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.

“Whatever you do, at the crossroads, don’t turn left. Don’t be fooled. It’s listening.” This is the strange message that a Minecrafter named AVeryLargeMayo (“Avery”) discovered inside a book in his Minecraft instance. At the end of the book, there’s a cryptic cipher that Avery doesn’t know how to solve. So, he makes a video asking the internet to help solve the mystery for him. All told, the video is less than four minutes long. Which makes the 40 minute long video the YouTuber the Minecraft YouTuber Wifies makes unpacking his discoveries exploring the Searching For a World That Doesn’t Exist ARG all the more impressive…even if he is secretly the game’s creator. And it’s that clever incorporation of the “ARG Explainer” video format as part of the ARG’s content that makes this Minecraft ARG so fascinating.

At least on the surface, this alternate reality game is handed to viewers as a fully-solved and crisply edited package, explaining (almost) everything and leaving little to the imagination. And yet, there is still considerable value in going to the “source material”, as none of the game’s three narrators are fully reliable.

Unlocking the First Layer: An Introduction to D3rlord3
The puzzle that Avery presents as the initial call to action in his video remains unsolved, at least at the beginning of the video: it doesn’t quite work as alphanumeric cipher, and similar attempts to treat it like a book cipher are quickly thwarted. Instead, Wifies falls down the rabbit hole by examining an inventory menu that flashes briefly onscreen during Avery’s video…a glitch in the system.

Wifies discovers that taking the first letter of each inventory item (and capitalizing the letters if there’s more than one of the item in the stack) spells out the location of a Google Drive link. So, the first image of a light block would be the number “1”, the three zombie heads in the second slot would become a capital “Z”, and the vine in the third slot would become the letter “v”.

When Wifies checks the URL, he finds the Google Drive link contains three files: two of these files are ~100 minutes of “raw” footage of someone playing Minecraft, and the final file is a PDF of an info doc from an anonymous Minecraft player, noting that the videos represent their “exploration into a strange tunnel I found in my minecraft world.” The rest of the video is Wifies’ account of what he uncovers through those video files from a user we’d later learn goes by the username D3rlord3.

Notably, this is only a puzzle that works when explained in retrospect: the numbers could have just as easily represented indices into the words, and interpreting the blank space as underscore presumes that the solution will be a Google Drive link. But since this is a puzzle constructed to be presented as solved, none of that matters. The link wouldn’t even need to exist, since Wifies helpfully explains everything you’d need to know about its contents.

And yet, the Google Drive link does exist. You can watch the full 100 minutes of D3rlord3’s exploration. AveryLargeMayo’s channel also exists, so you can confirm the secret message is present, and watch him win at a game of SkyWars.

The Protagonist’s Competence: What Would D3rlord3 Do
As the PDF introduction explains, D3rlord3’s videos center around his exploration of curious signs of life that shouldn’t exist on a random Minecraft seed. At first, the idiosyncrasies are little things: plant life growing where it shouldn’t. But then, he notices signs of something following him. Footsteps echoing just a half-second too long after stopping…torches going out in a long tunnel when they shouldn’t.

D3rlord3 sets up layered traps using obscure Minecraft functionality about how chunks load to confirm that something is following him, and determine how much it can see and hear. He confirms: something is out there, and it appears to be “listening” to what he says in chat, as well. Moving forward, he is writing to this unseen follower as much as anything else.

Eventually, he stumbles across a block of cipher text carved into the walls. In the raw footage, he pauses here for over 15 minutes, commenting “this isn’t trivial” before solving the puzzle and complimenting his unseen follower: “got it. good poem…but cipher stacking is pretty bad practice you know”.

Wifies doesn’t solve this cipher himself in his video overview, but he does provide a transcription of the letters…or at least, a reasonable facsimile of a transcription, since it’s incredibly easy to confuse similar letters in the block text etched into the walls of his Minecraft world. When corrected, something like this emerges:

Using the corrected cipher text and the Vigenere key CIPPSA (the word “yellow” shifted four letters forward) gives something close to the following poem:

Beneath the sky of melting gold
Ancient echoes of a shepherds mold
An old decay If left one goes
Is unseen truth all but faux

This is one of the most fascinating narrative beats of the ARG. As the game’s creator, Wifies knows both the intended solution, and the transcription necessary to generate it. As the creator of the explainer video, however, he does not know the answer and is equally baffled by how to transcribe the cipher text, since much of the resolution of ambiguous letters shown above required familiarity with the structure of the intended message.

Even then, a likely error in what was carved into virtual walls leaves part of the message inscrutable. And yet all of this is solved by D3rlord3 in mere minutes, followed by a snarky comment on poor puzzle design.

The first segment of Searching For a World That Doesn’t Exist is a celebration of D3rlord3’s competence: both through his knowledge of the game, and his ability to solve complex puzzles with minimal effort invested. And this is something that Wifies celebrates in his narration. All to make the fall that much more poignant.

The Hubris and Downfall of D3rlord3
After moving on from the puzzle, D3rlord3 enters an abandoned village and finds a book that recounts the King in Yellow’s initial visit to the world. The book’s anonymous author leaves a final entreaty:

I’m going. I’m leaving this here in the rare case someone finds it. If you have found this, I implore you, turn back. Disconnect. Forget about this world. It is not for you.

If you’ve come here you must be curious. I know you must want to continue onwards.

So I know that this is a heavy ask, but please do not go any further. For you own good. Do not.

D3rlord3 ignores this message, and finds a staircase hidden behind a bookshelf that leads to a pair of massive golden doors. What he sees is censored from view, even with the “raw” footage from the Google Drive link. Whatever it is he sees, it causes him to hurry back to the initial room, and write the warning for whoever is unlucky enough to find the world next.

Only this time, with the footage of his gameplay, we have the key to translate the cipher: yet again, it relies on the contents of his inventory, with the book cipher indexing into the names of items in set inventory slots. The message: RUN AVERY ITS HERE.

We don’t hear again from Avery, so his fate remains a mystery.

A Quick Refresher to The King in Yellow
At its core, Searching For A World That Doesn’t Exist is an allusion to the mythos that emerged around Robert W Chambers’ short story collection, The King in Yellow. Chambers introduced The King in Yellow through a series of four connected short stories in a book of the same name, centered around a play capable of driving its readers mad. Each short story touches on a different person’s experiences with the play, and the different flavors of madness it could trigger.

And while the play itself is never fully revealed, excerpts provide glimpses into what can be found within, through lyric poetry. Some of that poetry references Carcosa, the ruins of an “ancient and famous city” introduced through Ambrose Bierce’s An Inhabitant of Carcosa. The search for Carcosa itself drove one of its former inhabitants mad, culminating in the man discovering his own tombstone.

While The King in Yellow has come to be associated with the Lovecraftian mythos’ Hastur, the King himself is rarely the direct threat: instead, it’s the stories that touch upon him.

Do Not Trust This Video: The Existential Threat of Curiosity
D3rlord3 received an explicit warning against curiosity from a book left by a nameless villager. He ignored the message, until he was confronted by whatever lay behind the door. As what seems like his final act, he passed on the same message to the next person to find themselves in this world: “whatever you do, at the crossroads, don’t turn left.”

Suspecting this wouldn’t be enough to slake his successor’s curiosity, he left a video archive of his journey. In it, he revealed that something was following him…watching him. Through tests, he realized that it wasn’t just following him: it could see what he was writing. What he was doing. And so, he left a second, more deeply obscured message to the Minecraft instance’s next recipient: “Run Avery, it’s here.” This message wasn’t set to be triggered after Avery himself passed through the golden doors: instead, it was set to be triggered by finishing the story. Because what if the threat wasn’t just turning left at the crossroads and confronting what lay behind the golden doors yourself, but merely witnessing the act?

If so, that begs the question: who shared that Google Drive link, in the first place? Was that actually an example of D3rlord3 warning future visitors of what was to come, or was it the unknown entity tricking more people into engaging with the story? Were all the ciphers, codes, and secret online folders an excuse to expose more people to the story? And did pulling on all those threads place Wifies (and by extension the ARG’s active playerbase) in greater danger?

An ARG That Weaponizes the “Explainer Video” Dynamic
Searching For A World That Doesn’t Exist works incredibly well as standalone explainer video. The raw footage was re-cut to create dramatic tension, audio narration explains the mostly silent main character’s strategic choices, and an epic soundtrack provides full orchestral accompaniment to the story. There’s really no need to dig any deeper, especially since the reveals that can be uncovered are relatively minor. By contrast, the “raw footage” can be an often confusing slog, and understanding the puzzles feels borderline impenetrable.

