Steinman grew up with Legos in the 1970s (his favorite, the “Galaxy Explorer”) but only returned to building them during the pandemic. “A lot of people rediscovered things about their creative selves,” he says about that time. He began with basic, out-of-the-box constructs like the Tantive IV from Star Wars: A New Hope, but he wanted to see what he could create on his own, especially since the advent of new, intricate slope and tile pieces.

Each sculpt begins by building out the corner of a base cube, a six-sided studded plate, assembled using S.N.O.T. bricks (i.e., studs not on top) which have studs in multiple directions. From there he layers piece upon piece, organically expanding outward, creating things that look like ridged crystals found in some alien mine or a device from a Christopher Nolan film.

“At the beginning when people were calling my stuff art, I wasn’t fully accepting,” he says, mentioning how his mom, an artist herself, encouraged for a long time. “But now … there’s been this sort of an awakening—an outlet.” Now, after multiple requests and DMs, Steinman is setting aside more sculptures to potentially show at a gallery and perhaps sell, instead of dismantle, in the future.

Find more of Steinman’s (nightly) builds on Instagram @SteinmanZachary.

Images courtesy of Zachary Steinman

Words by David MacNeal

Meade’s work focuses on the contrasts between light and shadow. She highlights the details that the human eye glosses over in order to perceive the world effectively; when we look at someone’s face, we tend to take in its totality instead of picking out how shadows play across the contours of their face, for example. “There’s also reflected light,” Meade explains, “like on the edge of the nostril, where it should be dark, it’s actually bouncing light from your upper lip.”

Applying paint to accentuate those details is what makes Meade’s work look like a moving 2D painted portrait instead of a human wearing body paint. “There would have been other ways to achieve a similar effect, say with Photoshop,” she says, “but that wouldn’t have involved me actually using my hands to do it.”

Thinking with her hands is important to Meade’s process; she lets her brush take over without too much interference from her brain. “If I try and map out how it’s going to be, it’s always less interesting and exciting than just letting it flow out of me.”

"Bold Enough to Wait" by Alexa Meade

Meade doesn’t yet have a title for her style; during our conversation we settled on calling it “the thing she does.” The original concept has grown to take many different forms since she first started investigating it in 2008. Meade sees living painting portraiture as the fine art side of her practice. “Then there are the things I create that are just fun, like giant painted installation spaces.”

In Wonderland Dreams, a 26,000-square-foot exhibition open now in New York City, visitors can interact with the space, costumes, and props — every inch hand-painted in Meade’s favorite color, rainbow — to fall down the rabbit hole of their own imaginations. (And yes, there’s an on-theme deck of cards waiting for you at the end of the experience.)

“I think there’s something really beautiful about empowering people to see themselves as a work of art and create their own composition,” Meade says. “Each person changes the painted space through their participation.”

Meade sees her work as more serious than bodypainting, more profound than a selfie museum. She has created award-winning political pieces in her trademark style. But she’s also fed up with the idea that all art needs to make a statement. “Why do you always need to have some serious justification just to have fun with something?” she asks.

Play is an important driver for Meade. Many of the ideas installed at Wonderland Dreams were workshopped at Meade’s funhouse, which is what she calls the 800-square-foot “magical and fun and weird” apartment where she lives in Echo Park, Los Angeles. She designed a toy made out of reversible sequins (long before they went viral) and, under the mentorship of Ron Dubren, the inventor of Tickle Me Elmo, optioned it to Hasbro. The spirit of play means Meade is constantly experimenting, working on new units of exploration, knowing that many of her efforts may never see the light of day.

Recently, she has been playing with her decidedly analog style in the world of cutting-edge technology. “Paint is one of the oldest technologies,” Meade says. “It is colored mud smeared on a surface to create imagery.” As an artist-in-residence, she has collaborated with space-time researchers at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and worked with the Google team developing Light Field technology. NFTs of her artwork have been sold at Sotheby’s and orbited the Earth on a SpaceX rocket. “I definitely embrace technology, and am fascinated and inspired by it,” she says. “But when you’re actually looking at my tangible artwork, there is something really refreshing about seeing what you’re seeing and knowing that it is unmediated. It’s colored mud on the surface that does this magical transformative thing, without any smoke and mirrors.”

Words by Chloe Olewitz

Photo courtesy of Alexa Meade

SPOILER ALERT: If you're waiting to unwrap your own Mystery Decks and don't want to see all the decks we've included in this year's release, please enjoy this video later.

-- Buy Now -- Mystery Deck -- Buy Now --

Though in different genres, each is a carefully plotted mystery story about a person or group of people who receive—literally—invitations to adventure, whether as seemingly benign as a birthday gift or as sinister as a note from a blackmailer. The people are forced to solve puzzles, assess evidence, make deductions, and undertake dangerous, revealing journeys, often as the corpses pile up around them.

In celebration of cinematic puzzlers, and partly because of the release of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, let’s begin with a look at The Last of Sheila—one of the greatest, little-known movies of all time and a massive inspiration for mystery-obsessed filmmakers like Rian Johnson.

Editor’s note: This article contains plot details of the aforementioned movies, but no spoilers. After all, we do love mystery!

In The Last of Sheila, directed in 1973 by Stephen Sondheim, a group of six Hollywood-adjacent friends gather on the yacht of mischievous movie producer Clinton Greene. One year earlier, their close friend Sheila was killed by a hit-and-run driver, and the murder remains unsolved.

To kick off the game, Greene gives each of the six guests a role such as “Informer” and “Ex-Convict.” He tells them that the roles are actually secrets held by members of their group: one person present is actually an ex-convict, while another had indeed informed on their colleagues. Over the rest of the week, the players can follow a series of elaborate clues, racing each other to locate staged scenes with evidence about each role—or to protect their own secret from being revealed.

Sondheim is well-known for his musical productions, but according to his biographer, he was also a lifelong fan of puzzles and experiential games. In the late 1960s, he set cryptic crossword puzzles for New York Magazine, introducing the format to American audiences. And he ran elaborate treasure hunts and party games for his friends, renting limousines and sending them all over the city hunting for new clues, like slices of cake that, when recombined, formed directions about the next location in the game. In the years before his death in November 2021, he was a familiar face at New York City escape rooms.

(Read more: “The Art of Escape Rooms: Six Strategies for Success.”)

The movie Clue takes its inspiration directly from the board game of the same name, designed by Anthony E. Pratt in 1943. In the board game, players move between rooms in an old manor house in which a murder has been committed, working to deduce the identity of the murderer. Pratt was inspired by the popular detective fiction of Agatha Christie, and in the United States the game was marketed with a Sherlock Holmes tie-in, although he never appears in the game.

Clue carries over the detective influences of the board game, setting its scene in New England in 1954 at the heart of McCarthyism. In the film, an anonymous blackmailer invites six strangers to a remote house on a stormy night. Each person has an equally plausible reason to kill their blackmailer. The lights go out, and—blam!—suddenly there’s a body on the floor, and nobody knows whodunnit.

In fact, not even the viewing audience always knew. At the end of the film, Wadsworth the butler (played impeccably by Tim Curry) narrates three possible ways the murder-filled evening could have gone down, each with a different killer. If you’re watching the movie on a streaming service or a disc, you’ll see all three. But in 1985, each screening of Clue only featured one of the three endings. The studio hoped it would encourage repeat viewings, but it didn’t work, and the film flopped, only for it to become a cult favorite decades later.

While Clue took its inspiration from a board game, The Game, directed by David Fincher, was both influenced by puzzle games and helped inspire real-world games after its release.

In The Game, Michael Douglas plays Nicholas Van Orton, a wealthy investment banker whose younger brother gives him the ultimate “gift for the man who has everything”—a super-customized game, created by a mysterious company, Consumer Recreation Services. Strange events begin to trickle into Van Orton’s life, and he must unravel the mysterious conspiracy as the ordeals escalate.

The Game was inspired by “The Game,” a real-life puzzle-based treasure hunt that was inspired by the 1980 film Midnight Madness, which was itself inspired by a 1973 treasure hunt created by two Californians. And if that’s not enough layers for you: the film The Game inspired more real-world puzzle hunts and car-based games, as well as the first alternate reality game (ARG), 2001’s The Beast.

The popularity of 2019’s Knives Out and its 2022 sequel Glass Onion shows that audiences are still hungry for intriguing puzzles, twisty plots, clever detectives, and a bit of murder; the playful spirit that viewers embrace will surely sow its seeds in a new generation of designers to come.

Feel like going down your very own puzzle rabbit hole? Check out all the hidden secrets in our art journal TANGRAM.

Words by Laura E. Hall

Hidden throughout the pages of Tangram Volume 1 are 6 puzzles, themed around each of the 6 artists featured in the journal.

A small red tangram piece marks the starting point for each puzzle, though a single puzzle may utilize elements on multiple pages throughout the journal. Each puzzle can be solved independently and leads to a word or phrase as the answer.

Combining the 6 puzzle answers with another element in the journal reveals a multi-stage metapuzzle progression. You’ll know you’re fully finished once you’ve looked within and discovered a 3-word mantra.

*CLICK* below to find progressive hints for each puzzle. Each hint reveals more explicit information about how each puzzle works, so click for hints in order as needed. The last hint for each puzzle provides a full solution.

Additionally, a few puzzles require cutting but will leave all the non-puzzle content of the journal intact.

Bob Bosch Puzzle

Polly Morgan Puzzle

Kelli Anderson Puzzle

Oscar Ukonu Puzzle

Tobias Dostal Puzzle

Kensuke Koike Puzzle

Metapuzzle 

The Tangram Puzzle Hunt was designed by Matthew Stein. Follow his work at steinium.com and on Instagram @enigmida.

November 18th, 2022 (NY, NY)— Art of Play, the online wonder emporium known for its eccentric catalog of collectible playing cards, games, puzzles, toys, and home amusements, has teamed up with Pentagram, the largest independently owned design studio renowned for its work in graphic design and corporate identity. Together, the two companies will produce a new series of luxury playing cards to be used for card games, cardistry, and magic. Just Type Playing Cards, Edition 1 and 2 are now available in our Shop.

Just Type is a reinterpretation of classic playing card design and a tribute to the many ways that letterforms can be used to communicate. Paula Scher, a titan of the graphic design world, has helped to redefine modern typography. Working with fellow Pentagram designers Jeff Close and Kristin Huber, Scher has playfully deconstructed the classic french design of traditional “poker cards” and removed all extraneous elements. All that’s left is Just Type.

Edition 1 embraces big, bold postmodern elements. Oversized numbers constructed of simple shapes fill the entirety of each card. While each composition could stand on its own as a piece of art, taken together, this collection of 56 images represents a totally unique approach to a familiar form factor. Each number and letter is pushed to the breaking point, shattered into elemental pieces that evoke abstraction, yet communicate so clearly, they can be read from across the room.

