engaging with his environment: in one world, he comes across a towering obelisk, with strange glyphs written on it, and recognizes the puzzle in place: “bro is speaking enchanting table”. And he’s right – the bricks spell out a message in Minecraft’s Galactic Alphabet, which often appears alongside the game’s enchantment table. The upper portion of the obelisk starts with – — – , the pattern used in the Galactic Alphabet for “end of sentence”. This provides a hint that the cigils need to be flipped upside down and reversed to be legible, resulting in the message “BELOW”.

Avery proceeds through many of these elaborately designed worlds and eventually finds the doorway leading to the next, guided by a trail of items. Sometimes, viewers can intuit the way forward themselves. In a world blanketed by a sea of red rolling hills, the landscape is broken up by a series of white houses. Avery focuses on the items inside the houses, missing the giant tiled arrows placed on the floor of each house, directing him where to go. Eventually it’s a crafting table in the distance that leads Avery to his next location. Only this table couldn’t have been placed by D3rlord3, since it appeared out of nowhere. There’s something else leaving a path of breadcrumbs for Avery to follow.

One particularly insidious world almost halts Avery’s journey entirely. Slightly over 2 hours into the raw footage, after navigating a series of underground canals, Avery stumbles across a cozy world occupied by a single church. A Yellow Sign often serving as harbinger of the King in Yellow hangs above the pew, and a book at the altar reassures Avery he’s safe here. And for the next twelve hours, Avery silently tends to the church. It’s only until he reads a sign left by D3rlord3 that he is broken from his reverie and proceeds onward.

That is not to say that Avery has no personal agency in progressing forward: one particularly intricate puzzle appears in the center of a lake in between six statues. Avery “solves” the puzzle by spending four minutes breaking through the netherite block that acts as the lock, before typing “stupid puzzle” into chat. Finally, around halfway through the video, Avery encounters D3rlord3. And during that conversation, he’s provided a link to the events leading up to their encounter, from Derek’s perspective, although the video has since been “deleted”.

Derek’s Perspective: Traversing Worlds and Solving the Unsolvable

After Wifies pulls up D3rlord3’s footage, viewers learn that Derek’s confrontation with the King in Yellow at the end of the prior chapter left him a shell of himself, incapable of looking away from his computer. And yet, he’s still capable of tackling the puzzles left in the worlds he’s exploring. Interrogating the rules of the world filled with mountainous spires, D3rlord3 figures out that the mountains operate as a variant of Conway’s Game of Life. Drawing on exhaustive knowledge of Minecraft game mechanics, D3rlord3 manipulates his game settings to reveal the intended solution to the puzzle at the center of the lake.

And after catching up with his encounter with Avery, D3rlord3 comes face to face with the physical manifestation of the King in Yellow: a pair of yellow orbs. The King in Yellow reveals his plan to enter the real world using Avery as a vessel, and discards D3rlord now that his purpose has been served. Up to this point, the puzzles were designed to be solvable. Whether by D3rlord3’s intellectual progression through the worlds or Avery’s assisted path, the King in Yellow wanted the pair to progress, so he could escape. But D3rlord3 served his purpose, and the King in Yellow transports him to a world with a closed golden door, with no intended path out.

There is no puzzle to be solved here – and yet, D3rlord3 takes advantage of esoteric details of how Minecraft works to glitch himself through the floor, where he finds a secret door that leads him to an abandoned village from a prior civilization that summoned the King in Yellow. And it’s in this village that D3rlord3 finds a book that helps him come up with a plan to prevent the King in Yellow’s influence from spreading, leading to a dramatic confrontation with a virtual manifestation of the cognitohazard.

It’s worth noting that this wasn’t fans’ first encounter with the abandoned village, nor was it their first time witnessing Wifies’ interpretation of the King in Yellow’s Minecraft manifestation. For that, we need to turn back to Minecraft Live.

Wifies Launched A King in Yellow Prequel ARG at Minecraft Live
Minecraft Live is an annual virtual event put on by Mojang Studios, offering a sneak peek at the company’s plans for the next year. For their March update, the company announced new game updates, real world activations, and even an upcoming Minecraft theme park. As part of the leadup to the main event with Mojang, Wifies recorded a brief explainer of his channel, which got interrupted by two mysterious robed figures.

Wifies went on to elaborate, “I think easily one of my favorite things about solving these mysteries is the fun of solving puzzles and working with my community to unravel these insane worlds that shouldn’t even exist. In fact, in this very segment and everything you’ve seen so far there are clues hidden for you, the viewer, to find. So if you’re curious, and you want to figure out what’s really happening, that the answer is out there. Waiting for you.” At the end of the video, a central URL for the game appeared: Wifies.net/MCLive, along with some enchanting table text leading to rules for the ARG, structured around five puzzles.

The five puzzles unlocked a series of audio logs investigating why a house appeared in their village, framed as a series of interviews conducted by someone named Epsilon. During the investigation, details begin to emerge: the town is preparing to summon the King in Yellow, using one of their own, Abel, as his vessel. One of Abel’s brothers, Ianius, begins to have misgivings about the summoning. And in the final video, we see video of him disappearing from the town and facing the King in Yellow’s physical manifestation – a giant floating eyeball.