And that influences audiences’ reactions to the work: near the end of Wifies’ video, he ponders, “whatever was [censored behind the golden doors] in that black square was enough to drive probably the smartest protagonist I’ve ever seen into running for his life.” When Ludwig Ahgren does a live reaction to the episode on stream, he echoes that sentiment: “what is this, Light Yagami…the smartest motherf*cker to ever exist”. Not because of what D3rlord3 did…but because of Wifies’ explanation of that behavior.

But Wifies’ video is edited to tell a particular narrative, and that viewpoint is limited: both by knowledge, and by editorial intent. Since D3rlord3 doesn’t explain the solution to the cipher carved into the cave wall, Wifies doesn’t understand it enough to properly transcribe the message, making the message harder to untangle based on his record. But in the edit, he also leans into making D3rlord3 as “the smartest protagonist I’ve ever seen”, leaving moments that go against that narrative out of the final cut. A TikToker went through and created their own edit of some of his more humanizing moments…and while this edit is itself a curated view, it finds a different story in the same source material. Another TikToker even highlighted a moment where D3rlord3 almost walks away from the mystery after reading about the King in Yellow’s initial visit to the Minecraft instance.

D3rlord3’s unreliable narration came from conflicting motivations: the playthrough was presumably left as a record for Avery…but because of his wholly justified paranoia about an unseen entity literally following his every step, at least some of what he shared was left as a trap for that entity. He’s perfectly willing to leave a plaintext warning against following his footsteps. But the warning that the danger exists even without experiencing it himself is obfuscated.

Finally, there’s Avery himself – almost an afterthought to the whole story, existing to pass the mystery on from one storyteller to another. We see no evidence of him solving any mysteries, or even exploring the space. And yet, his video includes a hidden message that is essential in passing the story on to yet another victim. Did his lack of inquisitiveness save him and he’s back to happily trouncing friends at SkyWars, or did he merely fail to document his downfall?

If this is a story drawing on the King in Yellow mythos, it doesn’t take seeing the King to drive one mad. It’s being confronted with stories of him. D3rlord3’s presumed descent into madness didn’t start at the golden doors, it was already upon him when he translated the poem carved into the cave walls. It continued when he read a story about the King’s visit. And yes, it came to a head when he saw what was behind the golden doors.

These days, maybe all it takes to spread a memetic virus is a fresh coat of yellow paint on a Minecraft ARG explainer video…give it a watch on Wifies’ YouTube channel, just in case. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Updated 3/30 to add: Wifies has released a two hour long follow-up to the original video titled Destroying A World That Doesn’t Exist, offering a summary of the considerably longer AveryTheMayo video behind the gates, clocking in at a vaguely terrifying fifteen hours.

This update was preceded by a more formal alternate reality game Wifies launched as part of Minecraft Live – players compiled a Google Doc walkthrough of the solve, and the YouTuber Freshi created his own video walkthrough, including a video interview with Wifies about the experience.

The post The King in Yellow as Found Footage Minecraft ARG first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

It’s Saturday evening. A team of six puzzlers have spent the past five hours traveling across New York City for a hunt, and just decoded a sequence of responses from a custom Ouija board: the answers to the thirteen questions they had just asked spelled out GPS coordinates to a nearby office complex. Upon arriving at their destination, they rush past the Alamo Drafthouse to reach their next destination: a non-profit filled with vibrantly decorated pianos, arranged in rings of four. Multicolored stickers adorn several keys on each piano, practically begging to be played. And identifying the songs they’re about to perform is only the first step.

This experiential snapshot was from the charity puzzle event Midnight Madness. Famed composer and playwright Stephen Sondheim was not directly involved in the creation of this hunt, and none of his songs were featured in the puzzle that unfurled as teams tickled the ivory. And yet, as Barry Joseph argues in his new book Matching Minds with Sondheim, that event (and many more like it) might never have happened had it not been for Sondheim’s passion for puzzling.

Joseph makes an incredibly compelling case, tracing Sondheim’s influence through everything from puzzle hunts and cryptic crosswords to escape rooms and even board games. The book highlights how the puzzles and games that Sondheim created as intimate gifts for friends, family, and colleagues shaped the modern puzzling landscape.

In Good Company: Sondheim’s Surprising Puzzling Cameos

Much of the thrill of Matching Minds with Sondheim comes from learning how deeply embedded Sondheim was across early puzzling communities. Fans of Sondheim’s musicals might be surprised to learn that he moonlit as New York magazine’s first puzzle editor, starting with the magazine’s launch in 1968. During that tenure, he helped popularize the cryptic crossword format to American audiences, simplifying elements to be more approachable. And while Broadway fans may have been familiar with his longtime friendship with fellow composer Leonard Bernstein, the fact that he created a series of three narratively linked board games known as The Great Conductor Hunt to celebrate the man’s 50th birthday is less publicized.

Even Sondheim’s Broadway casts were enlisted into his puzzling fun. For decades up until his death in 2021, cast members would receive puzzles as elaborate opening night gifts…from custom engraved beans bearing a message of thanks for Into the Woods, to jigsaw puzzles with the recipient’s initials etched into the pattern.

Whether your puzzling passion leads you into the realm of video games (he was an avid fan of games like Myst), puzzle boxes (he had an extensive collection) or game shows (Sondheim spent years trying to hunt down a clip from his highly successful appearance on the game show Password), Matching Minds showcases Sondheim’s deep and abiding love for play.

Each of these forays into puzzles and games showcases a man infatuated with the many ways puzzles and games can spark creativity and inspire passion. In terms of puzzling tomes, I turn to AJ Jacobs’ The Puzzler as a tour of passionate puzzling communities. But Matching Minds with Sondheim may be my new reference book for showcasing why someone might fall in love with puzzles in the first place. And that celebration shines brightest (especially for ARGNet readers) in Barry Joseph’s section on treasure hunts, and The Murder Game.

Into the Puzzling Woods: From The Murder Game to Last of Sheila

Stephen Sondheim was obsessed with parlor games, and created a whole series of games that he would challenge his friends and family to tackle. He became particularly enamored with murder mystery parties, and created his own version to fix what he saw as some of the flaws of the format: so, he created The Murder Game in 1965, which constructed a murder mystery game with a puzzling twist that meant you could only play it once.

To begin the evening, players are handed numbered envelopes with instructions to retrieve a clue, hidden somewhere within the house. If the murderer catches you while trying to retrieve the evidence, they can either destroy the evidence or take it as their own before the survivors reconvene to sort out who the real killer is, based on the evidence left behind. I won’t spoil the trick here, in part because Matching Minds with Sondheim includes a version of the Murder Game that you can try and solve along as you read. But it’s a delightfully clever mechanic that provides even the killer’s silenced victims a chance to figure out what secret their evidence pack contained.

Sondheim went on to create increasingly elaborate hunts for friends and family. the Halloween Treasure Hunt was his first foray into puzzle hunts in 1968, sending teams of puzzlers throughout Manhattan in limousines. Sondheim’s ambitions only grew, with later hunts. The events were often created as gifts to close friends and family, and might include taking over the Shubert theater for a puzzle hunt that could only be solved by the cast and crew of A Little Night Music, or asking players to exchange cross-continental faxes with Stephen Fry. For one of his rare public hunts, Sondheim even teamed up with Hollywood power couple Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick to take over the American Museum of Natural History for a charity event priced at $1,500 a head.

Inspired by his experiences playing The Murder Game and some of Sondheim’s earlier puzzle hunts, director Herbie Ross turned many of the games and puzzles Sondheim used to torture his friends into the 1973 film The Last of Sheila. Sondheim himself collaborated on the movie’s screenplay, delighting in baking puzzles into everything from the film to its promotional materials. After viewing the film, puzzlers Donald Luskin and Patrick Carlyle were so inspired that they created their own puzzle hunt on the West Coast called The Game. This in turn inspired the movie Midnight Madness in 1980, which went on to inspire the puzzle hunt of the same name that started off this article. Sometimes, the nods get explicit. As Barry Joseph notes, homages to The Last of Sheila are so prevalent in the Benoit Blanc mystery Glass Onion that giving Sondheim his own cameo as one of Blanc’s colleagues in Among Us…which itself is an evolution of Sondheim’s Murder Game.

These explorations of creative provenance are some of the most deeply researched parts of Matching Minds with Sondheim, and why I feel comfortable going into so much detail about this particular subsection of the book’s subject matter. The book celebrates Sondheim’s story through the recollections of people who actually participated in his games and puzzles, through bite-sized puzzle snippets you can solve as you read, and through winding paths that show how Sondheim’s impact in the spaces he loved echoes to this day. One particularly heartwarming anecdote mentions how Sondheim’s love of escape rooms took him to the Dante-themed production Paradiso, only to learn that one of the puzzles he designed in 1968 was incorporated into the modern escape room as obscure homage. At another point, Barry Joseph even stages a Zoom playthrough of one of the better documented hunts, enlisting friends from various corners of Sondheim’s puzzling life as participants.