Edition 2 offers a minimalist approach in the spirit of classic mid-century design. Each card features an amalgamation of suit and value that expresses its identity with a single figure. An extraordinarily clever visual system makes use of negative space to incorporate the traditional pips (clubs, hearts, spades, and diamonds) into custom-drawn letterforms. The result is both beautiful and humorous. 

Together, these exceedingly adaptive versatile explorations of type prove once again that Scher is a master of pushing words beyond their literal meaning into the realm of purely visual expression. Or, as she more succinctly puts it, “Typography is painting with words.” With these Just Type Playing Cards, Paula Scher demonstrates, once again, why she is one of the most influential and respected graphic designers in the world.

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Pentagram is a multi-disciplinary, independently owned design studio. Their work encompasses graphics and identity, strategy and positioning, products and packaging, exhibitions and installations, websites and digital experiences, advertising and communications, data visualizations and typefaces, sound, and motion. All 22 partners are practicing designers, and whether working collaboratively or independently, they do so in friendship.

Pentagram’s structure is unique. They are the only major design studio where the owners of the business are the creators of the work and serve as the primary contact for every client. This reflects their conviction that great design cannot happen without passion, intelligence and—above all—personal commitment, and is demonstrated by a portfolio that spans five decades, many industries, and clients of every size.

So far his creations have appeared in multiple places from LEGO Technic ads to Jimmy Kimmel Live and Sesame Street and have racked up millions of views across YouTube and Instagram. “These inventions won’t improve your life,” he says. Well, at least not in a physical sense. The New Zealand native, who studied mathematics and computer science, is all about surprises, making viewers wonder what his chain-reaction machines will do next.

To give you an idea, here’s a few of the contraptions in his recent “Pass the Wine” video (embedded below):

• A hammer hits the belly of a rubber chicken launching a rubber ball from its mouth
• A mouse, after riding a toy train, scurries towards a cartoonish slice of cheese, setting off a pool ball, setting off a large wheel of cheese
• A cinderblock smashes a wine glass; a ballerina in a wind-up music box releases a ping-pong ball
• A reciprocating saw buzzes through a loaf of bread, the slice then dominoes onto a line of foam squares as the saw continues to cut through the table.

But that’s only a fraction of the complexity. Art of Play chatted with Herscher to learn more about his frenzied, wondrous mayhem.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Joseph's Machines (@josephsmachines)

How’d you get into this?

I used to be a software developer, but then, one day, in my spare time, I began building a Rube Goldberg machine because I was inspired by these other videos on YouTube. And I got really into it. Every day I would come home from work and spend four hours building it. Seven months later, I had this enormous machine that made me a cup of tea. I filmed it, put it on YouTube, and it got a million views. I realized, “Oh, maybe this could be my new job.”

What’s the most dangerous video you’ve made?

I just made one where I have to duck before a wine bottle on a pendulum swings at my head. It shatters against the wall and all the wine pours out into a chute before ending up in my glass. It’s a little bit dangerous. I had to practice the timing of the duck just right.

Does your background in mathematics guide the invention process?

When you’re a computer engineer, you go through a long process of testing your software over and over and looking for flaws in the construction, aka bugs, and then eliminate them. You’ve got to hunt them–bugs are hard to spot sometimes. Same for my machines. Once we’ve built it, we’ll just run it over and over, trying to find all the flaws in our work when it’s not perfectly consistent. They only work one out of 100 times. So eliminating the bugs means you don’t have to film it 1,000 times.

Photo by Yuri Uemura. Courtesy of Joseph Herscher

What’s the reaction been like? How does it feel to reach millions every day?

It’s crazy that I can self-publish any ideas I have. I don’t have to get permission like you had to in the old days on television. So [social media] allows me to do weird content that would not normally get made—and that is lovely. My fanbase is all over the place. I’ve seen 2 year olds entertained by these machines because you don’t have to understand a language to enjoy them. … It’s really good for kids because it inspires them to think differently about the world around them and the objects they see and all their potential uses. At its heart, that’s teaching innovation—to think outside the square. And that’s what we need.

See other Rube-Goldberg machines on Instagram @JosephsMachines.

Words by David MacNeal

Main photo by WeWork / Katelyn Perry. Courtesy of Joseph Herscher

How to Play Backgammon

Backgammon is a two-player game where each player controls 15 pieces, aka “men” or checkers, one black and one white. The first player to remove their pieces from the board wins.

A board consists of 24 arrow-shaped spaces, the colors split into alternating rows. Six spaces, or “points,” take up each quadrant. The home board for the white checkers is on a player’s right, while the home board for the black checkers is on a player’s left. The white checkers only move counterclockwise, and the black checkers move clockwise.

Each player tries to move their 15 pieces around the board until they can remove them from play by getting them to the edge of the home board. Removing a piece is known as “bearing off.” The starting position for all the pieces are as follows:

Players move their checkers to their home quadrant to remove them from play. The player’s home quadrant contains the six rows in the quadrant originally occupied by their opponent’s two checkers (opposite left for player one and opposite right for player two).

Moves and Rules

Players each roll one die to see who goes first. The first player moves spaces equal to the total of that first roll (their die and their opponent’s). After that, players roll both their own dice. Gamers move up to two pieces equal to the total of the dice roll. If moving two pieces, each piece moves the same as a number on a die. For example, if you roll a 2 and a 6, one piece must move 2 and the other 6 (or 6 and then 2).

• If you roll doubles, you can move that number four times.
• You can move to a space with only one of the opponent’s checkers. Your opponent’s piece is then bumped to the middle of the board, aka “jail” (which divides the four quadrants). In order to remove the piece from jail, they have to try to get the piece into their home quadrant on their next turn.
• To escape jail, the roll must include a die with the number of moves to a free space, following rules about blocked spaces, to return a checker to play. Otherwise, that player passes their turn.
• You cannot move a piece to a point where your opponent has at least two checkers.
• You cannot move the same piece twice if it would land on a blocked space at the end of a single die’s count. For example, if you roll a 3 and a 4 and both the third and fourth space are blocked, you cannot move your checker to the seventh space, even if it’s free.

Winning the Game

Once all 15 pieces are in your home quadrant, you can begin to roll dice to move them off the board and onto the side of the home board. You must roll at least the number of spaces plus one to bear off. Remove all your pieces to win! We are obviously huge fans of the game, hence the large variety of forms to check out, from large quilted blankets to an elegant set inspired by San Francisco’s skyline.

Introducing The Wavelinks Puzzle. Designed by Rod Bogart and produced by us (Art of Play) in collaboration with our good friends over at Craighill. We're two curious companies with one shared obsession: creating beautiful objects that evoke wonder.

Whether you're assembling it or taking it apart, it's delightfully surprising. The Wavelinks moves in a way that's unlike anything you've experienced before.

Even after you've unlocked the secret, the magic continues. The Wavelinks is an amazing puzzle to share with curious friends. You can blow their minds, help them through moments of frustration, and guide them into the inner sanctum of mastery and knowledge.

Now available for Pre-order.

This colorful device for hanging things, hats, coats, scarfs, or even toys, is the epitome of the Eames approach to design.

The first thing you’ll notice is the jubilant color palette of the early 1950s. The visual motif is a clear homage to the stick and ball components of the original design. However, in adapting the Hang-It-All to a new form, we made a surprising discovery.

When traditional playing card symbols are replaced with numerals, the result is more logical and visually cohesive. So, inspired by the rebellious spirit Ray and Charles were famous for, we decided to ditch the aristocracy entirely and adopt a more minimalist approach. You will not find any Kings or Queens in this deck, the cards are simply numbered 1-13, a subtle but gently revolutionary gesture that we’ve never attempted before.

But now, we can’t help wondering why this clarity eluded us for so long. Every time we shuffle the pack and juggle the colorful balls, we’re reminded of the Eames’ enthusiasm to defy the gravity of expectations and embrace a spirit of exploration.

Eames Playing Cards come packaged in a letterpress printed box reminiscent of the home that Charles and Ray designed and built in Los Angeles, California. Made in the USA.

In 2017, after leaving his job as an artistic director for an advertising agency, Boutin took to woodturning. Two years later, he began a series of wood sculptures called Tributes which featured a figure carved from ebony wood, posed in various predicaments, like hanging off a ledge or bridging a broken bowl. So we wanted to find out how Boutin’s work has evolved over time, and what ideas he’s trying to capture.

[Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

Art of Play: You mention on your website that your work is about the human condition and having the courage to face questions, getting to that existential truth. What are some of those questions you are asking? What truths are you trying to carve out?

Jean-Baptiste Boutin: My questions are the same as yours, no doubt. They are at the level of the humans we are. What are we? Does God exist? What is time? Are we free? What is truth/reality?

But the strange intuition that I have is that all these questions are born from a first question—a primary question that would be the cause of all the others. And this question precisely I do not know, and it is this one that I seek by my work, that I underlie by the whole of my pieces. Some would say that I am looking for God, others that I simply want to find my existential truth, whatever it is.

Photo by Benjamin Juhel

When did you begin this series? How has it evolved over time?

I usually say to people who follow and encourage my work, “Follow me because I don’t know where I’m going.”

When I started, I didn’t know it would be a series. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Deep inside me resides a strong thirst. As time goes by, this series becomes stronger—each piece completes the others. They all have their place since each one questions differently.

I like to create a whole system of questions. You have to see it as a universe of open doors, and sometimes the doors lead to others. I am now at 120 pieces, and I considered that I had enough material to publish a book [called Xylosophy, a contraction of the Greek words for wood (ξύλον) and wisdom (σοφία)]. I don’t know what’s next. I can’t wait to see where I’m going.

What are some cornerstone memories that you’d say have affected your artwork?

In addition to my appetite for reflection, a particular event marked me when I was younger. I was still in high school, and my philosophy teacher, a red-haired man with a loud voice, committed suicide right after we graduated.

Weeks prior, we had spent a long time talking about philosophy (with all the passion of which a philosopher is capable). This man, when he left, offered something that is essential to me now: philosophy does not seek happiness, and there is a risk in the logical clarification of ideas. This is why I said that searching is sometimes a risky activity, because you take the risk of finding whatever happens.

I’d like to get a sense of how your art pieces come together. Can you walk me through the step-by-step process of creating “ ‘I’ is a place that is not on any map”?

This piece is a bit peculiar, most of it is made of wood, but the head is made of plaster and diorama materials. I had created this sphere/island a few months ago because I was amused by the idea of a small island-planet, but I had no idea yet how to use it. This is the first stage of the work, those few months during which things mature, and I often have to remind myself that the pieces don’t come out of nowhere and that the work is first and foremost intellectual, whether it is conscious or not.