This confrontation is inevitably why no one in the town except for Abel remembers him, and why “House 31” seemingly appeared from nowhere: it’s been there all along, they just forgot who used to live there. Ianius’ reservations also make him a likely source for the book D3rlord3 finds buried

Did Playing This ARG Qualify As A Cognitohazard?

In ARGNet’s prior article on Searching For A World That Doesn’t Exist, I mentioned how Wifies’ ARG subverted the nature of how we consume media through its strategic use of the Let’s Play format. The sequel doubled down on this clever subversion: at the time of this article, Searching For A World That Doesn’t Exist has 25 million views, and its sequel has 15 million views. And for the bulk of that viewtime, watching the events unfold is a passive experience: follow the breadcrumbs left by Avery that were left for him by both D3rlord3 and the King in Yellow himself.

A portion of the audience didn’t stop at Wifies’ explainer videos, however. Since the full 15 hour behind the gates video was uploaded directly to AveryTheMayo’s YouTube channel instead of hidden in a Google Drive folder, for instance, we now know that people opted to explore a more unfiltered experience over 1.6 million times, implying as many as 10% of viewers went on to expose themselves to a more unfiltered version of the cognitohazard. Luckily, the choice of also sifting through D3rlord3’s footage was taken from us. On D3rlord3’s Google Drive, a PDF entitled Notice of Removal states:

The footage in the folder belonging to ‘Derek Hutchins’ has been temporarily seized for investigation by the US D.M.S.. We thank you for your patience.

The United States Department of Metaphysical Sciences (US D.M.S.) intervened during some of Wifies’ earlier coverage, and shielded the more curious from engaging with some of the King in Yellow’s more overt manifestations.

Players who engaged at this level spent a significant amount of time engaging with Wifies’ world, but the nature of that engagement still resembles Avery’s approach more than Derek’s. Luckily, time spent alone isn’t enough to drive one to madness: after all, the footage confirms that Avery spent over 12 hours hanging around a church of the Yellow Sign and was still considered an ideal vessel, while Derek’s mind was fractured beyond repair after a brief attempt to comprehend the King in Yellow.

A select audience did run the risk of a more direct attempt at comprehending the King in Yellow with the Minecraft Live alternate reality game, however. In it, Wifies directly challenged his audience to both solve his series of puzzles, and piece together why “House 31” suddenly appeared in the middle of a village of cultists worshipping the King in Yellow. Making things worse, they were encouraged to directly enter Minecraft to solve the puzzle, bringing them closer to the place where this interpretation of the King in Yellow was looking to tempt the curious with his (game)play.

Far fewer people took the extra steps capable of bringing them closer to madness, of course – the final audio log has been viewed just shy of 20,000 views, to date. It’s much more tempting to have it all explained, with Freshi’s walkthrough of the ARG receiving over 400,000 views. But their efforts left a trail of breadcrumbs for others to follow, offering up more potential vessels for the King in Yellow.

This also offers up an interesting interpretation of D3rlord3’s seemingly triumphant confrontation with the King in Yellow at the end of the series. His ultimate plan involved offering up his corrupted mind as vessel for the King in Yellow, allowing for mutually assured destruction. And at first, we see that plan working, with the King in Yellow’s physical manifestation disintegrating…until Avery returns, offering up a far more attractive vessel. With his return, dozens of eyes appear, hungry for a new home.

D3rlord3 eventually takes Avery out of the equation…but even without Avery, wouldn’t one of the millions of viewers Wifies brought to the table with his video offer up a tempting vessel to help the King in Yellow (and his story) live on?

None of These Styles of Gameplay Are Wrong

It’s tempting to look at this article’s comparison of Avery and D3rlord3 and assume that one of their playstyles is better than the other – that there’s something inherently superior about being part of the vanguard unlocking (and sometimes even directing) the story for those to follow after. That couldn’t be further from the truth, and I’ve previously argued in favor of designing with the casual spectator in mind.

If watching a video explaining the events of an ARG is enough for you to enjoy it? That’s great, and hopefully the broader context of how it came to be helped contribute to that enjoyment. If what you see makes you curious enough to do a little digging and skim through the game to see if there’s something the summary missed? That’s great too, and hopefully you end up feeling like those efforts were rewarding. And if you start poking around at puzzles or writing guides to help others navigate the game’s complex web? You guessed it: that’s great as well.

If you’re interested in watching Wifies’ reimagining of The King in Yellow, check out part 1 and part 2. For more on the Minecraft Live ARG, Freshi’s explainer video is a great start, and the ARG’s Google Doc can help fill in the missing details.

The post Return of the King in Yellow Minecraft ARG first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

It’s January 16th, and I’m sitting in a classroom on the MIT campus. Hours earlier, I joined thousands of puzzlers attending a paranormal research conference called CRYPTIC, where an intrepid researcher named Burnham proved that cryptids do exist…but in the process, opened up a rift to another world that threatened our very existence. The only way to close the rift and save the world: befriend that world’s puzzle monsters (PuzzMon) to save the world. This is the 2026 MIT Mystery Hunt, an annual puzzle event that attracted over 5,000 puzzlers to spend a long weekend tackling a series of wildly creative puzzles.