Sunday in the Park with Barry: The Author As Puzzle Master

In case you haven’t guessed yet, Matching Minds with Sondheim is more than just a book. Many of the pictures scattered throughout this article were taken at the Drama Book Shop’s pop-up exhibit dedicated to Sondheim’s penchant for puzzles, which ran through the month of October. Joseph also launched a podcast, featuring extended interviews with many of the experts consulted for the book. The episodes on escape rooms and The Last of Sheila are likely of particular interest to ARGNet readers. And that’s not even getting into the book’s hidden puzzles.

The first secret puzzle in the book is fairly easy to find: the book’s dedication is a series of enumerated spaces, left as a cryptographic exercise for the reader. Pairing that enumeration with something that appears later in the book makes it possible (although still difficult) to work out Barry’s intended message. The next puzzle takes a little more attention to discover, but starts getting a little more personal.

While paging through the book’s index, you might be surprised to find a few out of place references, including a mention of Sentient Machine Therapist Dr. Jeanine Salla. No mention of Dr Salla appears on the referenced page, she’s just…there. This might make a bit more sense with some additional context about Barry Joseph himself, as he didn’t arrive at the subject of this book by happenstance.

In addition to being one of the co-founders of Games for Change, Joseph was also one of the initial ARG players known as “Cloudmakers”, who participated in The Beast, which is often credited as the first alternate reality game. And a stray reference to Dr Jeanine Salla in the promotional materials for the film Artificial Intelligence served as primary trailhead for The Beast. If the text of the book is a tour through Sondheim’s love of puzzles and games, this embedded puzzle trail is a tour of Barry Joseph’s own passions for the space.

Anyone Can Puzzle: Sondheim’s Other Legacy

ARGNet has covered a number of celebrities and their passion for puzzling in the past, from Neil Patrick Harris and Alex Hirsch to Taylor Swift. And while they have all left their marks, it’s hard to overstate how much of an impact Stephen Sondheim has left on the puzzling world. So, to close out this coverage of Matching Minds with Sondheim, I thought it would be fitting to highlight some of the hunts and experiences that might not have existed without Sondheim.

ARGNet has already covered Great Gotham Challenge, but Sondheim-inspired treasure hunts aren’t limited to New York City. Earlier this year, Different Area Same Hunt returned with a half day puzzle hunt that played out simultaneously in 25 different cities, leading teams of 3-5 through a series of locations to pick up fiendishly clever puzzles wrapped in a light narrative. This year’s hunt led participants on a safari through an animal sanctuary. A personal puzzling highlight was this year’s “Duck Konundrum” puzzle, a following-directions style puzzle that our team members play a game of trivia with each person doing something completely different.

As the resident #CrowFacts expert on our team, I was charged with ignoring all the actual trivia questions and spouting out dubiously accurate facts. Did you know that according to science, at some point each of us will die? Duck Konundrum puzzles are an exercise in trusting the process: the tasks you’re charged with doing may seem like nonsense, but if you follow every instruction to the letter, things have a way of working out and delivering an answer.

In a 2011 WIRED interview, DASH creator Deb Goldstein notes that it was created as a slightly more accessible offshoot of Bay Area Night Game (which in turn was a more accessible version of The Game). DASH also provides a free print-and-play archive of past hunts, making it one of the more accessible hunts for those interested in hosting their own Zoom Party playthroughs.

Midnight Madness NYC leans in more towards Sondheim’s charitable hunts as inspiration, asking teams to donate a hefty sum to charity as the cost of entrance. This year I volunteered as part of Game Control, doling out hints to teams as they raced across New York City until 3AM. This year’s hunt was Houdini themed, and teams were handed “magic wands” that helped make the city come alive. A particularly cinematic sequence led teams throughout a series of street corners in Alphabet City, with magical encounters along the way. Eventually, teams learn that the locations they were visiting mapped to a secret card order often used by magicians. Proceeding to the next locations in sequence (while reordering a deck of cards provided earlier) led to a major reveal.

Even the MIT Mystery Hunt owes a debt of gratitude to Sondheim. While credit for the puzzle hunt’s origin is a bit more circuitous than the previously mentioned outdoor hunts, Matching Minds with Sondheim notes that Mark Halpin would frequently send Sondheim “cryptics that were created for MIT or for various puzzle events”, so Mystery Hunt constructors can now wonder if one of their own puzzles ever graced Sondheim’s desk.

What’s particularly heartening about Matching Minds with Sondheim is that it shows off how a creative legacy can be about deeply impacting a small circle of like-minded colleagues who share a passion for the art, as much as anything else. The Murder Game was a parlor game designed for a handful of people and yet it helped inspire an entire subculture.

A number of friends in the puzzle community have recently started celebrating birthdays by asking friends to create bespoke games and activities for the celebration. During these events I’ve taught a course on lockpicking despite not being able to pick locks. I’ve mailed 3D printed Moo Dengs to out-of-state friends so that they could surprise the birthday girl at conferences by dramatically handing over tiny pygmy hippos. And I recorded a video triggered by a NFC tagged necklace.

And as much as Matching Minds with Sondheim makes me contemplate how major projects like the Gravity Falls ARGs inspired an expansive fan project, it also brings to mind the impact of those more intimate creative explorations that are intended as a gift to a loved one, or celebration for a small group of friends.

For more on the Matching Minds with Sondheim book and podcast, visit MatchingMindsWithSondheim.com. It doesn’t just provide a rich and evocative history of a man who deeply loved puzzles…it celebrates how that love can take root in others, and blossom into something bigger. Reading the book even inspired me to overcome my long-standing aversion to cryptics. That’s right, I finally started teaching myself the format (with a little help from the Minute Cryptic daily puzzles).

The post Stephen Sondheim Loved Puzzles More Than You first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

Last year, ARGNet reviewed the first installment in PostCurious’ episodic puzzle series, The Ministry of Lost Things: Lint Condition. The series of puzzle games center around the “Elusiverse”, a world filled with the lost and forgotten objects from our world enter when they’re misplaced. The crowdfunding campaign ultimately invited over 4,000 backers to join the Department of Returns as scouts, looking to return lost objects of sentimental value to their humans.

PostCurious is back crowdfunding for its second installment of the series, Ministry of Lost Things: Finders Keepers. The newest release is just as whimsical and lighthearted as the last, and packed full with so much wordplay, you could almost be excused for thinking the game’s dozen or so puzzles were just an excuse to inflict a series of tortured puns on players.

A Surprisingly Heartfelt Story for a Relatively Tiny Box
With the first installment of Ministry of Lost Things, finding out what object went missing was an element of the first puzzle. For Finders Keypers, things start out with a more explicit task: Cary the Carabiner ended up detached from her owner Jenna’s bag, and all of the keys she was securing became scattered. As a scout for the Department of Returns, it’s your job to traverse the Elusiverse collecting witness statements and solving puzzles to find the lost objects, learning along the way why they’re more than just keys to Jenna.

And every square inch of that heartfelt story is packed with more puns than you’re prepared to handle. One of the game’s early puzzles does a particularly good job of exemplifying this: starting off in The Keys (a location initially teased in the game’s first installment), Department of Returns scouts are tasked with tracing down the carabiner’s path through a series of islands that weaves through “Rock” and “Hard Place”, past “Key Largo” and its nearby counterpart “Key Smaller”, and past a series of islets like “Doss Isle, Grocery Isle, and Rept Isle”.

If your reaction to that map is more of a chortle than a wince, this is the game for you since that’s the type of whimsy that saturates every part of the game, whether it contributes to the puzzle solving or not. There may be a dozen puzzles to this game, but there’s easily over a hundred literary flourishes, making this just as much a pun-laden successor to Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels as it is a puzzle game.

Streamlined Structure Made with Logic Puzzle Lovers in Mind
Ministry of Lost Things: Finders Keypers is structured around five “Transmissions” centered around for the hunt for the missing keys at the center of this mystery. Each transmission will include 2-3 separate puzzles with one challenge focused around locating the missing key, and another about uncovering why it was so significant to Jenna. And priced at $26 for the game, the Ministry of Lost Things games remain PostCurious’ most affordable product offering.

Logic puzzles are frequently a highlight in PostCurious games, but Ministry of Lost Things leans in particularly heavily on the format in order to fit an entire multi-part adventure into a box the size of a tarot deck. That is not to say the puzzles are repetitive. While logic puzzles do account for almost half of the game’s puzzles, each one feels fresh and distinct, introducing unique rules and mechanics. The puzzles just happen to lean heavily on types designed to satisfy fans of Murdle who wished the game had a little more variety or a stronger tactile element to the solving process.