For most pieces, I start with a tree trunk and cut it with a chainsaw. I draw the [figure’s] position on it, then I rough it out with power tools until I can begin to carve more finely. The rest is done with a chisel, a knife, a scalpel, and then, depending on the work, the finishing touches are all different. For this one, it is waxed and polished, its essence is robinia from the region where I live.

One of my favorite pieces packs an incredible amount of tension. It’s of a seemingly satisfied person looking out at the world, but only a few inches from them is this massive wooden hand, middle finger curled back, primed to flick them—send them flying. What does that piece mean to you?

“The Fragility of Satisfaction,” is a gentle reminder of humility. If you’re happy with yourself, wait a bit, it will pass. By measuring this feeling of pleasure and well-being, we become more solid. It is an encouragement to take a step back and take a more global and longer-term vision. Satisfaction doesn’t see very far. Austrian novelist Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach once wrote: “Humility makes you invulnerable.”

Find more work by Jean-Baptiste Boutin on Instagram @gibus.bordeaux.

Words by David MacNeal

Images courtesy of Jean-Baptiste Boutin

Silly String was supposed to be an instant spray-on cast used for medical purposes until its inventors accidentally sprayed a whole canister across the room. The McVickers Soap Company originally created Play-Doh as a substance for cleaning wallpaper. And Silly Putty was the result of a doctor trying to create synthetic rubber during World War II. But another childhood memory was born around that time ...

In the early 1940s, a 25-year-old Navy engineer working in a shipyard was trying to create a meter that could observe the horsepower of battleships. The engineer, Richard James, used a variety of tension springs in his horsepower meter’s design, but could never quite get the right torsion.

One day, a spring dropped to the ship’s floor. James watched as this spring didn’t just fall to the ground but continued moving. He told his wife Betty that he could probably fashion it into a toy. Eventually, she found the perfect name while looking through the dictionary, and thus the Slinky was born. Well, at least the idea for the toy.

James spent a couple years experimenting on the right type of steel wire, one that was thin enough with the right tension and weight. (The spring that originally fell to the ship’s floor was comparatively thick and heavy.) Once he found the steel wire in that “Goldilocks zone,” he patented the toy.

Next came winding 80 feet of this perfect wire 98 times into a stacked coil 2.5 inches high. The Slinky can “walk” because of this coiled perfection. It transfers the energy from the first “push” along the length of the coil in what is known as a longitudinal wave. This is possible because there is no tension or compression. It’s the closest a toy comes to perpetual motion. Hypothetically, the Slinky would continue down an infinite staircase, end over end, until acted upon by a different outside force.

Once Richard James had perfected his design, he took out a loan for $500, which today would be around $7,500 to $8,000. He used the money to create a Philadelphia-based company, James Industries, and produce his new invention. With his company as backing, he was able to score shelf space inside Philadelphia’s famous Gimbels Department Store. Gimbels stocked 400 Slinky toys that November day, priced at $1 each (about $15 to $20 in today’s dollars). Ninety minutes later, all 400 Slinkys were sold. They would go on to sell 20,000 before Christmas and over 250,000 throughout the following year. At the two-year mark, 100 million.

Betty wasn’t just instrumental in the toy’s naming but also in coming up with additional products incorporating the original Slinky. Remember the Slinky Truck and Slinky Crazy Eyes? Or how about “Slink” from Pixar’s Toy Story?

But by the end of the 1950s, James did a one-eighty. He abruptly left his company, wife, and children behind to move to Bolivia with a religious cult he’d become affiliated with. Little is known about this religious group—some accounts say it was the Wycliffe Bible Translators of America—but Betty was mortified by them, according to an interview with her in 2001. James ultimately funneled his company’s fortunes to the sect, leaving it and his family in financial turmoil and dying of a heart attack in 1974.

Betty, however, was resilient. In 1963, she brought the Slinky to a New York toy show, complete with a catchy jingle to play on TV, and the toy resurged. By the end of the 1990s, the History and Discovery Channels named the Slinky one of the 20th Century’s Top 10 Toys. Following that win, the toy earned several accolades:

• 1999: Slinky gets its own USPS Postage Stamp
• 2000: National Toy Hall of Fame Inductee
• 2001: Betty becomes Toy Industry Association Hall of Fame Inductee

Betty James passed away in 2008 at the age of 90. Today, the Slinky brand belongs to Michigan-based toy company Poof Products. In celebration of National Slinky Day on August 30, check out The Original Metal Slinky, which comes in classic silver, anodized black, or giant classic silver. For the collector in you, upgrade to the 14-Karat Gold-Plated Slinky.

Words by Jennifer Cameron

“They are like this visual language that’s being passed down,” says visual artist and designer Julia Ibbini. “The symmetry and the repetition. You get this beauty coming out of it.”

She and Stéphane Noyer, her husband and collaborator, have spent the past five years in their Abu Dhabi studio applying their own visual language to these ancient motifs by painstakingly crafting meticulous paper sculptures. The delicate motifs are sometimes composed of eight layers—some of which are broken up into a thousand tiny pieces—diligently assembled with a pin and glue. (Her vessel sculptures, which twist into sharp, organic shapes, sometimes have up to 350 layers of paper.) “People keep telling me I have a lot of patience,” she says, smiling.

For “Ornamental Mixtapes V3,” Ibbini began, as she does, with a digital sketch and reimagining various Arabesque motifs, with flowers and tendrils growing outwards. “The way I achieved that was almost like a glitch effect,” she says, explaining how she pulled the sweeping and sprouting motifs apart to create a collage of symmetries.

Next, the complex, curvy details are mapped out for the laser-cutting machine using a bit of computer wizardry. Noyer, a software engineer versed in computational geometry, fine tunes algorithms to cut motifs into paper without burning it. Using a mix of Adobe Illustrator and programming-language Python, he calculates how much distortion is needed within a curve so that the cut is smooth as though it were a straight line and the layers line up cleanly.

Even with such microscopic precision, Ibbini must balance a formula of power and speed for the laser cutter and experiment with paper types. “Sometimes it comes down to the length of the line you’re cutting at the time. So you play with the power within the cuts,” Ibbini says. Cutting one piece of paper can take as much as five hours to complete, which is a long time to wait for something to go wrong. “It’s a bit of a nervous dance around the machine,” she adds, laughing.

But the results of Studio Ibbini’s ornamental glitch motifs further expand the language of biomorphic art that evolved on ancient trade routes—worldwide influences obscured in interlacing patterns like reading tea leaves. A story altered subtly with age. “Where did they come from originally?” Ibbini asks with a shrug, “There’s no good way to tell.”

Find more of work from Studio Ibbini on Instagram @juliaibbini.

Words by David MacNeal

Images courtesy of Studio Ibbini

Nine years ago, Art of Play was a side project to Dan & Dave, an online shop for magicians. We offered self-produced instructional books and DVDs on sleight of hand and cardistry, bespoke apparatus, and luxurious playing cards for performing magicians. When playing card sales on Dan & Dave began dominating sales of everything else, we recognized this is what our customers wanted. But instead of just saturating our catalog with every deck on the market, which would diminish the reputation and integrity of our brand, we imagined an independent shop for playing cards and only playing cards.

On August 13, 2013, we launched Art of Play with over a hundred different decks, which was incomparable at the time. It was a brilliant idea, but sales suggested otherwise. And it was disheartening to watch a few orders trickle in now and then. But we never gave up.

Art of Play was a fantastic resource for playing card enthusiasts, something that didn’t exist at the time. As a playing card shop, we peaked with close to 300 decks available in our catalog. As our popularity and sales increased, other card shops opened their doors. The competition challenged us to think anew.

Ultimately, we followed our passion. We separated away from selling magic tricks—the basis for everything we had created up to that point—and downsized Dan & Dave so that we could focus on building our dream company.

We hired amazing people, such as Syd Segal, Justin Buck (our brother), Adam Rubin, Jen Hassen, Cece Do, and Adam Davis, to name some of our early team members. And between us, Art of Play’s reputation evolved from a boutique playing card shop to a world-class wonder emporium offering an insurmountable collection of curiosities—a place to discover magic. And it feels like we’re only just beginning.

We love that playing cards are the foundation of this company. We play with cards every day. We think with cards. And so Art of Play is, really, a house of cards, but a magical house where dreams come true. How else can we explain our collaboration with the Eames Office on a brand of cards we imagined 20 years ago in high school? How else can we explain an upcoming partnership with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in light of our lifelong fascination with architecture? How else can we explain the opportunity to work with legendary designer Paula Scher on a deck of playing cards?

With overwhelming gratitude, this is your house too.

However, the United States Playing Card Company (USPCC) found that reproducing that style of cards—favored amongst card magicians for its ultra-thin stock—was too risky. Their machines weren’t calibrated for this technique. Still, innovation usually begins with a problem.

“We signed a waiver that said if [the USPCC’s] machines broke, we were liable,” says Art of Play CEO Dave Buck. The risk was worth it, especially since at such a young age, the Buck twins hadn’t built up enough to lose. Upon release, the cards sold out almost instantly; and today, the USPCC charges a premium for what is now known as “crushed stock.” “A lot of the things we do set trends and spark momentum,” Dave says.

For the past 15 years, the Buck twins have generated that momentum through their two brands: Dan & Dave and Art of Play. By spotlighting artists and collaborating with studios like Studio Muti and DKNG, the two brothers from California, along with creative partner Adam Rubin, have helped push custom card design into the mainstream. Largely because the diverse range of cards is something akin to an art museum. “We always wanted to celebrate the artist,” Dave says. “It’s as much their product as it is ours.”

The current state of the playing card industry has been a long time in the making. Dan and Dave’s motivation increased with the 2005 release of Tally-Ho’s “Split Spades.” “Coming across anything that wasn’t Bicycle or Bee or Tally-Ho was a novelty. … So, when David Blaine put out his ‘Split Spades,’ that proved to us that we could maybe do that too—egotistical as that may sound,” Dave says, laughing. Inspired, the Bucks decided that it was time to take a major leap into the custom card market.

Unlike the big three brands at the time (i.e., Bicycle, Bee, or Tally-Ho), making a quality deck didn’t only mean using premium stock, it meant casting the spotlight on the artist’s creative individuality. Very few decks have done this. One rare and early example of this is found in “Vanity Fair No. 41.” The transformational deck, copyrighted in 1895, features unique artwork on every single card. It served as something to strive for.

In 2007, the Buck twins released the first edition of the famed “Smoke & Mirror” playing cards, enlisting Si Scott, who’d worked on global brands like Nike. He designed the iconic whirls of smoke that pull off the serifs of each letter, curling with mystery. It marked the beginning of a decade’s worth of global collaborations.