Shortly after the conference, the PuzzMon.world website went live. By the time the evening rolled around, our team had already solved a handful of puzzles. I had just come off working on a puzzle themed around fanfiction tropes and the Omegaverse, and took a break from puzzles to explore the world of PuzzMon through a fully playable 16-bit video game world to unlock more puzzles for our team.

All of a sudden, two teammates settle down at my table and dump a box of black jigsaw puzzle pieces on the table, and start slowly matching pieces. I ask them what they’re working on: they explain it’s a puzzle called Starry Night. This is more interesting than what I was working on, so I drop everything and join them. Curious, I ask: “our team was given a set of two blacklights in our team’s welcome kit…do you think there’s secretly UV ink on the puzzle?”

My suspicion was correct: there was secretly UV ink on the puzzle pieces, and under the right lighting the puzzle is much easier to complete. In under an hour we have a fully assembled jigsaw puzzle, covered in ultraviolet stars and astrological signs. But that’s only the first step of the puzzle, and for the next hour or so we would try and figure out how to connect the dots to transform those hidden symbols into a word or phrase that is the final solution to the puzzle.

Puzzles at the MIT Mystery Hunt can take just about any form, so over the event’s 45 year history the teams running the event have used it as a platform to push the limits of what a puzzle can be. And because the prize for a team winning the MIT Mystery Hunt is the responsibility for running the next year’s hunt, every team has a slightly different answer to what that spectacle entails. For 2026, the puzzles themselves served as center for the spectacle. But be warned, as this article will spoil puzzle mechanics of a number of puzzles for those looking to solve after the fact.

This Puzzle Has Been Here The Whole Time: The Art of the Cameo
One of the earlier puzzles in this year’s Mystery Hunt is titled This Puzzle Was Here the Whole Time, and guided players through a series of puzzles referencing episodes of Dropout’s hit variety show Game Changer. The initial phase of the puzzle featured four mini-puzzles that used mechanics referencing back to those episodes, resulting in an instruction to search for a particular phrase.

The top result for that query was a review of Escape the Greenroom (an escape room themed episode) on the blog Room Escape Artist, with three seemingly incongruous images added to the review. Overlaying those images over the prior puzzles spelled out a message, leading to a particularly fitting answer: CAMBRIDGE. Entering that word into the hunt’s answer checker didn’t solve the puzzle, however. Instead, it triggered a link to an unlisted YouTube video for teams, with a message from Dropout CEO and Game Changer host Sam Reich, himself.

Buried in Reich’s snarky response is a cryptic clue instructing solvers on the final step necessary to find the puzzle’s true solution. Amusingly, the puzzle’s solution document notes its initial design had to be scrapped because those elements were used to launch an actual Game Changer ARG, last year.

This Puzzle Was Here the Whole Time highlights two of the ways many hunt teams chase spectacle in puzzle design: enlisting nerdy celebrities to make puzzle cameos, and finding unexpected places to hide puzzles.

In making a cameo in a puzzle themed around his own show, Sam Reich has joined an impressive line of nerdy celebrities who made cameos in past Mystery Hunts. In 2022, Weird Al Yankovic congratulated puzzlers on completing a cooking-themed metapuzzle themed around his music. In 2024, Barenaked Ladies frontman Ed Robertson offered a similar congratulatory message for a puzzle based around one of their songs. Even former American National Standards Institute chairman Oliver Smoot joined in on the fun, narrating the 2020 puzzle Tall Tales as a nod to the time in college he established his own height as the unit of measurement for a campus bridge.

However, it’s not just about sneaking celebrities into puzzles: it’s also a question of where puzzles can be hidden. Room Escape Artist isn’t the only place Mystery Hunt puzzles have been hidden. Alex Rosenthal took advantage of his relationship with TED to hide secret puzzles in both TED-Ed videos as well as a TED talk he delivered on puzzle hunts, while Cards Against Humanity co-founder Josh Dillon helped print up a custom set of official game cards for a Mystery Hunt event.

Even reference sites for the MIT Mystery Hunt have been retrofitted into puzzles: in the puzzle Haddock Walk, a puzzle created a mirrored version of the MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle database with slight changes made to serve as base for a puzzle.

Lets Get Physical: The Care and Feeding of Voracious Puzzlers
The Starry Night puzzle was a particularly involved answer of how physical puzzles can be used to create spectacle. The Boxaroo team that made the puzzle published a write-up of how that puzzle came to be, from ideation to mass production. But spectacle in physical puzzles doesn’t always involve high production costs: for this year’s puzzle Da’ Bomb, spectacle centered around watching teammates make poor life choices.