By way of example: one of the more delightful logic puzzles in Finders Keypers involves figuring out the physical traits of a certain object using descriptions from witness testimony. However, that standard logic puzzle structure is complicated by a fun and thematic twist: none of the witnesses are reliable, with each one getting a single detail wrong.

To be clear, this is not a pen-and-paper puzzle box: practically every puzzle (whether it’s a logic puzzle or not) involves moving around game pieces in creative and frequently unexpected ways, and the game’s final puzzle delivers a particularly satisfying reveal that resonates at both puzzle and narrative levels.

The Kickstarter campaign has already funded, and will be running through the morning of October 30th. And as is PostCurious tradition, the campaign is also releasing a series of four weekly puzzles so PostCurious-curious backers can get a sense of what their puzzles are like. This time, four people who successfully solved all the puzzles will win a preview copy of the game, to join the Department of Returns even earlier.

So check out The Ministry of Lost Things on Kickstarter soon, for both puzzle puns and preview prizes. The game is a standalone game so you don’t need to play Lint Conditions first, but there’s also an option to buy both games through the campaign.

Note: ARGNet received a review copy of Ministry of Lost Things.

The post Ministry of Lost Things Delivers a Box of Puns with a Side of Puzzles first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

It’s the second night of Previews for Masquerade, and I’ve just finished seeing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s newest immersive musical take on Phantom of the Opera. While comparing notes with a friend from the NYC immersive community, a man dressed in black approaches. Leaning in conspiratorially, he quietly tells me: “You see? Everything I told you was true.”

The man who approached me was a ghost hunter named Sean Hunter, who was at the center of a months-long alternate reality game teasing the release of Masquerade. The musical just finished Previews with a gala event, last night. To celebrate, here’s an overview of how we got to the Masquerade.

The Masquerade ARG: A Popup Homage to New York City
At its core, Masquerade teased the show’s existence with a series of popup experiences, celebrating New York City. As ARGNet previously reported, it started with the immersive show’s historic venue itself: to prepare for the show’s transformation, the windows of Lee’s Art Shop were liberally covered with newspapers. Upon closer inspection, however, many of these papers were referencing the history of Phantom of the Opera in New York City. And scattered in between the real papers from the city were a few in-universe papers about L’Opera Populaire.

Shortly after fans noticed this detail, a series of masks started popping up at locations across the city, with luggage tags bearing MasqueradeNYC.com on one side, and the message “if found please call 212-505-5666”. Calling the number (now Masquerade‘s business line) would trigger a voicemail message featuring a music box playing the song Masquerade, slowly winding down before an ominous voice states “he’s back”. The following day, a series of mirrors with the Masquerade logo appeared across the city. Each time, the MasqueradeNYC Instagram would post a story with a picture of where to go, for those curious enough (and quick enough) to find it. A full accounting of these events is listed below.

• Masks and Mirrors (April 20th): Six masks were left in front of key locations significant to the Phantom including Lee’s Art Shop, the Majestic Theater, and Christie’s Auction House. Shortly after, they’re joined by six mirrors.
• Breaking News (April 23rd): Addresses for a series of newsstands across Manhattan were shared, with instructions to give the password “Masquerade”. In exchange, the shop attendant would hand over an in-universe newspaper from the 1880s, with a personalized letter from the Phantom tucked inside.
• A Bed of Roses (April 25th): This time, a series of Broadway theaters received a bed of roses attached to lampposts, tagged with the same luggage tags as the masks. Fans later realized that each of these theaters was home to one of director Diane Paulus’ prior shows, teasing her involvement in the musical before it was formally announced.
• Speakeasy Scratch-and-Win (April 26th): Once more, fans were directed to a newsstand…but this time, it was for a late night drop, starting at 10pm. Visitors ran into a masked woman in a jester costume, handing out scratch-and-win tickets in exchange for a password that offered newspapers, masks, and…something special that we’ll get to later, as prizes.
• Ice Cream Social (May 2nd): The same masked jester returned to take over an ice cream truck in Chinatown, giving out free cherry-dipped ice cream cones to fans with the right password…along with red napkins bearing the Masquerade logo on one side, and the music box phone number on the other.
• High End Haberdashery (May 11th): Next, a series of bold red signs started popping up across New York City, encouraging the curious to contact Fittings@MasqueradeNYC.com to “Hide your face so the word will never find you”.
• Tourist Traps and Tshirts (May 15th): People who weren’t selected for fittings (again, more on that later) received an email telling them their consolation prize was waiting for them inside a souvenir shop in Tribeca. After providing the correct password, they received an “I Love NYC” shirt with the message “Did you think that I had left you for good” scrawled over it in red.
• Subway Serenade (May 23rd): This time the East Village deli location provided was only the start of the experience, as visitors were handed a Metro card and a map with the now familiar “Did you think that I had left you for good” message scrawled across it, along with a red mask over Union Square station. After taking the subway uptown and getting off the train, a haunting violin melody led fans to a masked woman performing music from Phantom of the Opera, with a bed of luggage tagged roses (and a pile of red sheet music) at her feet. This was the final public-facing event for quite some time…but not the last.
• Speakeasy Scratch-and-Win Reprise (September 27th): The night before Masquerade‘s gala launch event, the Masquerade Instagram reactivated once more, directing fans to yet another late night newsstand drop. This time, the jester was replaced by the same man who approached me after Masquerade, with another round of scratch-and-win tickets cleverly branded as “Lotto 666”. Most recipients won posters signed by Diane Paulus, although a select few won tickets to the opening night gala event.

Beyond creating spectacle, these popups offered up an understated celebration of New York City, by injecting magic into many of the cultural touchstones of Manhattan. From corner delis and souvenir shops to newsstands and subway street performers, the Masquerade ARG welcomed the Opera Ghost back to the city that was his home for so long. But these activations were only scratching the surface.

Joining an Opera Ghost Hunting Society: The Story Behind the Popups
Those of you who noticed a few gaps in that recounting of Masquerade’s popups and activations have probably already deduced that something more was going on…after all, there was barely any mention of that ghost hunter who greeted me during the show’s Previews. That’s because scattered throughout the experience were a number of chances to stumble deeper into the experience, and uncover a loose narrative tied together through a series of one-on-one encounters.

Before the Masquerade even started doing deaddrops, active members of the Phantom fandom started receiving deeply personalized letters from the Opera Ghost, complimenting them for their contributions in the space and welcoming them to the return of the Masquerade in an almost threatening manner. But the Masquerade ARG’s true narrative started in parallel with the popups.

It all started in the unofficial fan Discord. Emursive’s immersive theater production Life and Trust had just announced that April 19th would be its final show when Masquerade started its first round of deaddrops, and someone going by the username ghosthunter218 slipped into the newly created Masquerade Discord (as well as a few other immersive theater Discords) with a video insisting that they found something at Lee’s Art Shop. Those interested in investigating further were invited to email or DM him for details.

When approached, he would inquire about whether you believed in ghosts, before explaining, “I’ve stumbled across something remarkable. I want you to see what I’ve seen. 218 w 57th (the address for Lee’s Art Shop). I’ll send a time later.”

The Initial Ghost Hunting Expedition
In between the initial newsstand drop on April 23rd and the speakeasy scratch-and-win event on April 26th, select members of the community were instructed to meet outside Lee’s Art Shop late at night, where they were met by Sean Hunter in person to “sneak in” to the building under construction. Once inside, he fitted fellow ghost hunters with red headlamps to see in the otherwise dark building, before guiding them into the basement.

While heading down, he recounts the building’s history and mentions how he sometimes hears music coming from the basement. In the distance, a figure is seen fleeing, and a copy of the newspaper drops, marred by red text reading “Hide your face so the world can never find you.” This spooks (pun intended) Sean, and he hurriedly guides guests out…but not before a mask drops, leaving hunters with two souvenirs from their exploration of the haunted Art Shop.

While the emerging fan community got early access to this in-universe tour, the event served as an additional grand prize for a lucky few at the late night speakeasy scratch-and-win event. Winners were scheduled for their own run through the ghost hunting expedition later that night, with staggered times to allow more than a few people to see the full experience. This would soon become a pattern: certain activations would come with additional opportunities to stumble across a deeper layer to the ARG, coordinated on a tightly looped schedule.

A Brief Puzzling Interlude: A Musical Discovery in Lee’s
Thanks to my email correspondences with Sean Hunter I was initially scheduled to go on a ghost hunting expedition on April 27th, but my invitation was cancelled last minute, with the in-universe explanation that “they changed the locks…they’re trying to make me think i’m crazy. there’s gotta be a better way.”

While I never got to go on the tour, I did receive a consolation prize of sorts: Sean followed up with a discovery from his own ventures, noting that “they tried to lock me out. they didn’t want us to see what’s in there. but this morning i found this in my bag…what even is this?”