When discussing playing card design, some draw comparisons to vinyl records, combining functionality with art. “There’s a dual purpose,” Dan Buck says. And the ideas can come from anywhere. Take, for instance, the tranquility-infused “Mindfulness” deck released in 2021. Dan says the idea for the deck spawned from this moment in time where he was bringing observance to meditation and what that can do for individuals. “And then we turned that into a deck,” he says, smiling.

“A lot of it is spontaneous,” Dave adds. “We’ll see something and say, ‘That looks like playing cards.’ And then we explore how to adapt that particular style.”

Such was the case when Adam Rubin heard a podcast interview with Pulitzer Prize-nominated author David Haskell. Shortly after reading his book The Forest Unseen, Art of Play collaborated with Haskell and artist Ellen Litwiller on 2021’s “Eastern Forest” playing cards–a deck of 54 illustrations and scientific prose that capture the flora and fauna of a miniature ecosystem.

“Not many people make decks with art on each card because it’s a huge undertaking,” Dave says. “For us, cards are more than cards. They can be a new medium for an art book. They can be left on the coffee table as a conversation piece. They can inspire. That’s what we try to focus on: What is this in addition to a deck of cards?”

Brad Fulton, another pioneer in the custom market and long-time friend of the Buck twins, has been redefining playing cards with equal measure.

“I want to recreate certain times and atmospheres,” Fulton says. “Cards just come from wanting to hold a piece of my imagination.” He gives a quick example: “I wanted to be in a casino in the 1970s, so I thought, What if I had my own casino?” He’s referring to “Fulton’s Thunderbird Room,” a retro-colored deck seemingly plucked out of some 1960s era, Arizona ephemera.

The majority of his cards, he says, are influenced by his life and his passion for film noir. In fact, for “Clip Joint”—one of his longest running and successful series—Fulton color-matched the tuck case to a Mildred Pierce movie poster he had from the 1940s. “Playing cards are looked at as a commodity,” he says. “But there’s so much more you can do with it. You can tell a story. You can be a visionary.”

Sometimes that vision can take nearly a decade to come to fruition.

Back in 2013, Dan Buck was scrolling through Fulton’s photo archive. As a professional photographer, Fulton had amassed thousands—a gallery of black and white photos that included images of icons like David Lynch, Tony Todd, and Keanu Reeves, as well as a number of noir-inspired and surrealist images. So, Dan asked: “What if you did a photo exhibition as a deck of cards?”

“Fultonal,” which is named after film developing agent Rodinal, took eight years to release because Fulton wasn’t satisfied with the end product. He needed more time. So he remained patient, refusing to rush the project. “The Bucks and I never let go of a good idea. Bad ideas fall away, and the good ones keep going,” he says. “I’m a constant reviser. I’ll hold up a project forever. Dan [Buck] is too; so if we don’t like something, we’re not going to put it out.”

Such was the case the “Starburst” Eames Playing Cards, which took Dan more than one hundred iterations before settling on a design. (The Second Edition of the deck called “Hang It All” is planned for this year.) Same goes for breaking design conventions with pips (i.e., the small symbols in the corner of the card determining suit and rank) in an upcoming deck in collaboration with Pentagram’s Paula Scher. Go back through the Art of Play library, and you’ll notice all the pips are all traditional—save for the Stranger & Stranger “Ultimate Deck” collaboration (which is getting a special anniversary release this year). Scher’s deck is a little different.

“It really breaks the mold, so much so that we’ve struggled to figure out how to print them because of technical constraints,” Dave says.

But technical challenges, like the crushed stock for Guy Hollingworth’s deck, present new opportunities. A deck can be anything you want it to be—even something deeply sentimental. Just look at one upcoming deck under the Dan & Dave name: “Kodiak” was designed as a love letter to Alaska where the Buck twins are currently constructing an A-frame cabin on two acres on an island cliffside as though they were Bond villains.

“Alaska feels at home; nature is so beautiful,” Dave says. “So of course we turned it into a deck of cards.” As kids, the brothers regularly hiked and camped with their grandfather, and the project is one of their lifelong goals.

“The playing card medium,” Dan says, “is an opportunity to explore our interests in a tangible way.”

Art of Play is celebrating its 9th anniversary this August. You can find their most recent playing cards here.

Words by David MacNeal

Exhibit A … the “Digesting Duck” created by inventor Jacques de Vaucanson in 1739. The device could flap its wings and move its head and bill, as well as "poop" out food onlookers fed it, causing a sensation among Parisians raptured by the oddity. This duck and other automata helped in crystallizing two competing philosophies about agency in the 1700s: passive mechanism and active mechanism.

INTERIOR OF VAUCANSON'S AUTOMATIC DUCK
A, clockwork; B, pump; C, mill for grinding grain; F, intestinal tube; J, bill; H, head; M, feet

Passive mechanisms, championed by figures like René Descartes and Isaac Newton, saw the natural world as a machine governed by external forces. Newton, for instance, considered the cosmos to be this wind-up device that required a maker to maintain it. The idea was scoffed at by German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who championed active mechanisms. That philosophy proposed that nature was a self-constituting machine with its own sources of action. The debate between these two philosophies was long and complicated, but ultimately the philosophy of active mechanism won out—just consider all the artificial intelligence embedded throughout technology today.

Automata artists working in the aftermath of this history speak to the importance of machinery as a device for thinking about agency, free will, and the nature of life.

Drawing of Self-trimming lamp from The Book of Ingenious Devices by The Banu Musa Brothers

Automata (the plural form of “automaton”) were first used in religious contexts. The mid-9th century illustrated work The Book of Ingenious Devices by the Banu Musa brothers discusses automata such as clocks and fountains made by engineers of the Islamic world. Gradually, automata evolved into secular contexts. Worthy of note is the 18th-century faux automaton "The Mechanical Turk" by Wolfgang von Kempelen, which was operated by someone in a hidden compartment. 

In the early 1830s, Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin created an automaton that was a technical marvel for its time and is still regarded as one of the greatest illusions of all time. Known as the “father of modern magic,” Robert-Houdin tapped into his skills as a trained clockmaker and engineered “The Marvelous Orange Tree.” After disappearing an audience member’s handkerchief, a small potted tree on a table would begin to bloom real oranges. After tossing the fruit to the audience, the final orange atop the tree would split open. Butterflies sprung forth, fluttering, and the handkerchief magically reappeared.

In the late 20th century, automata became a key part of debates about cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. Darwin’s theory of evolution, based on the idea of self-organizing machines, helped spark the notion that a machine could perform human processes.

Today’s art continues this line of thought.

UK artist Nik Ramage’s series of “Fingers,” for example, automate an eternally tapping copy of the artist’s own hand, the resin-cast digits drumming thoughtfully on a tabletop. The strangely compelling work is a good example of automata merged with the human form.

Other artists, like Thomas Kuntz, utilize steampunk automaton techniques. His "Alchemyst's Clock Tower" comprises theme-park technology and a puppet theater staffed with a magician who evokes fiery hellions, turns wood into water, spins out optical illusions, and engages with the audience.

As our world becomes increasingly automated, automata offers a way to preserve a more innocent and simple past. Wanda Sowry's wood automata is a childlike exploration of creatures and scenes from childhood fables and literature who swim, walk, play instruments, or bake bread. Kazuaki Harada has a similar intent, crafting wood automata that performs whimsical stunts—vegetables dance on a counter, a door paints itself, a man wriggles beneath a teapot. Playful and sometimes nonsensical, Harada intertwines the mundane with the surreal.

And Keith Newstead was considered by The Guardian to be “the UK’s pre-eminent maker of automata,” collaborating with artists like Terry Gilliam and Ralph Steadman. While he did unfortunately pass away in December 2020, the artist crafted some of the most playful moving toys using basic mechanisms, even going so far as to educate people on creating their own. How to Make Automata was released by the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre in 2015.

As his popularity rose in the 1990s, Newstead began creating automata kits made of cardboard and affordable material so that people could assemble their own wooden robots, learning the whimsical fundamentals of clockwork engineering in the process.

The automata artists of today are the heirs to a long and complex history about bringing life to machines or, rather, machines that are themselves alive.

Historically, automata is about artifice, fooling the eye and the mind into believing that something is real when it is not. In our age of digital media and computer-generated imagery, it’s a way of grounding our experience in the physical world, reminding us that even in an age of ubiquitous screens and ever-present technology, there’s always a place for magic.

Words by Anne-Marie Yerks

For some, this challenge begins with a packing puzzle, a type of interlocking sculpture made from wood, metal, or plastic. Often solved by trial and error, the goal is to disassemble the pack and put it back together again. Frustration is part of the appeal, and most end up craving the endorphin rush felt after the first victory. Many enthusiasts probably wind up at Pelikan in the quest for more complex and challenging packs.

Based in the Czech Republic, Pelikan is known as the Rolls-Royce of packing puzzles. Their three-dimensional wonders are made from various woods, including beech, birch, cherry, and walnut, each segment meticulously crafted, cut, and varnished. The company was reinvented in 2005, aiming to please puzzle enthusiasts around the globe with new designs and concepts.

Colliding Galaxies Puzzle

Pelikan puzzles are deceptive in their perplexity, sitting on shelves or coffee tables as an impressive objet d’art. And sometimes, the name of a puzzle will hint at a solution. In “Colliding Galaxies,” for example, four dark-brown wenge wood pieces must be packed into a 2.4-inch cubed box made of light cherry. Four pieces may not seem like much, but design subtleties require gravity for precise positioning. Master this task, and you might feel a little like you’ve accomplished something on the scale of, well, colliding galaxies.

Packing Puzzle Design

For some, such puzzle mastery evolves into the temptation to design one. That’s the case with Alexander Magyarics of Slovakia, one of Pelikan’s creative minds and the designer of “Colliding Galaxies.” “After about six years of collecting, I thought it was time to try to come up with my own designs,” he says. “When I had about 50 different designs ready, I said to myself, ‘Why not offer them directly to the best manufacturers in the world?’ I approached three different craftsmen, including the Pelikan team. To my surprise, they liked my work.”

Mouse Hole Puzzle

His first puzzle for Pelikan was “Wishing Well and Pincers,” a level-eight model (i.e., demanding) shaped like a wishing well. He’s moved on since then, producing the popular “Mouse Hole” and “L6,” among others.

Packing puzzles—unlike standard jigsaw or mechanical puzzles—help inform your spatial awareness. “Most often, I deal with the complexity of my new puzzles,” Magyarics says, “how to create it so there are challenges for more experienced solvers and at the same time kids could also play with it. … It can’t always be combined in one design, but if it works, it’s great.”