Setup for the puzzle was relatively simple: teams were provided with a series of ten numbered plastic cups with hot sauces, and charged with identifying the sauces and pairing them up with ten audio clips pulled from episodes of Hot Ones, with Sean Evans. The goal: identify the hot sauces used, look up their ingredient lists, and use the spice scale at the bottom of the puzzle page to “extract” an answer. And while a large part of the spectacle of Da’ Bomb involved watching teammates tenderly dab droplets of hot sauce on their tongues with toothpicks, even the puzzle’s liability waiver got into the fun, comedically noting that:

Da’ undersigned acknowledges that they are voluntarily choosing to consume products that may contain a high concentration of capsaicin (up to one million scoville units). Some of these sauces are significantly hotter than standard culinary spices and can cause:

• Intense mouth, throat, and stomach pain.
• Physical reactions such as sweating, nausea, lightheadedness, and shortness of breath.
• Irritation to da’ eyes or skin if touched after contact.
• Being part of “The Best Da’ Bomb Reactions of YYYY” compilations.

The physical care and feeding of teammates was mirrored with the virtual care and feeding of a Puzzmon. For the puzzle Novelty Store, teams were gifted with a virtual TaMITgochi pet, highly reminiscent of the retro Bandai toy. Proper care and feeding unlocked a series of dance moves for the pet, which spelled out a secret message.

This particular breed of spectacle at the MIT Mystery Hunt has been a popular form of oneupmanship, with build teams competing for the most impressive puzzle artifacts. Last year, much of the hunt centered around a custom radio, while the 2018 hunt’s puzzle Marked Deck produced a custom deck of playing cards featuring a layered, 3-dimensional rendering of the cover of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon when the cards are sorted in the correct order. Prior Mystery Hunts have produced everything from self-published books like The Puzzle at the End of This Book and Send Yourself Swanlumps to custom playable pinball machine with Game to Be Themed Later.

Prioritizing Puzzle Rounds As Source of Spectacle
While the 2026 MIT Mystery Hunt featured spectacle of many different types, the biggest impact it will likely leave is in how heavily spectacle featured into entire puzzle rounds. Understanding what makes this so impressive requires an understanding of how puzzle hunts are typically constructed.

When designing puzzle hunts, teams will typically start by building out puzzle rounds, since restrictions built into the solving process for metapuzzles often rely on imposing restrictions against the individual puzzles that “feed” into them. Sometimes, those restrictions can even dictate other elements of round design. One example of this constraint in action can be found in the 2019 Mystery Hunt round Thanksgiving and Halloween, which required answers to include the letters A/B/O in a specific order, as a reference to blood types. To practically make that happen, an individual puzzle constructor might be instructed to write a puzzle with a solution that includes the letters BOB in that specific order. Just as likely, they might be assigned the solution SUBPROBLEM for a thematically appropriate puzzle they pitched to the puzzle editors.

Some puzzle types, however, don’t just dictate what the answer of a puzzle might resolve to, but a core structural element of the entire puzzle round. For the MIT Mystery Hunt I helped construct in 2024, my teammate Joseph DeVincentis constructed the meta A Rift in Hades to create a series of interdependent puzzles, so that each individual puzzle had six different solutions. This type of meta construction doesn’t just place restrictions on what puzzle answers look like, it adds restrictions to what the “feeder puzzles” themselves look like.

The MIT Mystery Hunt will often have a few rounds that are pressing the boundaries of what hunt structure looks like. But for the 2026 Mystery Hunt, practically every round in the second half of the hunt came with constraints that pressed the boundaries of what a puzzle round might look like, while at the same time imposing considerable restrictions on the types of puzzles that might live in that round. Below are some of the more impressive feats of puzzle meta construction.

One of the first non-traditional puzzle rounds to confront solvers was The Land with No Name: a round of 26 puzzles where every puzzle corresponds with a letter in the alphabet. Even the text on puzzle pages remains obscured in a sea of question marks. The only way to unlock the missing letters across the 26 puzzle pages is to solve the corresponding puzzle. Initial entry points like an emoji-laden Celeste puzzle (which unlocks the letter “M” across all puzzles in the round after solving it) made it possible to reveal a few initial letters, but identifying which puzzles are potentially solvable at any given point are as much of the challenge of this round as anything else.

Fate’s Thread Casino round challenged teams to pull for puzzle fragments across five different categories. Pulling against the Characters banner, for instance, pulled anime trading cards associated with either the puzzle Hear Me Out, or the puzzle Goku. The first step of the puzzle involved figuring out which puzzle pieces go with which puzzle, using hints provided in the Quests section to figure out each puzzle’s mechanics.

The Terminus round tasked solvers with hopping between dimensions to unlock puzzles across six different categories. Navigating to dimensions in the central terminal that met specific criteria would unlock puzzles from different dimensions offering puzzles following a highly specific theme. For instance, puzzles mapping back to the sixth dimension explored different methods of deconstructing crossword puzzles, asking “can you really call it a crossword if” there were no clues, no words, or no crosses. Offering a similar deconstruction, puzzles mapping back to the fourth dimension challenged solvers to identify popular terms based on their various trend lines, ranging from financial stock prices to Google Trends data on searches for numbers.