Reading the musical notes, the message from the Phantom spelled out “A FACE CAGED”, which would end up being the first and only puzzle of the experience – proving that while alternate reality games often leverage puzzles as gating mechanism, they’re far from necessary for the format.

Madame Zephyrine’s Tarot Readings and the Return of the Ghost Hunter
The next week during the ice cream social event, the masked woman in a jester costume would occasionally hand a customer a red envelope, telling them to proceed to an address a few blocks away, and knock on the door at a set time with a specific pattern. But when the door opened, it wasn’t the psychic: instead, Sean Hunter was standing there clutching a locket seeming somewhat dazed, before he bolted across the street in a rush.

Madame Zephyrine went on to give a three-card tarot reading, before the now-familiar music box music took over as the third and final card was pulled: a custom Death card with Death replaced by the Phantom’s Red Death costume. More tarot cards from this set would appear at last night’s gala event, as Madame Zephyrine returned for additional readings.

Yet again, while anyone who went to the event had the chance to receive a lucky red envelope inviting them to dive deeper, there was an alternate route in as well. One fan discovered a pair of eyeglasses perched on the ledge outside Lee’s Art Shop that matched the pair featured in the in-universe newspaper. After contacting Sean about the discovery, they were invited for an appointment with Madame Zephyrine.

Mask Fittings and Ominously Specific Measurements
While most applicants for custom fittings were rejected, a handful received instructions to show up at the souvenir shop that would double as the pickup location for custom I Love NYC tshirts. “Special guests”, however, would be given personalized passcodes alongside instructions to knock three times on a door in the back of the store. Yet again, Sean Hunter was waiting at the door to guide guests to the store’s second floor, for a personalized mask fitting with “the Maskmaker”.

Worryingly enough, while taking measurements for the mask, the only measurement The Maskmaker took is the customer’s neck, bringing to mind the Phantom’s penchant for using garottes on his victims. After taking down that number, the Maskmaker selected a mask from the wall and placed it on the face of his satisfied customer, as the music box starts to play once more. The experience closed out with a final photograph, sent personally to the mask’s recipient and later preserved on the Masquerade Instagram account.

The Fittings email would eventually be repurposed for an official line of couture masks, designed by Nicola Formichetti, who also designed masks for the show.

Summoning Circle: A “Majestic” Theatrical Finale
Each of the previous encounters were something that particularly brave or curious participants could stumble their way into: however, the finale was reserved for some of the most vocal fans. On June 2nd, Sean Hunter reached out to some of the more active creators documenting the experience, with a message: “i need to show you something. are you free tomorrow between 5pm-7:30…tell no one.”

After confirming availability, they were invited to enter the Majestic Theatre (Phantom of the Opera‘s prior Broadway home) where Sean Hunter guides his solitary guest into an empty theater, lit only by their headlamps and the hauntingly red ghost light protecting the stage.

Upon entering Box 5 the guest is joined by Madame Zephyrine and the Maskmaker. The four sit in a circle and conduct a seance to help the Opera Ghost return. As part of the seance, the guest is handed a rose, a necklace affixed to a piece of the chandelier from L’Opera Populaire, and an elaborate mask.

Upon completion of the ceremony, a letter from the Opera Ghost falls at the guest’s feet and the Phantom appears at the other end of the stage, only to vanish once more with a flourish of his cape.

So, piecing together the clues from the ARG: the Opera Ghost was trying to come back, with vestiges of his former self surfacing – most frequently, through the music box that was so dear to him as a child, but also by adding messages to physical artifacts. Sean Hunter was investigating those appearances, and through the course of that journey he came across others looking to bring him back, with one final ritual. Evidently that ritual was successful, making the ARG’s players complicit in Erik’s return.

The Masquerade ARG: Promises Made, Promises Kept
Often, alternate reality games created to tease experiences are designed to make promises about the media property to come. When HBO used an alternate reality game to tease the first season of Game of Thrones, it was created to reassure ardent fans of the book that HBO was just as passionate about George RR Martin’s works as readers, by finding ways to showcase Westeros using all five senses. And when Dropout finally caved to fan pressure and made an ARG for the most recent season’s secret episode of Game Changer, it created an experience that stripped Sam Reich’s control of his own show, to set the stage for a secret episode intent on doing the same.

The Masquerade ARG made two promises about what to expect in the release of Masquerade. For Phantom fans, it promised the opportunity to step into a reverent tribute to L’Opera Populaire by paying tribute to Masquerade‘s place in history. This wasn’t just a tribute fictionally through the in-universe newspapers, it extended across the broader Broadway community by celebrating Diane Paulus’ body of work by creating a literal trail of roses through the theaters that housed her works, and even organizing for ARG’s final scene to take place bathed in ghost light at the theater that was home to the Phantom for so many years. Even the cultural significance of Lee’s Art Shop itself became a core feature of the ARG, with multiple narrative beats celebrating the history of the show’s new home.

For immersive theater fans, the Masquerade ARG promised that the show would be something that offered up moments of spectacle that put theatergoers in the middle of the action, while also providing the chance for personal interactions directed at you personally, rather than to a crowd of hundreds. The ARG was reassurance that the “immersive Phantom” moniker wasn’t just a marketing ploy.

Which brings us back to my earlier encounter with Sean Hunter. When he approached me, he said, “you see? Everything I told you was true.” And Sean was right. Not just because the Phantom actually was haunting Lee’s Art Shop, but because the production delivered on the promises its marketing made. In order to explain how, I’ll need to peel back the curtain and offer light spoilers about the structure of Masquerade as an immersive theater production, at least based on how it played out during Previews.

If you’d like to remain unspoiled about the show until you get a chance to see it, use the following photo of the newspapers that obscure Masquerade‘s interior at Lee’s Art Shop as excuse to stop reading.

Still here? Great. You’ve been warned.

Masquerade‘s Structure: A Dark Ride Musical
So, let’s talk about the show’s structure. At its core, Masquerade is still a musical, following a (largely) linear path through the narrative of Phantom of the Opera. But rather than having stage crew hurriedly rearrange a single set throughout the show, the audience itself moves through a series of rooms and follows the story, told primarily through the perspectives of the Phantom and Christine. No Proscenium typically refers to this style of show as a dark ride immersive, because of how audience experience is “on rails”.

To take full advantage of the space, every night audiences are divided into six “pulses” of 60 guests following a different Phantom and Christine pair for each pulse, offset by 15 minute increments. For the major musical numbers and moments of spectacle, the play resolves around those 60 guests, with cast members and performances flowing around and even within that crowd.

But every now and then, groups are split apart and enjoy a more intimate experience, in groups of around 20 guests. Sometimes those groups will continue to roam through the halls before converging, and other times they’ll be split off into a single room where the frenzied action comes to them. And it’s these more intimate groups where the promise of immersive theater is fulfilled.

Even in scenes where everyone in your pulse is in attendance, Masquerade offers the surreal experience of watching Broadway performances while being effectively closer than the front row of most plays. Most of the backing tracks may be prerecorded, but the singing itself is live and literally in your face, creating a surprisingly intimate environment. And thanks to Phantom’s show-within-a-show structure, you are often literally on stage with the cast and crew. And while some liberties were taken with the plot, these were almost universally true to broader Phantom lore, drawing on book, musical, and even film to adapt to the show’s immersive structure.

Masquerade‘s Intimacy: Building Magic in the Small Moments
Every time Masquerade splits its audience into smaller groups, the show takes full advantage of the opportunity to make sure practically every guest leaves with a special moment that’s all their own. That might be a tangible thing, with the many letters that change hands over the course of the show finding their way into audience hands as souvenirs. Or it might be a little more physical. During a series of events taking place in L’Opera Populaire’s dressing room, which might be the immersive highlight of the entire performance, characters enlist audience members into all sorts of hijinks. Carlotta even sat on my lap, at one point.

As is often the case, however, the most powerful moments were the dozens of small encounters along the way where the cast recognized you as someone sharing the space with them. When the Managers spoke ill of the Opera Ghost, Christine’s whispered response wasn’t directed at a fellow cast member, it was directed at me. The show’s dramatic and heartfelt conclusion (which I will not spoil here) is perhaps the strongest example of this in action, bringing the story to a close in a way that could only work as an immersive performance.

To be clear, Masquerade attendees are there first and foremost as audience members, and little is asked of you. Masquerade is not a show that revels in Sleep No More‘s motto of “Fortune Favors the Bold” – indeed, it’s one of the few immersive shows I’ve experienced where courtesy and deference wasn’t treated as a moral failing.