Magyarics is known for designing 3D packing puzzles with restricted openings, as seen in “The Rattlesnake.” Here, players use logical steps toward the solution instead of random trial and error. “The world around me is full of inspiration, I often use natural motifs—animals, plants, lightning,” he says.

A 19-century carved ivory puzzle ball from the Rijksmuseum collection

In that way, he’s adding to annals of interlocking puzzles as many designers have in the past. The puzzle balls and mystery balls of China are one example. These heavy spheres, usually made from ivory, consist of many intricately carved layers. Turn the ball in your hands to find a hole allowing you to move one the smaller spheres inside. You can only wonder how they fit together so perfectly.

Magyarics is much like an artist in the way he works, sketching designs before turning to software and, when necessary, permitting ideas to incubate. “For example,” he says, “I could not finish a design to a state where I would be satisfied with it. So I put it aside, and sometimes after a few months—even after more than a year—I returned to it and had it done in a few hours.” But the road from conception to completion isn’t alway long, he explains. “Sometimes it goes almost by itself—the design of ‘She Loves Me She Loves Me Not’ was finished in about 15 minutes.”

Looking forward, he plans to keep on designing for Pelikan and others with the hope of making the world a little happier and healthier. “Please, go out and play with your kids, parents, grandparents, friends,” he says. “With or without puzzles—just don’t forget to play!”

Learn more about Pelikan packing puzzles and Magyarics’ work here.

Words by Anne-Marie Yerks

His latest features a number of peculiar joineries—pieces of wood fastened together without nails, sliding closed with satisfying clicks with grainy surfaces running the same direction. Tiny mechanical feats of engineering that strengthen furniture and cabinetry. Some feature right-angle triangles. Others dovetail seamlessly into place. And some joints lock together with pegs seemingly borrowed from a sequential puzzle box.

Davidsson, a woodworker attending the Capellagården school on an island in the south of Sweden, feels that some joineries are less practical and are more intended to spark curiosity. Take, for instance, the kawai tsugite joint created by Shinobu Kobayashi. This three-way joint involves two square pieces of lumber, each face carved the same but with a rotated orientation. “It’s amazing,” Davidsson says, laughing, “but I’m not sure how to use it.” One option, though, might be to create a standing lamp that can transform into an L-shaped reading light.

But marvel and exploration are part of his journey.

As a plumber for several years, Davidsson made okay money, but he never was fulfilled with the job. “I felt empty,” he says. So he considered other paths, like engineering—anything he could feel passionate about. In grade school, he wasn’t attracted to woodworking. But after taking a design class at a university in the late 2010s, he fell in love with wood. “It was winter, and I read about all these wood pieces and trees. So I began to look at trees and know their characteristics of the branches.”

His first exposure to Japanese woodworking was through craftsman Natsuki Ishitani, whose minimalist and sturdy designs seem to take direction from the trees he sculpts.

“When I work more artistically, I find a piece of wood that wants to be something specific. A plank might tell me what it wants to be.”

So the Swedish woodworker began scavenging the forest for woods that spoke to him and began transforming them. “Elm was one of the first ones I began to turn [i.e., spinning and carving wood on a lathe],” he says. Swedish elm begins light but has deep and darker colors towards the center. “It was so beautiful.”

Much of his work centers around Japanese and Danish design. One chair he made this year was especially Scandinavian in design. Built with a tall, airy frame crossed with a baby’s crib, the chair is giant—enough to sit cross-legged and drink coffee (for which there’s a tiny table). “I created something you could crawl into and feel safe,” he says. “Something to keep the outer world away.”

Conceived overnight, his designs usually begin with paper and pen, and then move to CAD using the Shapr3D design app on his iPad. It’s a necessity when executing more complex designs, like the puzzle cabinet that’s solved in three moves, made using alder woods and wenge, an African hardwood.

“Sometimes I’ll work with the physical wood and just see a box or imagine it being a cabinet,” Davidsson explains. “When I work more artistically, I find a piece of wood that wants to be something specific. A plank might tell me what it wants to be.” The grain and patterns in the veneer help dictate the final result. Wood-turning bears some similarity to shaping clay.

“Maybe that’s what I’ll return to this summer,” he says in preparation for his final year at Capellagården. Rediscovering the origins. Listening to the grain and shapes of branches. “Going back to my passion for woodworking. … Put a piece in a lathe and let the wood be what it wants to be.”

See more of Olof Davidsson’s woodwork on Instagram @od_form.

Words by David MacNeal

Images courtesy of Olof Davidsson

During my time shuffling and making playing cards, I have become increasingly interested in how we can challenge the conventional idea of what a deck of cards should be and bring it into the present—maybe even push it into an imagined future.

I attempt this by exploring ideas and narratives which spark curiosity in any aspect of life, and then find a way of positioning playing cards within that context. After all, the medium through which something is expressed can itself be a statement.

Let’s explore some examples.

Space travel must be exhausting. And if I was traveling through space for years, I’d need something to pass the time. A deck of cards would be great, so what exactly would that deck look like?

Let’s try to imagine an otherworldly entity and visualize it. Perhaps future card manufacturers would put newfound cosmic creatures on the back design—either as a celebration of what we have discovered, or as a caution of what will meet you upon arrival.

The alien from Alex Garland’s Annihilation is one of my favorites. It takes on a liquid, cloud-like form and is difficult to grasp. (What are its intentions?) Similarly, the tesseract from Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar—although not exactly a life form—plays with our idea of expanse and stretches it with visual grace.

Color is a direct product of light. Within a ray of sunshine, a wide swatch of colors can be extracted depending on which wavelengths are absorbed or passed through.

The fresnel lens is a great example of this. Originally designed to enhance a light beam from a lighthouse, it can also produce wonderful sights of color through light dispersion. I find it fascinating how unpredictable this phenomenon is. The angle at which you observe, and the power of the light itself, directly determines what you see. By moving a bit to the side it looks like regular glass, but from another angle you can get a beautiful little glimpse of captivating colors.

You have to search for it. It’s like finding gold.

Within my creative practice, I strive to examine rather than explain. The graph below illustrates it beautifully. You have to find the sweet spot—not give too little nor too much information. Try to keep it vaguely precise.

You can see more of my playing card artwork, as well as cardistry, on dealersgrip.com.

Oliver Sogard is the founder of dealersgrip and is currently co-organizing a new cardistry event in Copenhagen, Denmark, called Card Club. Updates and news for the event taking place August 6 - 7 can be found on Instagram.

Images courtesy of Oliver Sogard

In the book Catalogue of the Tate Gallery’s Collection of Modern Art, art historian Ronald Alley mentions how Dibbets saw his land art photography as a “dialogue between nature and cool geometrical design by rotating the camera on its axis” with his “perspective corrections.” In his photography, Dibbets intersects Minimalism with Conceptualism and land art.

Architectural elements like ceilings, floors, and even windows inspire his work.

"Perspective Corrections" (1968) by Jan Dibbets

With his renowned series of photos entitled “Perspective Corrections,” Dibbets concerns himself with illusion and reality as he uses nearly right angles to “correct” recessive perspectives of flatland. This particular series ran from 1967 to ’69 and focused on floors, lawns, and even walls to give the photographs this 3D illusion through oblique perspective.

In 1971’s “Panorama Dutch Mountain 12 x 15° Sea II A,” he extended his exploration of geometric features in the landscape, focusing specifically on a beach in Holland during the empty winter months. He references the 15-degree angle change of his tripod in the title of the work, which enabled him to juxtapose the flat Dutch landscape with the movement of the waves to create the mountain in a panoramic view.

Dibbets helped to propel the medium forward, pushing the abstract. He reimagined and recreated unique perspectives in geometry and mathematics, merging spaces with shaped images and serialized grids.

"Lewitt" (2004) Courtesy Jan Dibbets and Cristea Roberts Gallery, London © Jan Dibbets

“In the course of photography’s brief history we can see how this diabolical, hybrid medium began to insist increasingly on its place in the arts,” he stated in a Musée d’Art Moderne press release, “especially since the 1960s and the coming of Conceptualism.”

Dibbets achieved international acclaim from his showing at the Dutch Pavilion in 1972. Since then, his work has appeared in collections and exhibitions around the world at the Guggenheim Museum, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Stedelijk Museum. He continues to adopt and revolutionize, using multiple viewpoints, collages, and fragmented exposure times to further diversify his photographic practice.

Words by Esther Lombardi

“[The] remarks really pissed me off,” says Stout, who was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1949. “I vowed to master the art of lettering and become the best letterer in the school—if only to show him how wrong he was about me and my potential.”

Determined to prove the tutor wrong and become the best letterer in school, he sought additional help and worked hard to improve. Today, his best known font is “Stout-Beetle” because the letters resemble insect legs. It is an icon within fantasy art.

Stout is well-loved for his depictions of prehistoric creatures, but has also had a fascinating impact on the modern film industry. His first and probably most famous movie poster was for the animated feature Wizards, but after getting connected with Hollywood almost by accident, he got more high-profile commissions. He even received an invitation from George Lucas himself to do the art for the re-release of American Graffiti. “That act of kindness really launched my movie poster career,” he says. In 1979, Stout was hired to be the storyboard artist on Conan the Barbarian starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Stout has traveled all over the world to spark his creativity, believing that “travel is crucial to expanding an artist’s perceptions.” He has hundreds of artistic influences including late 19th-century academic art and early 20th-century children’s book illustration. He specifically cites the work of Frank Frazetta, Roy Krenkel, and John William Waterhouse as some of his biggest inspirations.

In the world of paleontological art, Charles R. Knight is a huge figure for Stout. “He visually defined dinosaurs for the world,” he says. Knight’s influence can be seen in films like King Kong and Fantasia. Stout’s own dive into things Paleolithic began when he joined the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and began studying paleobotany in the late 1970s to stay on top of the latest scientific information to ensure his work was as accurate as possible.

As a result, Stout was hired by museums to paint murals of prehistoric life, working with the Houston Museum of Natural Science, Walt Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and the San Diego Zoo. He was also the first person ever to create a reconstruction of the best-preserved Tyrannosaurus Rex specimen in the world, known as “Sue.”

Last year, Art of Play was fortunate enough to produce Dinosaur Playing Cards deck, which consists of 54 original illustrations by Stout. “My card backs are prehistoric parodies of the Bicycle card deck backs,” he explains. “I [also] divided the four playing card suits into dinosaur families. The hearts are sauropods, prosauropods and therizinosaurs; the spades are predatory dinosaurs and oviraptors; the diamonds are ceratopsians and hadrosaurs; and the clubs are stegosaurs, armored dinosaurs and pachycephalosaurs.”

In a way, Dinosaur Playing Cards functions as its own museum, which will pair nicely with a book project he’s currently working on: the first-ever visual history of life in Antarctica, from prehistoric times to modern day.