The hunt’s pièce de résistance, however (and that is a modest hint to the meta), was the Atlas of Mosaics round. The puzzle starts out simple: place lettered tiles on a hexagonal grid in response to crossword-style clues, but subsequent rounds get increasingly creative with their use of hexagonal tiles. At first, it starts simple: in addition to letters, colored tiles are added to the solving repertoire, like the section of “Identification” pictured above. Progressively, hexagonal tiles are placed by increasingly creative methods. How are popular celebrities related to each other? What’s the answer to a superhero themed murder mystery, with evidence ranging from progressive heat map scans of the scene of the crime to interrogations with four of the suspects? And how on earth do you cope with a grid that has colored dots moving across the hexagonal panels?

With over a hundred hexagonal sections organized across 12 different thematic rounds, the Atlas of Mosaics round is an in-depth exploration of the many different types of puzzles that can be fit into a hexagonal grid, with a metapuzzle reveal that justifies why teams were tasked with creating such an expansive grid. And while it’s comparatively easier to talk about how puzzle hunts can create spectacle through celebrity guest appearances or impressive technical builds, there’s something truly awe-inspiring about puzzle rounds that make you rethink the very nature of puzzles.

Whether that’s a puzzle that decides your access to the alphabet is a privilege to be earned, or one that maps out an entire world one hexagonal tile at a time.

Special Mention: Devilish Devilries
One of the innovations added to MIT Mystery Hunt structure from the 2025 hunt was the introduction of brief descriptions of feeder puzzles, since teams were given the opportunity to choose which puzzles to unlock. That tradition continued in 2026 for earlier rounds, with one notable evolution that persisted throughout the full hunt: puzzles were given iconographic indicators when they required MIT presence to solve, and “spicier” puzzles were given mature content warnings. And no puzzle earned that flag more than Devilish Devilries, which reduced my team’s MIT headquarters into fits of laughter.

As the puzzle title implies, the puzzle is comprised of a series of printer’s devilries, with a particularly spicy twist. For instance, one exchange starts out: “I am deed to see you well. / It was just a min. Omen Tim feeling better.” While the sentence as presented is somewhat incomprehensible, adding two words into the exchange makes things much clearer:

“I am de[light]ed to see you well. It was just a min.O[r ail]ment.”

The step that followed the discovery of the phrase LIGHT RAIL is what earned the puzzle its mature rating, while reducing our team to a classroom of immature middle schoolers.

Spectacle Through the Breadth and Depth of Puzzling
As is often the case with the MIT Mystery Hunt, even this lengthy overview only captures a small portion of the puzzles featured in the hunt. And that acts as its own form of spectacle. The hunt’s wrap-up page highlights some impressive stats, with over five thousand puzzlers tackling the hunt’s 232 puzzles while also completing almost a hundred scavenger hunt style “tasks” that this article didn’t even adequately address. Even that understates the sheer scope of the hunt, with teams placing over a quarter million hexagonal tiles over the course of the hunt.

To explore the hunt yourself, go to Puzzmon.world and explore it yourself: you don’t have to catch ’em all, but it’s definitely worth checking out a few corners of the game, whether that means an idle exploration of the underlying video game or attempting to solve the first few rounds of Atlas of the Mosaic. The Atlas of the Mosaic round in particular makes a great accessible entry into variety puzzling for the first few grid segments.

Since Providence won the 2026 MIT Mystery Hunt, they will be spending the next year creating the hunt for 2027, with their own unique view of what “spectacle” means. And I look forward to seeing what emerges.

The post Gotta Catch ‘Em All: The MIT Mystery Hunt as Puzzle-Based Spectacle first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

During the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl Salesforce released a TV spot promising a $1M prize to the first to solve a puzzle hunt in collaboration with Jimmy Donaldson, who runs the MrBeast YouTube channel and media empire. The commercial itself, centering around Slack’s “Slackbot” assistant, is a veritable whirlwind of codes and references, culminating in a bird’s eye view of a QR code driving to MrBeast.Salesforce.com. Luckily, early teaser content linked on the Million Dollar Puzzle page helps point prospective solvers to a few helpful starting points to help make sense of the seemingly herculean puzzling task.

Lone Shark Games confirmed their involvement in helping design puzzles for the event. And while this is the company’s first Super Bowl commercial, they have developed a number of high profile, spectacle-laden puzzle experiences in the past. Wired enlisted them to help run a month long nationwide manhunt for one of their journalists. Cards Against Humanity turned to them for a puzzle hunt leading to a safe filled with hundreds of thousands of Sloth cards locked up on a remote island whimsically renamed “Hawaii 2”. The company even took over the third floor of Washington DC’s Planet Word Museum to create Lexicon Lane, a series of 26 separate puzzle adventures making use of the same space.

Luckily, the contest site implies MrBeast and Lone Shark Games’ penchant for spectacle should continue through this puzzle hunt, noting that “clues are everywhere: videos, websites, and the real world. Anytime you see MrBeast with Salesforce, assume there’s something there.”