A Layered ARG Launch for a Layered Show
Masquerade‘s alternate reality game worked on so many levels, making it one of my favorite ARGs I’ve personally experienced in years. The frequent popups and activations created compelling introductions to the Phantom’s immersive return to New York City even without further context…and further digging only heightened the anticipation, for Phantom and immersive fans alike.

Even more impressively, Masquerade seems to have delivered on all of the promises made by that advance campaign, creating a show that isn’t just a successor to Sleep No More‘s decades long run in the city: it’s a welcome evolution to the form that should be more approachable to the average theatergoer. And while the show is significantly pricier than most of its Broadway competitors for their cheapest tickets, it also delivers an experience that justifies the premium. Masquerade is a show where every “seat” feels like it’s the front row, while manufacturing dozens of moments that make you feel like it’s actually an audience of one.

For tickets to Masquerade, go to MasqueradeNYC.com. While most nights are 21+ (alcohol is served as part of the show, although non-alcoholic alternatives are also available), weekend matinee shows expand the age range to anyone 16+.

For personal perspectives on what it was like to play the ARG check out TheatreWithSelena and BroadwayBen on TikTok, as well as FlagBridge Designs on Instagram. Their ongoing coverage of the campaign was practically essential in following the ARG as it progressed, and captures a lot of the magic and excitement of experiencing it unfold in real time.

The post Masquerade: NYC’s New Immersive Musical Launched With a Secret ARG first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

I think Dropout’s hit game show Game Changer is celebrating the end of its seventh season with an alternate reality game. Admittedly, when fans of the show posted to the streaming network’s subreddit, the show’s host Sam Reich clearly and repeatedly denied the claims, writing “NOTHING TO SEE HERE” and “THIS IS NOTHING, LOOK AWAY”. These denials were reinforced by the show’s co-executive producer Paul Robalino, who went even further with his statement:

Admittedly, I was convinced there was a Game Changer ARG two years ago, when the team teased there might be more to the season after the “final episode” of season 5. And then I did it all over again last year, when a particularly glitchy episode released during season 6.

But please, ignore my spotty personal track record for this and the team’s explicit and suspiciously specific denials: this time, I think Game Changer really is running an alternate reality game that gives its players a peek behind the fictional-curtain of the show, to help unlock the “real” ending for the season. But before going over that, I should probably own up to past missteps.

Third Time’s the Charm? The Last Two Times We Suspected a Game Changer ARG
Admittedly, the Dropout fandom doesn’t have the best track record of finding ARGs in episodes of Game Changer. The first time we missed the mark was after the season 5 episode Escape the Greenroom. The episode introduced viewers to Samuel Dalton, Sam Reich’s great-grandfather and occultist. During the episode, Dalton kidnapped and replaced the real Sam Reich, subjecting the episode’s guests to a custom escape room designed by Stash House‘s Tommy Honton.

At the time, this episode was thought to be the ninth and final episode of the season. But immediately after it aired, Sam Reich posted a cryptic message to the Discord, hinting that there might be more to come.

In retrospect, the solution to this was relatively straightforward: zoom into the series’ key, and Sam Reich had an extra “13” up his sleeve, hinting that the show would have not just one surprise episode, but four: a multi-part Battle Royale homage to the Survivor franchise that served as the true end of the season. That didn’t stop fans (myself included) from deconstructing every tidbit of occult lore shown as part of the escape room, suspecting we hadn’t seen the last of Samuel Dalton, time travelling magician and occultist.

The next year, suspicions of an alternate reality game started to really percolate after the season’s sixth episode, Deja Vu. The episode centered around contestants reliving the episode on a time loop, with the episode’s footage glitching out more and more after every loop – a theme familiar to fans of Ranboo’s Generation Loss ARG from the prior year. Ranboo would make their own Game Changer debut through a series of guest appearances culminating in the season finale.

This theme was also familiar to Game Changer fans still looking for Samuel Dalton to make an ARGish return. Was the time loop happening because Reich’s time travelling great-grandfather returned to torment a new batch of contestants in a neverending loop? The episode’s frequent glitches and nearly impossible challenges did task contestants with exploring external websites, like the FixItMan78 YouTube channel which provided helpful instructions on how to repair the ElectroBobbleWobble QZ.

So, fans started poring through Deja Vu to interpret the glitches, and even started skimming through past episodes to see if there was a pattern in Sam Reich’s introductions that might reveal whether he’d been secretly replaced by his identical great-grandfather. Multiple promising leads emerged, but nothing that manifested into anything definitive.

The next episode, Beat the Buzzer (which brought back Tommy Honton as a consultant) only fanned the flames of speculation by subjecting the show’s contestants to a number of challenges to earn the right to press dozens of buzzers hidden throughout the studio: this time, famed magician and time traveler Samuel Dalton even made a cameo on an advertisement for his show, next to a literal callback puzzle that challenged contestants to order a buzzer from a fake pizza company.

After the episode aired, some of those games (like Crack the CAPTCHA) were even made playable on Dropout’s site. But ultimately, in season 6 there wasn’t even a card up Sam’s sleeve – sometimes, a time loop episode is just a time loop episode.

The Dropout ARG is Real This Time, I Swear
Which brings us back to earlier this week, when a third round of hype around a potential Dropout ARG started taking hold. Game Changer‘s seventh season ended with an election for the next CEO of Dropout, and many campaign promises were made: one of the more bold ones involved a promise to air the entirety of Avengers: Endgame after the episode’s credits. And at least part of this promise was fulfilled: the final moments of the finale pays homage to the MCU’s iconic Marvel logo introduction by flashing through a highly cinematic crawl montage of key moments from past Dropout episodes, mapped onto a 3D rendering of the brand’s logo…before cutting to a copyright claim explaining the episode’s ending was removed “due to a (legitimate) copyright claim.”

After the episode aired, Dropout’s minigames site saw the introduction of a new game themed around the episode called “Cast Your Vote”. Select one of the show’s five contestants, and cast your ballot. Only…players are also allowed to enter the names of write-in candidates. And during the episode, Brennan Lee Mulligan attempts to game the system by ceding his nomination to Sam Reich’s wife Elaine Carroll. Enter her name, and she replaces Brennan as a candidate. Vote for her, and a fragment of a QR code appears behind her name.

Piecing Together the QR Code Puzzle: Behind the Scenes with 1S Studios
Once this discovery was made, fans started digging into the other minigames created for prior episodes, and discovered edge cases that would reveal additional QR code fragments. But even more curiously, they discovered the website for the game studio responsible for these creations, 1S Studios, redirected to a bare-bones LinkedIn page that in turn linked to their Github repository. While exploring that codebase, they found a secret VIP login page, with instructions on how to email support for a password reset.

Fans eventually realized they could spoof Brennan Lee Mulligan’s credentials by using bleem_d20dm as username, and ecce amice tu cornibus ferries as password, to enter the VIP Feedback mode.

Once there, feedback notes between 1S Studio (cmyk and joker_ling) and Dropout (MrWenis and bleem_d20dm) became visible, offering nudges on how to unlock the various QR code fragments using behind the scenes conversations as hints. For instance, Cast Your Vote‘s commentary included Brennan Lee Mulligan saying, “official request: take me out and put Elaine in”.

Survive the Maze can be solved thanks to a hint from cmyk reminding Sam “have you tested your account name for the secret ending”, Power Up Jacob hints at a “Maximum Mode” that takes more than quick tapping to reach, and Crack the CAPTCHA places a special request for a round of playtesting from the West Coast. The piece de resistance, however, comes from the lighthearted Chrome Extension Buttling Buddy, which adds cartoon butts to your screen. Completing the requirements for that particular task unlocks a QR code fragment made out of tiny cartoon butts.

Elote of Trouble For What? The Final Piece of the Puzzle
Within the Feedback section for “Survive the Maze” in particular, Sam Reich encourages 1S Studios’ joker_ling to remove references to “the corn game”, prompting joker to reference how much they love elote. This nudges puzzlers to hunt down a secret Elote Street Corn page, featuring a pixelated image of a corn cob with seven colored squares on it, paired with an elated comment from joker_ling saying, “HAPPY PRIDE!”

Each row of the corn cob corresponds to the length of a different season of Game Changer, with one pixel per episode: and referencing the highlighted episode of every season reveals a different unique description tag for each episode. Sort those in rainbow order, and a final instruction is revealed:

RED – s5e9 (Escape the Greenroom) – ASSEMBLE THE PUZZLE
ORANGE – s4e7 (Don’t Cry) – PUT THE LETTERS
YELLOW – s1e4 (Whodunnit) – IN ORDER
GREEN – s6e7 (Beat the Buzzer) – AND SEARCH
BLUE – s2e2 (Do I Hear $1?) – FOR
INDIGO – s3e5 (Ham It Up) – THE REAL
VIOLET – s7e10 (Outvoted) – ENDING

So, we’re beginning to put together enough pieces of the puzzle to know what’s going on. While porting over minigames that were used during Game Changer for public consumption, 1S Studio inserted a handful of easter eggs into the games, alongside fragments of a QR code. Once assembled, the code will presumably scan to a final puzzle that will reveal a keyword that Dropout subscribers can search for to see the real ending to a season that otherwise ended with a faked copyright claim.