Words by Laura Hadland

Images courtesy of William Stout

And at the moment, what’s stopping you is a very stubborn secretary.

The secretary stands firm against your pleas. This is the office of a vital person in the communications office, she tells you, and she can’t just let you in.

Unless, she adds with a knowing wink, you happen to have something you can trade for her to look the other way.

You confer with your friends. One of your teammates hands the woman a set of food-ration coupons, usable in the made-up country of Argovia.

The secretary is delighted with the bribe. She thanks you profusely, saying this will more than cover her midday meal and that she’ll be back in an hour—and please, don’t break anything. She holds the office door open as your group files in, closing it behind you with a firm click. Inside the room, the lights are dim. The space is filled with large, boxy shapes.

You pause to let your eyes adjust to the darkness. There’s a clunking sound, like a big machine whirring to life, and an electric buzz fills the room as the lights turn on, one by one. You and your friends look around excitedly to see what you’re dealing with.

You find yourself standing in the office of a bureaucrat, obviously a cog in some type of dystopian government machine. There are big propaganda posters on the walls; books on a shelf locked behind a grille; a typewriter with strange letters on its keys.

On the wall, a timer blinks on: 60 minutes. It begins counting down. The game is on.

6 Strategies for Escape Room Success

Escape rooms may seem like a new trend, but in truth, they’re an extension of a long legacy of in-person entertainment. Much of today’s entertainment takes place on screens. The video game industry, for example, is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. One thing that sets escape rooms apart is that they’re “embodied”—that is, they take place in a physical space, with other people present. In the cultural context of the video game age, anything that’s successfully getting people to come together in the real world is worth a closer look.

Escape rooms can take the form of an in-person room, a computer game, or something played over the internet with friends in remote places. If you’ve never played an escape room before, think about who you’ll ask to be on your team. Go for a theme you think you’ll enjoy. And if you’re a novice puzzler, aim for beginner-level rooms—you can always come back to the higher difficulty games, once you’ve become an expert.

I design escape rooms and puzzle games for a living, and I love mysteries. With a group of friends, I opened one of the first escape rooms in the United States. And since then, we’ve been lucky to make many more exciting adventures for the curious at heart.

In 2021, I wrote Planning Your Escape: Strategy Secrets to Make You an Escape Room Superstar. My goal with the book is to open up the world of escape rooms to as many new players as possible and give them the tools to succeed.

There are six key strategies for doing well in an escape room or puzzle game.

No. 1 - Communication

Escape rooms are all about finding information, sharing what you’ve found, and using it creatively. So if everyone’s finding information, but nobody’s sharing it, you’re going to be in trouble.

No. 2 - Have a game plan

How well does your team communicate? When will you hand off a puzzle, or offer to help out a teammate? How often will you ask for hints? Chat about group expectations beforehand—this is a team sport, after all.

No. 3 - Watch the clock

Ultimately, you’re playing for fun. But beating the clock is the way to win. Keeping an eye on the time, using hints, and asking for help when you get stuck will be key.

No. 4 - Do your research

Many escape rooms and puzzle games use common codes and many puzzles have similar structures. Do a little studying beforehand and you'll be well prepared to succeed in a game.

No. 5 - Eyes on the prize

The goal of escape rooms is, well, to escape. Or to save the day, find the magical object, defuse the bomb, and so on. Every step of the game is driving you toward this end goal, so don’t get distracted by misleading objects or puzzles that don’t actually need solving. If you need a hint to move toward this end goal, take it.

No. 6 - Have fun

Yes, it’s a challenge; it’s team building; it’s a detailed story world. But it’s also a game, and you’re there to enjoy it. Be nice to your teammates, the game monitor, and yourself.

Learn more about the history of immersive entertainment and how to succeed in any escape room or puzzle game in Planning Your Escape: Strategy Secrets to Make You an Escape Room Superstar by L.E. Hall (Simon & Schuster 2021), available now.

Laura E. Hall is an artist, writer, puzzle-maker, immersive environment and narrative designer living in Portland, Oregon. Her work focuses on the intersections between arts, culture, and technology, especially in gaming. She now creates exciting adventures for the curious at heart with Timberview Productions and Meridian Adventure Co.

Each Harmongram offered in our collection is an original, one-of-a-kind artwork created by Ivan Moscovich in his home studio using an elaborate double-pendulum drawing mechanism of his own design.

Artist, inventor, author and Holocaust survivor, Moscovich patented his Harmonograph in 1967 and slowly honed the precise techniques required to master his innovative "cybernetic" approach to drawing. The machine produces two-dimensional oscillations which mathematicians refer to as Lissajous figures. Through variations of color, shape and composition, Moscovich was able to achieve a striking visual diversity in his images. The drawing process was time-consuming and required extensive experimentation to execute each concept successfully. For this reason, the artist never produced copies of his works.

Each of the 56 signed Moscovich Harmonogram's offered in our collection is unique in the truest sense of the word, there is no other like it. Colored marker on art-board. 24 x 24 inches. 

Photo by Chad Jensen

“I’d say my starting point is curiosity; I have to make the work in order to understand it,” he says on his website. “If I can completely visualize my final result I have no reason to make it—I need to be surprised.”

His work process is collaborative, often involving input from scientists and other experts in various fields. Shlian (pronounced “Schline”) has exhibited his artwork extensively across the US and has received commissions from well-known brands such as Apple, Facebook, and PBS. In 2012, he and his collaborators received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to explore the potential applications of origami in solar cell technology.

Despite their complexity, Shlian’s pieces have a lighthearted quality that belie the amount of planning and experimentation that goes into their creation. “I learned by taking things apart, doing things the ‘wrong way’ and being curious,” he says. “Getting something wrong is more important to learning than copying something perfectly.”

Once he has a prototype that he is happy with, he begins the process of refining and perfecting it. Some of his playful approach is tied to his fondness for kids and his willingness to share ideas with young minds. A father himself, he’s worked with Sesame Street to produce a video showing a group of youngsters how to use his Misfold kinetic sculpture pattern to create an impressively large hanging mobile from colored paper. In addition to sharing his own creative process with students around the world, Shlian is also always happy to share his latest projects. Want to try the Misfold pattern on your own? Follow the easy step-by-step instructions below.

Misfold Pattern

1. Download the template here
2. Print out the template and cut all along the solid outline
3. Fold the piece in half along fold line A

4. Fold each side diagonally in half along fold lines B

4. Fold both forward and backward to weaken the crease, then pop it inward inside the card
5. Fold creases C and D both forward and backward

6. Pop each side inward (along creases C) and pop each side back outward along creases D
7. Fold creases E forward and backward and pop each inward inside card

8. Repeat process on second sheet of paper and carefully glue pieces back to back

Tips for joinery

• Gluing 4 in the same orientation (lining up pointy ends) = circular form
• Gluing 2 in the same directions and reversing the next two = long form seen in the above video

“Sometimes architecture tells us stories,” says Devís, who’s featured in the majority of the duo’s photos. “Sometimes we have ideas in mind and need to find the right location.”

“But we always start with a blank piece of paper,” Rueda says.

The duo prides themselves in using Photoshop only when necessary, opting instead to shoot using practical effects in real-life locations. The guerilla approach often means passersby will ask questions and hold up production by taking their own photos. But that’s part of the charm—part of the philosophy behind making these playful, humorous moments as real as possible. It also reveals the hidden fun in architecture.

“When we are walking around, our brains are actively working and scouting … even if we don’t mean to,” Devís says, smiling. She mentions avoiding any screentime on a walk and taking longer paths to discover new locations.

Every idea begins with a sketch. Given their design skills—the two met while studying architecture at the Universitat Politècnica de València—Devís and Rueda then use architecture software to build sets ahead of time to understand the human scale in order to create optical illusions with meticulous precision.

“Getting that right on camera is super complicated,” explains Rueda. “Everything in the software is scaled 1:1 so when we actually set up the camera, the props, the model, and the outfits—everything fits perfectly. … It’s a long process.”

Such geometrical thinking is exhibited in their recent ad work for Desperados beer where a canonical lamp casts a yellow, bottle-shaped light over a couple sitting at a bar table. “Everything needs to fit in this particular shape of the bottle,” Rueda says. “It’s not like you can buy just any table at IKEA.”

“But we are problem-solvers,” Devís says.

That tenacity shows in work they’ve done for multiple brands (Disney, Netflix, Facebook), and with shoots across Argentina, Austria, Qatar, Denmark … The list goes on. But this playful perspective encapsulates a much broader idea: that beauty and imagination are ubiquitous—you just need to open your eyes.

“These,” Rueda says, “are our love letters to the city.”

See more of the duo’s love notes on Instagram @drcuerda and @anniset.

Words by David MacNeal

Images courtesy of Anna Devís and Daniel Rueda

In celebration of the life and work of Martin Gardner, the late Scientific American columnist, Gathering 4 Gardner (G4G) invites people from all levels of education and life experience to explore the interdisciplinary fields of mathematics, art, magic, and puzzles. Held biannually, the “mathemagical” event takes place over the course of five days, with talks and workshops focused on topics that Gardner and his readers would enjoy. There are also special events such as musical entertainment, offsite sculpture-building (candy-tray polyhedra, maybe?), and socializing.

This year’s G4G (the fourteenth), held at the Atlanta Ritz-Carlton Hotel, included more than fifty lectures on topics like puzzle theory, the history of chance, 3D design, and fine art.

Who Gathers for Gardner?

G4G 14 attendees weren’t your stereotypical spectacled scholars. As with years prior, they included professional and amateur mathematicians, magicians and performers, artists, educators, scientists, and others inspired by the interdisciplinary curiosity that Gardner pursued and promoted throughout his life. In the tradition of the event, participants sustained his legacy not only with visual tokens like photos, murals, and buttons, but with workshops and talks that focused specifically on the conference’s backstory. Writer Peter Cannon of Publishers Weekly, for example, presented a personal oral history of the time he interviewed Gardner for an author profile.

Gardner's influence carried on in the halls and conference rooms where groups huddled together over puzzles, card games, or just sat together for conversation and connection. As always, the products of their brain power were on full display—G4G event planners encourage all attendees to contribute in the form of a five-minute presentation, an original paper, a unique exhibit, or a puzzle, magic trick, academic paper, book, or novelty item for the gift exchange.

Speaker Spotlights

The lecterns at G4G 14 spotlighted an impressive slate of artists, professors, designers, business people, and students sharing the results of their hard work and intellectual ingenuity. Math was a common thread weaving into other disciplines like graphic design, 3D modeling, physics, fine art, and crafts. Mark Burstein, the head of the North American Lewis Carroll Association, launched the events with a public lecture on the enduring legacy of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.