Road to the Big Game: Setting the Stage for a Puzzle Hunt

It all started with a tweet: back in December, Donaldson tweeted out a request: “I’ve been sitting on an amazing Super Bowl commercial idea for years. I know it’s random but someone please let me make your brand’s Super Bowl commercial so I can finally make this idea happen”. Shortly after, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff replied, offering up their commercial. This kicked off a flurry of promotional teasers. Donaldson then shared a behind the scenes look at his pitch process. His employees discussed how they use Slack (a Salesforce product) as a pillar of their content production processes. Donaldson even made a Freleng Door Gag inspired video teasing the spectacle of the upcoming spot, as well as a teaser commercial themed around taking the $1M prize money out of the bank.

The $1M puzzle hunt may have only officially kicked off with Salesforce’s fourth quarter ad spot, but those videos contained more than a few clues to give astute puzzlers a head start on the solving. Some of these leads (including the name of Donaldson’s fictional bank) appear to be red herrings. An extended acrostic that flashes in one spot, for instance, teases solvers with the message “this means nothing I just wanted to waste your time lol”. But other moments seem considerably more intentional. Why is there a conspicuously placed barcode on the armored tank receiving a parking violation, during Donaldson’s bank visit? And why does the teller have a series of dates circled in red on all of her desk calendars?

The real entry point to the puzzling, however, is a pinned comment on the teaser video linking to a playlist of nine past MrBeast videos. The pinned comment on each of those videos now links to a series of variety puzzles.

For example, a comment on Beast Philanthropy’s Changing the Lives of 600 Strangers video directs puzzlers to a Sudoku variant puzzle posted on Reddit, using the nine letters in LIF(E)CHANGE instead of numbers. Solving that grid on its own doesn’t lead to any additional instructions…but is there a different piece of information that can instruct solvers on which letters to pay attention to?

Solving the variety puzzle is only the first step of this particular puzzle. And while all the information to solve the puzzle could be provided in the initial image, information on which letters to select from the completed 9×9 grid might also emerge through other parts of the campaign. And that guidance could come from practically anywhere: supplemental videos, other puzzles, or even some as-yet-unrevealed real world spectacle.

As for the Super Bowl spot itself? It seems to be as much a guide for how to discover where to find the puzzles, as much as anything else.

Beyond the Super Bowl Spot: A Growing Tradition

Last year during the Super Bowl, GoDaddy partnered with Walton Goggins to use the SuperBowl to promote their AI site-building services. As part of the spot, Goggins walked over a crime scene before UV lights revealed he tracked footprints over a series of glyphs reminiscent of the Zodiac Killer’s script. Corners of the puzzle community attempted to tackle this prospective puzzle, but weren’t able to extract a message out of it. The verdict: it was probably just there for the aesthetic, although I did get sent a complementary pair of Walton Goggins Goggle Glasses as thanks for my failed efforts in attempting to crack the mystery.

While the GoDaddy puzzle didn’t appear to be real, puzzles have increasingly found their way into ad campaigns. Last year, ARGNet wrote about KFC’s advertisement that snuck 11 puzzles into their newest ad, with the first to crack each challenge awarded a year’s supply of fried chicken. The TV show Push, Nevada used a Monday Night Football placement to provide the last piece of a $1M scavenger hunt puzzle as far back as 2002. Puzzle challenges have even made their way into the Big Game before. Most recently in 2024, DoorDash offered one lucky winner every product or service advertised during the Super Bowl…as long as they could enter the commercial’s excessively long promo code without making a single mistake.

Quite a few alternate reality games have used movie trailers as vector for game launches as well, starting with The Beast in 2001. During the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence, highlighted letters spelled out “WARN HER / JEANINE SALLA / EVAN DIED SINNING”, drawing fans’ attention to the curious credit for the film’s resident Sentient Machine Therapist. Years later, Cloverfield teased the ARG for JJ Abrams’ new film without even revealing the name of the property, instead directing fans to a website themed around the release date: 1-18-08.com. Abrams would later use a Super Bowl spot to not just share a trailer for the Cloverfield Paradox, but also to announce the full movie was already available for streaming.

Advertising placement at the Super Bowl is not cheap – Ad Week reports that this year, the price of some 30 second placements may have exceeded $10M. So, it’s no surprise that brands are looking to extend the campaign footprint beyond the 30 second spot. And launching a flashy puzzle hunt with a $1M prize in partnership with YouTube’s biggest creator looks to be scratching that itch…especially since a few of these puzzles look like they’d benefit greatly from online collaboration.

Which is why it should only come as a slight surprise that this isn’t even the only $1M puzzle hunt launched in conjunction with a Super Bowl commerical this year. RedFin’s Great American Home Search is a scavenger hunt giving away a house “hidden in Rocket and Redfin’s commercial”, that can be identified by solving a series of six clues provided in the Redfin mobile app.

Interested in tackling the Million Dollar Puzzle? Head over to MrBeast.Salesforce.com to check out the challenges.