Assuming it’s an ARG in the first place. After all, I’ve been wrong twice before, and Sam Reich and Paul Robalino were quite convincing with their arguments that there’s nothing to see here.

Game Changer and the Art of the ARG
It’s no secret that I’m obsessed with Dropout’s game show programming. ARGNet’s coverage of the 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt was almost exclusively dedicated to celebrating a single puzzle’s narrative and mechanical homage to Um, Actually. When I was in charge of running live events for the 2024 MIT Mystery Hunt, one of the events I’m proudest of creating adapted the recurring Game Changer segment Sam Says into a time loop puzzle designed for a crowd of over 100 people (and yes, that took place a few months before Deja Vu). I even competed on an ARG-themed edition of Um, Actually to celebrate the ARGonauts podcast’s 101st episode. I also know I’m not the only member of the ARG community who’s fallen deeply in love with the streaming service’s programming, and Game Changer in particular. Part of that love comes because structurally, Game Changer delivers an experience for its viewers and contestants that’s highly similar to that of following an ARG.

At the beginning of every episode, Sam Reich welcomes his guests with a deceptively simple question: “now, you all understand how the game works?” And almost without fail, contestants will answer no, allowing Sam to explain the only constant of the show: “our players have no idea what game it is they’re about to play. The only way to learn is by playing. The only way to win is by learning, and the only way to begin is by beginning.”

And by and large, that’s the experience of playing an alternate reality game: there’s no set way to signal the beginning of a game. It can start with something as innocuous as a bottle of honey with strips of paper shoved inside, or as extravagant as an invitation to deliver a secret passcode to a corner newsstand. And the nature of gameplay itself can be just about anything, from solving a string of puzzles hidden in a video to digging through fictionalized historical artifacts. The only constant is that you learn the rules of the game by poking at its boundaries, and seeing what behaviors the game encourages with the implicit promise that the results will be worth the time investment.

That doesn’t mean ARGs will never resemble each other: for instance, the current Game Changer ARG bears a lot of structural similarity to the Chain Factor ARG, which served as a minigame-based sequel to an episode of Numb3rs by hiding a story in the error code messages of a casual game now known as Drop7. But it does mean that approaching something that feels similar still requires caution, as new twists in gameplay (or “Loop de Loops”, as Game Changer likes to call it) may have been introduced.

So, no. I have no idea what kind of ARG this will be. But, as the saying goes: the only way to learn is by playing. The only way to win is by learning. And the only way to begin is by joining the discussion at r/Dropout, checking out the minigames yourself, or subscribing to Dropout and binge watching Game Changer yourself.

UPDATED TO ADD: Around the same time this article went up, the r/Dropout subreddit realized that the instructions to search for “The Real Ending” was a literal instruction, leading to extended cuts of Dimension 20: On A Bus, Brennan’s Exit…and a “Real Ending” video that feels like it’s still one step away from the ARG’s grand finale.

Fans have also managed to assemble enough of the QR code to discover the website ep11.love, which is where they can enter the answer from The “Real Ending’s” prompt…to unlock a secret 11th and final episode of Game Changer season 7. A megathread has also been created in r/Dropout to consolidate the discussion.

…and part of that conversation includes the “magic word” itself: entering SAMALAMADINGDONG on ep11.love (a Sam-centric spin on the YouTube video linked in the description of Dropout’s “The Real Ending” video), with secret episode 11 unlocking after 100K people enter the magic word.

Updated 8/25 with the finale: After the password “Samalamadingdong” was entered 100K times, a countdown to August 25th at 1pm EST unlocked, at which point Sam Reich went live with a (now archived) 30 minute Instagram Live stream explaining how the Dropout cast conspired to inflict a secret 11th episode upon him – “the most expensive ever piece of Dropout content…the only episode of Dropout not helmed by me, but helmed by Brennan Lee Mulligan. An awful taste of my own medicine. It was humiliating, it was terrifying and I…if we’re going to be honest…loved it.”

That episode is now live for Dropout subscribers.

The post It’s Been Here the Whole Time: The Boy Who Cried “Dropout ARG” first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

Colonel Harlan Sanders was obsessed with fried chicken, even before he convinced a cafe owner to sell fried chicken with his special blend of 11 herbs and spices. Enough so, that KFC’s newest commercial is a 75 second homage to the obsession that gave birth to the Kentucky Fried Chicken brand.

With this focus on obsession front and center, it’s no wonder the commercial snuck a QR code on Matty Matheson’s tattoed arm, kicking off a deviously challenging series of 11 secret codes and puzzles to celebrate the herbs and spices that built an empire. The first person to solve each of the puzzles? They’re rewarded with 11 months of free KFC for their efforts.

KFC gets extremely creative with their advertising. Celebrity casting for commercials is fairly standard for major brands, but starting in 2015 KFC went out of its way to surprise fans by cycling through a full roster of celebrity Colonel impersonators. Darrell Hammond was the first to take over the finger-lickin’ mantle, but was quickly supplemented by everyone from beloved comedians like Norm MacDonald and Jason Alexander to more surprising picks like Reba McEntire and RoboCop. But it’s the company’s stunt marketing that truly shines: it’s been almost a decade since the release of the free romance novella Tender Wings of Desire to celebrate Mother’s Day, but I still keep a copy on my Kindle. The company doubled down on their thirst trap branding by releasing a free dating sim that’s still available on Steam.

The commonality between Tender Wings of Desire and I Love You Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Sim? They’re highly enjoyable experiences that recognize what makes the source materials work so well, and pay homage to it. And I am happy to announce that KFC’s puzzle hunt for the overly obsessive continues that tradition with a series of challenging yet creative puzzles. So, we’re going to do this article a little different. If you’d like to give the puzzles a try yourself, go to The11Secrets.com, and see what you can uncover. Keep on reading to be spoiled on a selection of those 11 puzzles and to learn why I’m so effusive in praise for them.

Again: what follows will be absolutely riddled with spoilers.

The first puzzle challenge of the series is finding the website for submissions in the first place, and tweaking the contrast on Matty Matheson’s tattoos was quite the challenge: luckily, I was able to partially circumvent that by paying close attention to a promotional video from Loey Lane, who has covered ARGs extensively in the past and even called me out for my engagement with Nutter Butter’s long-running gonzo marketing campaign.

While the main puzzles are fairly difficult to spot on their own, a series of eleven minimalistic icons nudge puzzlers where to look for the various challenges, while further serving as reinforcement that they’re on the right track once a prospective puzzle is spotted. These clues are not listed in order of the video, but still provide both guide and framework to the experience, with file names providing additional structure to the experience. Notably, these are not just hints – for more than a few of these puzzles, the image is a necessary component to the solve.

Elementary, My Dear Watson: The Case of the Smoking Tree
One of the more straightforward puzzles of the set was nonetheless one of the more satisfying ones: for a few seconds, the camera lingers on the Colonel’s car as it drives past a particularly gnarled tree in the desert.

Take a closer look at the tree, however, and some of those branches start to look a lot like stick figures: a very particular type of stick figures known as “Dancing Men”, which was used as a cipher in a Sherlock Holmes mystery. The result: a solution that leaves you SPEECHLESS.

It’s an elegant puzzle: the icon tells you where to look (a gnarled tree) and what you need to learn about to interpret the message (Sherlock Holmes’ more encryption-based tales). And this level of care is fairly standard for the experience, although many of the finer points are only evident in retrospect.

A History Lesson in Puzzling Form: Reading Maps is Hard
Seconds later, Colonel Sanders pulls out a map, heavily annotated with a red marker. The geographically inclined might notice that the square chunk in the upper right corner is the border between Utah and Wyoming, establishing the map’s area of interest as Salt Lake City. I suppose it would even be possible to pinpoint exactly where the star on the map is located, flexing cartographic skills I’ll never have.

Luckily, the context is built into the puzzle’s iconographic clue: somewhere in Salt Lake City, there’s a starred location along 3900 S. And a bit of good old fashioned research pulls up why Sanders might be starring a location along that road: the first KFC franchise, still bearing signage of its initial Harman Cafe branding to celebrate its legacy.

Since the clue’s icon places the star over the unknown cross-street, the answer becomes an exercise of filling in the blank with STATESTREET. And while this full backstory is hinted at in the Obsession ad spot, the act of solving almost inexorably down the location’s storied history.