David Plaxco, a professor at Clayton State University, discussed his experiences using Rubik’s cubes to make various styles of knots, sharing algorithms and general strategies that take cube enthusiasts beyond the typical “solved” cube. Key points from Plaxco’s presentation, “Knot Theory on the n*n*n Rubik’s Cube,” are available online. “N*n*n just means that the Rubik’s cubes I work with have ‘n’ layers,” he says, “as opposed to the traditional three-layer cube, which is often referred to as a 3 by 3 by 3 cube.”

Portrait of Martin Gardner made by David Plaxco

Plaxco also helped design a mosaic mural (made of cubes, of course) of Garner’s face. “I designed the image using a friend’s website,” he says. “Then I built the stand and collected 250 cubes. I actually didn’t help much building the mural—it was crowdsourced. The kind folks attending the G4G actually built the mosaic.”

One of those kind folks was Susan Goldstine. A professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Goldstine also presented “Mosaic Knitting Friezes: Seventeen Symmetries, Minus Three,” a visual demonstration of a newer form of mosaic knitting. Along with friend Carolyn Yackel, Goldstine has been researching the impact of color placement restrictions in knitting patterns. “My outlook is inherently mathematical, so trying to see, understand, and construct patterns is part of everything I do,” says Goldstine, who’s attended G4G several times. “I use math and knitting to make sense of each other, and I try to smuggle deep mathematical ideas into non-mathematical spaces through yarn.”

Goldstine wasn’t the only one connecting math and geometry to arts and crafts. Artist Alexa Meade presented “Adventures in Wonderland,” showing the audience how she paints on people and 3D surfaces to make them appear as 2D paintings. “My paintings are like a reverse trompe l’oeil,” Meade says on her website. “Unlike a traditional trompe l’oeil painting which tricks the eye into thinking a 2D canvas might be a real 3D space, I do the opposite: I take the 3D world and create the illusion that it is a 2D painting.”

In “Further Abracadoodads,” participants learned about functional impossible objects designed by Art of Play’s own Adam Rubin, who is also the author of several children’s books. “This year I presented some new videos of old abracadoodads that were filmed during the pandemic, as well as bonus chocolate which I hadn't shared at the Gathering yet,” Rubin says. “I also presented my impossible dice in a bottle for the first time and talked about The Ice Cream Machine a bit. Gardner was a big Lewis Carroll buff so children’s literature is one of the topics of the conference along with mathematics, magic and puzzles.”

Among the puzzle theoreticians was MIT’s Erik Demaine, who spoke on “New Adventures in Puzzle Fonts,” and presented five mathematically generated alphabets (some were recently featured in The New York Times). Demaine’s talk takes a twist on typeface design by using Tetris shapes, sudoku squares, and other themes that, once designed, are loaded into guessing games that challenge players to uncover words and phrases.

In “Adventures in 3D Puzzle Printing,” Aaron Siegel covered the efforts involved to create high-quality puzzle models ready-made for 3D printing, focusing on faithful prints of classic designs by Stewart Coffin. He also demonstrated Puzzlecad, a new software library that automates numerous routine operations in puzzle modeling.

Participation Requirements

G4G is an invitation-only conference; however, you can nominate yourself or others for attendance. If you have not previously attended G4G and want to join in on the fun, you will first need to nominate yourself for attendance by filling out the online form. If your nomination is accepted, you will receive an email linked to the registration website where you can purchase conference tickets and submit your participation proposal.

For many attendees, G4G has more meaning than the chance to present—it’s also a chance to make friends and bring an element of magic into life and work. “The presentation was fun and energizing, but the conversations afterwards were equally rewarding,” Goldstine says, adding that she especially enjoyed talking to Meade. “I love her artwork and the way she thinks, and it was exciting to be able to share some of my work with her and to give her some ideas back.”

“I met a ton of people and deepened connections with a few who I already knew,” Plaxo says. “I think that’s a lot of what G4G is all about—building relationships.”

Words by Anne-Marie Yerks

Images courtesy of the G4G Foundation

The phrase “Armchair Treasure Hunts” is actually a bit of a misnomer. The hunts may start in an armchair, but hunters soon venture out into the real world with spades and metal detectors, often digging up yards and trespassing and causing all sorts of mischief.

The original Armchair Hunt was birthed by a 1979 British picture book called Masquerade by a big-bearded and reclusive artist named Kit Williams. I loved that book as a kid, and spent countless hours studying it.

The book contains a series of detailed and fantastical images—a man with rabbit ears and a violin, the Sun dancing with the Moon, and so forth. The paintings contained clues to the location of a real-life treasure buried somewhere in England: a golden rabbit about the size of a paperback book, insured for £100,000.

Well, it drove the world insane—or at least a certain portion of the world.

“Masqueraders dug up acres of countryside, traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, wrote tens of thousands of letters to Williams, and occasionally got stuck halfway up cliffs or were apprehended by police while trespassing on historic properties,” as an article in the literary journal Hazlitt puts it.

I never went to England, but I did have my theories. That seagull means it must be on the coast!

At the time, Kit Williams told reporters that all the unexpected attention from Masquerade wrecked his life. People would knock on his door at 3 a.m. He got tens of thousands of letters and terrifying packages, such as a disembodied, blood-covered plastic hand.

But when I tracked down Kit and chatted with him on the phone, he seemed more bemused and mystified than angry. “People flew from all over, spent their life savings. It was a bit embarrassing … One man wrote me seven thousand words a day. That’s more than I ever wrote in my life!”

After two years of ransacked gardens, the rabbit was found. It was dug up in a park in the county of Bedfordshire near a statue of Catherine of Aragon, underneath the tip of the shadow she casts at noon on the equinox.

The discovery itself was a little messy, since the man who found it apparently had gained inside information about the general location from an ex-girlfriend of Kit’s.

But regardless, the great Masquerade hunt was over.

Or was it?

A British journalist devoted an entire book to the phenomenon called The Quest for the Golden Hare, and he writes:

“Tens of thousands of letters from Masqueraders have convinced me that the human mind has an equal capacity for pattern-matching and self-deception. While some addicts were busy cooking the riddle, others were more single-mindedly continuing their own pursuit of the hare quite regardless of the news that it had been found. Their own theories had come to seem so convincing that no exterior evidence could refute them.”

What a scary insight into how we think! We are not always swayed by evidence. We spot a pattern, fall in love with it, and refuse to change. QAnon followers are basically obsessed Masqueraders but chasing a nonexistent cabal of cannibals instead of a golden rabbit.

While researching a book about puzzles, I stumbled across several other armchair hunts that are still unsolved.

One in particular interested me. It was hatched by a 1982 book called The Secret, not to be confused with the woo-woo self-help megahit The Secret, which promises to make every five-foot-five-inch accountant an NBA superstar if he just visualizes it hard enough.

No, this Secret was created by a writer named Byron Preiss who buried twelve treasures around the United States and Canada—little boxes containing precious or semiprecious gems. He hid clues to the treasures in twelve paintings and twelve cryptic poems.

So far, three treasures have been found: one in Cleveland, one in Chicago, and, most recently, one in 2019 in Boston. That leaves nine for treasure hunters to obsess over.

And obsess they do—on websites, podcasts, YouTube channels, episodes of a reality show. Preiss died in a car accident many years ago, but thousands of fans still try to get inside his mind.

And things can get pretty heated.

There are hoaxes (people pretending to find treasure) and trolls who are banned from forums. One Secret hunter agreed to email with me, so long as I didn’t use his name, explaining: “While 99% of armchair treasure hunters are perfectly normal people, there are a few who are literally insane yet computer-literate enough to post on forums, harass people, etc.”

I found this to be true. For instance, here’s a message on Reddit: “It’s a shame the people best equipped to find this treasure are clowns like you who can’t pull your head out of your ass far enough to see the goddamn map in the goddamn painting.”

After reading several such messages, I think 99 percent might be a bit optimistic.

One of the big names in the Secret quest goes by the handle “the Oregonian.” He has a website where he dissects clues and gives his theories. I email him mid-quarantine and tell him that I’d like to find the New York–based treasure for my book. He responds that he can help. He believes he knows exactly where it is. He includes an eleven-page attachment dissecting the painting and the poem.

He explains that the painting—which is of a white-robed, long-haired figure floating above the ocean—has a hidden 74 in the ocean waves. This is probably the longitude of New York City.

The face on the hovering figure looks like the Statue of Liberty’s, so that’s another clue that it is buried within sight of the statue.

The poem has a line about New Yorkers speaking of “Indies native.”

This likely refers to Alexander Hamilton, who was born in the West Indies. That, says the Oregonian, is a hint to a Hamilton-related location (the Oregonian asked me not to reveal said location).

And on and on.

The final answer: the treasure is buried under a tree on a side street with some abandoned storefronts (again, he asked me not to reveal which borough).

The Oregonian admits that this sounds preposterous: “To anyone who hasn’t spent some time studying The Secret, this solution is going to sound convoluted and ridiculous. And that’s kind of the point. It IS convoluted and ridiculous. The brain of Byron Preiss worked in fairly mysterious ways.”

So if the Oregonian knows where it is, why hasn’t he dug it up?

Well, he doesn’t want to go to jail. The tree is under the jurisdiction of the Parks Department. A few years ago, he got permission from the department to dig, but only if he hired an internationally certified arborist and used a power tool called an air spade–which he’d never gotten around to doing. I said I might be willing to arrange the rental of the air spade. We contacted the Parks Department. They changed their mind—no digging allowed.

And yet … a few months later, the Oregonian emailed me that maybe he’d found a loophole? On the Parks Department’s website, he spotted a note to New Yorkers who care about trees that it’s important to loosen “the top few inches of soil with a hand cultivator to undo compaction.”

“So . . . maybe you could bring a hand tool and dig a little ways?” the Oregonian wrote. He also suggested I bring marigolds and plant them to avoid suspicion. He’d do it himself, but he lives far away.

So on a Sunday, off I went on my secret horticultural mission with a shopping bag containing marigolds and a trowel. It took me nearly an entire day. I can report that one tree in New York now boasts a couple of lovely marigolds at its base, but I can also report that the Secret treasure is not buried under that tree—or at least it’s more than four inches deep, which is as far as I felt comfortable digging.

Words by A.J. Jacobs

Illustrations from The Secret by Byron Preiss

Excerpted from The Puzzler by A.J. Jacobs. Copyright © 2022 by A.J. Jacobs. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Interested in doing an Armchair Hunt of your own? Try solving the metapuzzles in TANGRAM magazine.