The post Start Slacking Off with MrBeast’s Million Dollar Puzzle Hunt first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

The final episode of Stranger Things dropped on Netflix on December 31st, allowing fans of the series to say goodbye to one of the platform’s biggest hits before ringing in the new year. But that wasn’t the final transmission from the franchise: for the past six weeks, the UK company Global had been operating the in-universe radio station WSQK: The Squawk as a live broadcast, and the station had one final broadcast to get through before going dark due to “transmission problems”.

Stranger Things leaned in to the story’s 80s nostalgia to engage in an aggressive list of brand partnerships over the years, and many of those partnerships took a decidedly immersive turn. So while it’s worth exploring what six weeks of radio broadcasting looked like for Stranger Things fans, this also marks an opportunity to reflect at the show’s immersive history.

WSQK The Squawk: Radio Hawkins with “Global” Reach

Partners in workplace crime Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley worked at quite a few jobs over the course of Stranger Things: they became friends at the mall ice cream shop Scoops Ahoy for season 3 before switching over to Family Video to enter the video rental business in season 4. The premiere of season 5 saw the pair taking over programming at Hawkins’ local radio station WSQK, completing the nostalgic career trifecta.

Leaning in on that nostalgia, the UK broadcaster Global partnered with Netflix to produce six weeks of content broadcast to coincide with the show’s release. Every few hours a radio bumper does remind listeners that WSQK was presented by Stranger Things, but for the most part the programming is presented as authentically as possible.

In an interview about the project, Global stressed to Rolling Stone how seriously they took getting the sound right, noting:

“Most music and sound-design elements came from genuine pre-Nineties libraries like Bruton; anything newly created was shaped to avoid anachronism. ReelWorld dissected classic American jingle packages and rebuilt them to sound as though they’d aired on a Midwestern station for decades. Modern analog-emulating plugins were used sparingly and intentionally, then remastered through a final signal chain before broadcast.

For true period accuracy, the on-air signal passes through a vintage Inovonics FM250 processor — the same model found in thousands of U.S. stations in the mid-Eighties.”

And while the focus of the broadcasts are solidly fixed on playing classic tunes, a number of interactive segments help the show come alive like Mindy Flare’s “Rewind at 9” segment that tested listeners with song identification challenges. “Talk With Tammy” invited listeners to ask for advice, while “Dial A Dedication” allowed listeners to send in messages to the show’s request line.

A Light Narrative, From an Alternate Version of Hawkins

There’s even a loose narrative that ties together the broadcasts of on air disc jockeys Vance Goodman and Mindy Flare, leading to the station’s eventual shuttering. In the lead-up to New Year’s Eve, news segments start mentioning the radio tower’s signal has started to cut out, providing updates on the station engineers’ efforts to fix it. On January 1st, realizing the station would be going offline for good, the pair offer a heartfelt farewell that manages to namecheck a frightening number of 80s hits.

Because of those engineering troubles the station is canonically offline now, but a fan archived the broadcasts, allowing for segment-by-segment replays on their website.

While the WSQK broadcasts were riddled with references to the town of Hawkins and the events of the series, they don’t appear to be canonical – at least, not unless you believe the “Conformity Gate” theories that ascribe secondary meaning to the details in season 5 that seem oddly out of place.

For instance, season 5 opens with Robin celebrating her 500th broadcast with WSQK, holding down the fort after the station’s former shock jock, Jimmy “Fast Hands” Lee, abandoned the station. Within Global’s iteration of Hawkins, Robin understandably doesn’t make an appearance…but neither does Jimmy. Instead, the main DJ’s names are nods to the series’ primary antagonists: “Mindy Flare” anagrams to Mind Flayer, while “Vance” anagrams to Vecna.

Man in the High Castle also experimented with spinning up an in-universe radio broadcast for fans of the series, back in 2017. Like WSQK, Resistance Radio created programming around three in-universe radio hosts. The centerpiece of Resistance Radio were a series of 18 original covers that imagined American classics if they were written for the resistance during a Nazi occupation.

Phone Numbers That Still Work, 40 Years Later

A more direct integration with Stranger Things can be found in the many phone numbers that appeared on the show over the years: for the most part, dialing the numbers shown on screen would be acknowledged in some fashion.

Find yourself missing Argyle? Dialing up the number for Surfer Boy Pizza would treat you to a borderline hilarious message of the man himself sharing the hyper-specific order he just received, along with a handful of other messages that were swapped out over time. Caught a phone number on a Missing Persons poster in the final season? You can call in to help find “Jane Hopper”. These relatively light touches are typically as deep as the show goes with direct integrations within episodes, although the tactic has been used to dive deeper, for other shows.

Most recently, Pluribus recently had some fun with an in-universe phone number, using a brief on-screen appearance to kick off a text adventure puzzle hunt to close out the first season. One of its more outlandish puzzles challenged solvers with decrypting RNA codon sequences hidden in the spectrogram of an audio file.

Stranger Things does have a host of spinoff books and comics extending the story, but the series was often at its immersive best when it opened the property up for other brands to play.

Stranger Things ARGs: From Ice Cream Parlors to Lite Brite Boards

During Stranger Things season 3, Netflix handed over creative reins of their show to Baskin-Robbins and Mssng P eces, which transformed two locations into Scoops Ahoy shops, as well as hiding cryptic signage at their store locations across the United States. But that was only scratching the surface.