An Introduction to Esolangs: A Celebration of Obsession at Its Extreme
Bear with me, as there is no way this explanation won’t sound at least moderately unhinged – but that’s also why this puzzle is my favorite of the ones solved so far, and a major impetus behind this article getting written in the first place.

One of the more dramatic moments of the commercial features Colonel Sanders’ misadventures with pressure cookers, where the lid of a rickety cooker goes up in flames, completely obscuring the camera in darkness. In that moment of deepest black, a single frame highlights a series of almost-black squares that you wouldn’t even notice, if I didn’t dial up the contrast to 11 for the above screencap.

Sandwiched between a series of three tildes (“fenced code blocks” to keep the code contained) are rows upon rows of squares, with counts ranging from 2 to 39. Luckily, one of the clues provides a hint about how to interpret this: “square = chicken, Way Back”.

As ludicrous as this may sound, there is quite a bit of research into the word “chicken”, and I don’t mean that in an etymological sense. It all started with Doug Zongker from the University of Washington, who dedicated an entire published research paper to nothing but the word “chicken”, and went on to present those findings at a subsequent AAAS conference in exactly the manner one would hope. This inspired Nicholas Tollervey to create an entire coding language focused exclusively around the word chicken (although it does also rely on spaces and carriage returns to function).

And KFC in their infinite wisdom decided to hide one of their secret passphrases in Chicken code. Luckily, this isn’t something solvers have to manage by hand: WAY BACK encourages puzzlers to notice that most articles include a citation to a Wayback Machine version of a Chicken code parser. Horrifyingly enough, my first few attempts at running this code failed abysmally, triggering error messages. And I think it’s important that you see a portion of the “code” I was trying to debug.

This puzzle is borderline evil, but also embraces KFC’s message perfectly: in celebrating the Colonel’s obsession, the company is also highlighting a host of other obsessions: academics and coders who created technical odes to the chicken for their own amusement, and puzzlers willing to dedicate countless hours scouring through less than two minutes of video – often proceeding frame by frame – to learn that 396 repetitions of the word “chicken” somehow executes a chain of logical events that spits out the word CRAVE – an obsession in its own right. And yes, all of this “chicken” code was ~~~properly fenced in~~~, as any fowl wrangler worth their salt (itself one of the eleven herbs and spices) would heartily recommend.

At the time of this article, the r/ARG subreddit has publicly solved 8 of 11 puzzles hidden in the KFC advertisement. And while the three solves outlined above are my personal favorites, additional puzzles lead solvers on a journey through what.3.words locations hidden in “secret” closed captioning tracks, morse code cleverly concealed as part of the design of a major kitchen appliance, and blackout poetry mashing up a redacted copy of the Colonel’s secret recipe and a motivational quote from a newspaper article.

KFC’s puzzle adventure is more than a little reminiscent of a few past alternate reality games that also used puzzles to explore their company’s history: Levi’s ran a nationwide scavenger hunt in 2009 that explored the history of Levi Strauss through the lens of Grayson Ozias IV and his lost fortune, while Coca Cola sent puzzlers to Doc Pemberton’s journals for a similar closely guarded corporate secret in The Secret Formula. It turns out, puzzles are a great way to draw attention to the past, by creating an excuse to research all sorts of lesser known facts.

So thanks, KFC, for celebrating your founder’s obsessions, and for giving yet another online community something to obsess about.

To join the public solving effort, check out the r/ARG subreddit, whose collective solving efforts helped make this article possible. Thanks in particular to /u/just_speculating, who saved me from additional hours counting rows of chickens.

Current (Publicly Solved) Puzzle Status:

Binary: SERVEDWITHPRIDE (solution explained)
Bow: MOXIE (from a note on the fridge with X’s)
Chicken: CRAVE (see above)
DancingColonels: SPEECHLESS (see above)
EarthScript: ONTHEROAD (solution explained)
Louvers: GRIT (solution explained)
Map: STATESTREET (see above)
MorseCode: ZEAL (solution explained)
Redacted: ONEHASTOREMEMBERTHATEVERYFAILURECANBEASTEPPINGSTONETOSOMETHINGBETTER (no seriously, that’s the answer – solution explained)
Spark: EXPLOSIVEFLAVOR (solution explained)
Spices: STILLSECRET (solution explained)

Updated 7/23 to add: the solution to “Spark” has been to the final list
Updated 7/24 to add: “Bow” and “Spices” have been solved, completing the set.

The post KFC Launches Special Blend of 11 Secret Codes and Puzzles first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

PostCurious has a new narrative puzzle adventure called Emerald Echoes crowdfunding on Kickstarter, with the campaign running through August 14th. In many ways, it’s a classic PostCurious game: a series of moderately difficult puzzles strung together to tell a heartfelt story, drawing upon thoughtfully constructed game components designed to draw you into the narrative.

But the reason I’m currently obsessed with Emerald Echoes is how the game reinvents PostCurious’ already strong hint systems, taking the game fully offline in a surprisingly satisfying manner.

Emerald Echoes Finds Puzzlers Returning to the World of The Emerald Flame
Emerald Echoes is framed as a sequel to one of PostCurious’ earliest games, The Emerald Flame. The first game in the series followed Marketa’s research into an alchemical elixir and the often strained relationship that blossomed with Hannah, as told from the player’s perspective as a Koschei Historical Society researcher poring over letters and artifacts from the time in the modern day.

Emerald Echoes picks up where Emerald Flame left off, as people who have come to care for Marketa try and retrace her steps and find her after the events of the first game: a story that is once more told through the perspective of researchers investigating archaeological findings.

Notably, this is a standalone sequel: I played this with a friend who had never played the first installment, and the story still made sense without context from Hannah and Marketa’s prior adventures, although there are the occasional light nods to prior events.

Streamlining the Puzzle and Narrative Structure for Emerald Echoes
The biggest structural change to Emerald Echoes when compared to prior PostCurious games is in how the story and puzzles are delivered. Inside each of the game’s four chapter-based envelopes are a collection of physical objects, and a series of blue and green folders. Blue folders provide purely narrative updates to the story, while green envelopes also contain clues on where to find puzzles within the artifacts, and how to solve them.

Having said that: this is a narrative heavy game, and even letters used to transmit clues for the puzzles dedicate a significant amount of real estate to advancing the narrative across three distinct characters, distinguished by their handwriting.

Since Emerald Echoes is designed to be a completely offline game, the game’s hint system doubles as an answer-checker: the right side of every folder contains an “Analysis” pocket, that walks through the intended solve path and confirms the solution, through the lens of two modern researchers exchanging notes in an online chat.

This structure on its own is an elegant way to take Emerald Echoes fully offline. But the narrative execution of that structure is what has me so obsessed with PostCurious’ newest game.

A Narrative Hint System That Doubles as Heartwarming Story
On a functional level, the Analysis chat logs provide narrative justification for how these artifacts were uncovered. Two researchers pored over a series of letters and artifacts, and used what they learned to figure out where to search for the next set of evidence. If players get stuck, revealing the chat logs can help nudge players to the next step. If players are looking to verify their answer, the logs provide a fun way of highlighting the steps it took to solve the puzzle.

The thing that blows me away is how packed with personality these chat logs are. We never learn the names of the researchers: we only experience them as a blue chat bubble and salmon chat bubble. But the hint system delivers a full narrative arc for the pair, despite that anonymity. We get to witness them give each other nicknames, commiserate over inter-office drama, and even…well, that would be telling. But by the end of the game, I was just as invested in the story told through the margins of the game’s hint system as I was with the game’s main narrative.

I cannot stress this enough: Emerald Echoes‘ narrative hint system is a massive step forward for a company that has already been on the bleeding edge when it comes to in-game hinting, and hope more game designers explore ways to add a dash of fun to their systems.

Emerald Echoes Puzzles to Write Yourself Into the Game
Emerald Echoes delivers a series of diverse and well constructed puzzles, while maintaining a moderately hard difficulty level throughout, consistent with past PostCurious games. If you’re only beginning to get into puzzles you might find yourself checking the Analysis logs for a nudge fairly often. But ultimately, it’s hard to describe whether you’ll like a creator’s puzzling style adequately in a review.

Luckily, PostCurious is offering up a series of four sample puzzles over the course of the Kickstarter campaign to give prospective players a sense of the company’s puzzling flair: and four lucky backers who solve those puzzles will have their name included in one of the game components for the final version of Emerald Echoes. New puzzles will release every Friday for the duration of the campaign, with the first one featured above.

Check out the Emerald Echoes Kickstarter campaign before it ends on August 14th. You can also find past coverage on PostCurious games on ARGNet.

Note: ARGNet received an early copy of this game for review.

The post I’m Obsessed with Emerald Echoes’ Narrative Hint System first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.