With their first Cluebox, “Schrödinger’s Cat,” the designers wanted to pack those same enthralling moments of discovery into a wooden box that could be produced at an accessible price point. They also sought to differentiate themselves from other puzzle boxes, which may have no apparent moving pieces or locks—the mental equivalent of a climber approaching a smooth wall of rock with no obvious starting toehold. For newcomers, this can be very frustrating, because until an initial aha! moment, a solver might make no progress for minutes, hours, or days.

“If they don’t have a good visible clue of what to do ... they will try to kill the box.”

Clueboxes avoid that frustration. They have a clear first step—literally, the word “Start” indicates where to focus at the beginning—and lines traced around the puzzle show how sections connect to each other. “Initially the third box, [‘Nautilus’], was designed to have multiple possible starting points,” says Alexander Krys, one of the creators of the Cluebox series. “But we got feedback that people wanted a start indicator [like on the first two], so we added that for one of the paths.”

That kind of design affordance leads to a solving process which is not necessarily easy, but gives a steady stream of satisfying discoveries and a sense of progression—with a corresponding dopamine hit as each step of the puzzle is solved.

When developing a box, Krys says the team starts by first trying out different mechanisms. “When we do games, we start with a story, and based on the story we build puzzles, [but for boxes], we work on nice mechanisms, and see how we can incorporate all the mechanisms together so there is logic linking them,” he explains. “Then we think of the story and design. We always have a raw version of the puzzle with just mechanisms, then we add the story and start adjusting the mechanisms to give them the shape of the story.”

Take, for instance, the manta ray-shaped piece in “Nautilus.” For puzzle purposes, it doesn’t need to be that precise shape, but molding the mechanism to the story provides a pleasing blend of aesthetics and utility.

It generally takes 60 to 90 minutes to solve a Cluebox. To achieve that, iDventure drew on other escape room principles, like “gating,” i.e., clarifying what pieces are in play, and “signposting,” which helps indicate what pieces of the puzzle are related to each other. “People need to know what they need to do,” Krys says. “If they don’t have a good visible clue of what to do, first off they will be frustrated, second they will try to kill the box.”

Even with a few designs under their belt, prototyping remains a must before producing thousands of copies. “If something is unstable, or if we know that it will be difficult in production to assemble the box, it might be a no-go factor,” Krys says. “We have some mechanisms we tried to fit in, but couldn’t make reliable. ‘Nice mechanism, goodbye,’ because it is too small to work.”

A key part of the player experience is how smoothly a puzzle works, which is especially tricky with tight tolerances. Despite iDventure focusing on quality control during assembly, sometimes issues are only discovered later. Krys mentions how with “Nautilus” some customers received their box with the first stage of the puzzle box already solved. “It was really surprising!” he says, explaining how that stage is usually solved in seven to eight moves. “I was blaming quality control—that they weren’t locking the box. But then we took a box and started shaking it and … shake shake shake … it was opening! This is crazy.”

Luckily, the fix was simple. After adding a sticker to hold one piece in place, the iDventure team introduced a more, er, robust form of testing (read: throwing packages at the wall and shaking them vigorously).

As for what’s next for Cluebox, Krys is understandably coy. He’s happy to share that their next Kickstarter will reveal not one but two new boxes. He does mention one will be designed as a traditional Cluebox. When asked if the other might push the envelope with new shapes and materials, he offers an intriguing: “You’ll see.”

Words by Brett Kuehner

The OCD museum, which doubles as Oreck’s work studio, is open to the public every Wednesday and promises something for everyone: from miniature cabbage to miniature pink erasers to variegated, miniature hourglasses (or, really, minute-glasses)—all of it coordinated and balanced symmetrically like a Wes Anderson movie.

The OCD has been used for photoshoot backdrops and BYOB cocktail hours, as well as tiny concerts, craft nights, and dinner parties. Art of Play recently caught up with Oreck as she celebrates the one-year anniversary of the OCD this May.

Editor’s note: The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Art of Play: From miniature dice to pumpkins the size of a pinky nail, you’ve meticulously curated a fascinating world of unusual objects. How did you get started on this endeavor?

Jessica Oreck: My parents say that I started collecting before I started talking. (Likely some snowball mythology there, but who am I to argue?) Being a collector feels like one of my defining character traits. It isn’t just objects, but the way I live my life. The way I travel, the ideas I am drawn to, and most especially the way I work, are all built around patterns and series.

My longest-running (and largest) collection is of “unplayable” dice. (The pips might be slightly off, the corners chipped, handmade, poorly balanced, etc.) The earliest item in the museum was given to me when I was 12 years old. It is a tiny wooden box with two tiny tiny dice in it. The box and contents belonged to my great grandmother and were given to me by my aunt. That was the initiation of my dice collection, which now numbers at least 700 strong.

Do you use the Marie Kondo method on these objects (i.e. do they speak to your heart when holding them)?

Absolutely. From the slightly risqué inception of the foreign chewing gum collection to the charming history of our collection of gargoyle-esque faces carved from Tagua nuts, most of the items have a story behind them and if visitors are interested, I am always happy to share.

The obsolete, the broken, the lost, the discarded … Those are the treasures that make my heart beat a little faster.

Is there a story behind a particular object that inspires you?

When I was in Kolkata, India, for a film festival in 2019, I didn’t attend any screenings, but spent my days hunting for treasure (as I am wont to do). I was on the hunt for a particular type of tiny carved and painted wooden animal that one of my aunts had brought me many years ago. I walked several miles to a market that someone had recommended to me. No luck, but someone at that market recommended a different market. More walking and still nothing. Finally, I came upon a shopkeeper who shook his head, paused, thought for a moment, and nodded. He proceeded to give me complicated directions in Bengali.

After locking and closing up his little booth, he proceeded to lead me several blocks, through the kitchens of a steaming restaurant, then into a courtyard, and up three flights of stairs to a locked door. The door opened to one of the more magical spaces I’ve ever experienced. It was stacked floor to ceiling with fabrics and trimmings of every color you can imagine, the ceiling was completely obscured by garlands of beads and silk flowers, pom poms and bangles and fringe. Every single square inch was dripping with embroidered ribbons or beaded lace. The place was packed.

I squeezed my way to the counter and caught someone’s attention between many shouting salesmen and countless brides-to-be. I showed an employee the photo, and he pulled a plastic bucket from a high shelf. I spent an overwhelming, sweaty, and unreservedly blissful hour there, sorting out the little menagerie of tiny, hand-carved wooden animals I wished to purchase. I am forever grateful to the man who took time away from his shop to bring me to that paradise.

How do you curate these micro exhibits? Aside from the stories the objects tell individually, is there this grander idea a box display is trying to convey?

It’s a very intuitive process. Sometimes it only makes sense within the context of the whole.

One of our minuscule living rooms, complete with miniature rotary dial telephone, sits next to a box with more miniature phones nestled amidst several shelves of brightly colored Japanese pigments, which is next to a box of miniature television sets.

The TVs have a boat stacked on top, which leads you to another box, with one shelf devoted to tiny transportation elements. The other shelves correspond with the tiny transportation elements not based on theme, but based on color, which brings you back to the colorful pigments.

I am not sure that I can articulate exactly the “grander ideas” but I think the displays are a fairly accurate representation of the way my brain works. It’s riotous and joyful and abstract, but still adhering to some logic of patterns and series.

What do visitors often feel when they poke around?

Folks have called the museum a “time machine” and a “mix between the Hogwarts Castle and their grandparents’ home.”

The type of people that enjoy the museum aren’t necessarily the type to be drawn to the more mainstream elements of Las Vegas. It’s sort of like a built-in filter to find “my people.” Either you get it or you don’t. But the people that get it really, really love it. We’ve had some wonderful reactions. We once had someone stay for six hours, and a couple who came back three days in a row!

I love the enthusiasm of the folks that get it, but I also love the really unexpected ones. For instance, we had a really macho guy here with his girlfriend. He was trying to be polite, but was maybe a bit bored, maybe a bit confused. And then he opened a drawer and pulled out an object. He looked at me in total wonderment, with actual tears in his eyes, and said, “I haven’t thought about this since I was six years old. So many memories just came flooding back to me.”

He just took it and sat down with it, and was completely absorbed in those lost memories for a long while. It was so rewarding.

The Office of Collecting and Design is currently accepting donations, especially: unplayable dice, single dominos, used pink erasers, lost game pieces, lonely buttons, stubby pencils, and basically anything miniature. You can send them to the Office of Collecting and Design, PO Box 43343, Las Vegas, NV 89116; and follow them on Instagram @office.of.collecting.

Tedious legal disclaimer: By accepting your donation, the OCD is not obligated to keep, display, or photograph your item(s); and is not responsible for loss or damage of the item(s) under any circumstances.

Words by David MacNeal, Photography by Homer Liwag

Susanna Bauer in her UK-based studio. Photo by Rebekah Taylor

As a child in Munich, Bauer built small worlds. Using a pair of tweezers, she’d diligently assemble matchbox landscapes replete with paper-folded houses. Her affinity for plants led to studying landscape architecture, which later led to a career as a model maker for film and advertising. (You can thank Bauer for the wheels of cheese in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.) But over the years she felt the need to express her own ideas.

Splitting her time between London and Cornwall, she took long walks collecting pieces of nature: beachwood, stones, fallen leaves. One day, she sought to “contain the experience” of nature, and, as a long-time knitter (beginning at age 6), decided to encase a branch and pebble in a crochet.

"Levels" (2015)

“It stopped the process of this pebble,” she explains, “of it being tumbled about and going in the flow of time. And it becomes something else. It becomes a memory of a moment for me.” Bauer focuses primarily on leaves to create such mementos. What’s more, the meticulously threaded chains and designs are made using only a hook, thread, and enough muscle control to work down to one-tenth of a millimeter. The patterns are then an extension of the places her mind goes, the meditative art of crocheting.

After 12 years of producing incredible feats like “Levels” (2015) and “Thrive” (2020), Bauer has the ability to touch a leaf and understand the tensile strength of the material. Ginkgo and maple leaves, for instance, are super thin and require a more delicate hand. And the Magnolia leaves she finds in lush, Cornish woodlands hold a dear place in her heart—she calls them the “classic leaf” given its big veins and ovular shape. That penchant for nature shows.

"Thrive" (2020)

“A fallen, autumn leaf is something people just walk through. It’s there in abundance,” Bauer says. “It degrades and it’s gone.” For her, these are not mundane things. Much like the whorls of our fingertips, if you compare two leaves side by side, you’d notice that neither are alike. “That’s why I find the meaning behind it so fascinating. Even from the same tree, each leaf has its own character. And that for me is loaded with symbolism. … How do we define what is precious? How much do we take nature for granted?”

See more of Bauer’s leaves on Instagram @susanna_bauer.

Words by David MacNeal

Banner photo by Steve Tanner