Players realized that a morse code message hidden on the specialty ice cream flavor USS Butterscotch helped gain access to an SSH server inviting sleuths to join Operation Scoop Snoop. Once registered, fans were tasked with daily missions in preparation for gaining remote access to Cold War bunkers…only to realize their handler was a Russian spy all along. The ARG concluded with one final mission to help stop the Russians, and prevent a Demo-dog from escaping into the real world. Evocative ASCII art graphics complemented the final mission, which palyed out like a text adventure version of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, cross-referencing operating manuals.

The final challenge of the ARG proved to be the hardest, but also the most rewarding: send a fax to a phone number, with the first player to finish winning a lifetime supply of Baskin-Robbins ice cream, and the promise of a set visit. This was by far the most expansive ARG for the show, and remains one of my favorite alternate reality games to this day.

Season 4’s ARG was handed over to the NFT collectible company Candy, but still managed to construct an impressive game: during the season’s official trailer, a brightly colored rift flashed on the screen, with timestamps next to the six breaches in reality. Overlaying the rift over the timestamps in the video revealed a message, and website: I Am Hell’s Master.

This became the hub for a puzzle game that resulted in entering “passwords” by following instructions to make intricate art on a virtual Lite Brite game board…including one pizza-themed puzzle that actually made use of the mixed-up order Surfer Boy Pizza’s curious voicemail message, mentioned earlier in this article.

I Am Hell’s Master didn’t go out of its way to tell a narrative, but the creative ways the game hid Lite Brite coordinates made constructing the visually arresting pieces of nostalgic art even more satisfying, for season 4’s puzzle trail.

Beyond Broadway: From Screen to Immersive Stage

Even before Netflix brought Stranger Things: The First Shadow to Broadway, the company partnered with Fever to send Stranger Things: The Experience on tour. For the experience, attendees were welcomed to Hawkins Labs as test subjects and realize that they have super powers that can be used to advance through the experience. Unfortunately the labs become overrun with Demo-dogs, slaughtering researchers until the Stranger Things crew arrives to save the day. The final showdown with Vecna was particularly impressive, as a live actress playing Eleven is somewhat seamlessly replaced by a video counterpart to work the show’s final magic.

You can get a sense of the experience from this fan recording, but the real treat was the Mix-Tape experience at the end, which recreated a version of the Starcourt Mall with roving actors looking to engage in some light Larping, as well as offering assistance in a secret scavenger hunt, to find a series of rifts hidden in the set design.

The newly launched Netflix House features yet another immersive theater production, in the form of Stranger Things: Escape the Dark.

Picking Up on Clues: Introduction to Conformity Gate

Reception to the Stranger Things finale has been mixed, with segments of the fanbase frustrated at how some of the narrative threads resolved. But one corner of the fandom has come up with a creative theory that implies that was by design known as “Confirmity Gate”.

According to Conformity Gate, the final episode in particular features a lot of details that don’t make sense, both narratively and from a continuity perspective. One of the more curious continuity swaps involved an Instagram Story post from actor Finn Wolfhard, showing the characters’ D&D binders, rearranged from their appearance in the series to spell out “A LIE”. One of the main branches of the theory claims that this ending is a pleasant fiction, planted by the Mind Flayer to lull the series protagonists into a false sense of security.

Some leave the theory at that, while others are hunting for clues that imply there might be a secret final episode to the series that serves as the “true” end. And while the existence of a secret ending is unlikely, Stranger Things‘ engagement with fans for the past five seasons doesn’t rule that out as impossible. Hundreds of ice cream parlors were decorated with morse code messages and a Russian code wheel that helped unlock secret messages. A throwaway voicemail number was reused to deliver a Lite Brite passcode. The show’s licensed merchandise even included branded flashlights with secret UV messages on the packaging.

If anything, the factor leaving me skeptical regarding grand plans for a secret episode is how much of Stranger Things‘ immersive surprises relied on brand partnerships to fuel them. Operation Scoop Snoop was a Baskin Robbins partnership. Stranger Things: The Experience gave Fever a major brand to help expand its live event footprint. And even WSQK drew upon Europe’s largest commercial radio broadcaster to make it happen.

Indeed, one of Stranger Things‘ legacies might well be how open the brand was to letting other companies play within their playground in hundreds of different ways.

To listen to Global’s WSQK archives, check out LivingHuman.Host/WSQK
For Baskin-Robbins’ ARG, read ARGNet’s coverage of Operation Scoop Snoop
For Candy’s ARG / puzzle trail, read ARGNet’s Coverage of I Am Hell’s Master
For a video of Stranger Things: The Experience, check out this YouTube video
…and for more on Conformity Gate, search for the hashtag on your fan platform of choice.

UPDATED TO ADD: Secret Cinema also created a large-scale immersive theater production reenacting season 3 of the show in London, as covered in No Proscenium.

The post The Immersive Side of Hawkins: From Scoops Ahoy to WSQK Radio first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.