The Mystery League

Puzzle #53

Thu, 11 Oct 2018 11:20:46 -0500

Q: These two-word phrases all share a certain quality. Add another phrase to the list.

Fasten firmly
Brother boss
BeeGee Barry
Really regretful
Fancy fungus

https://twitter.com/pzlr/status/1050389788908539905

Puzzle #52

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 19:51:26 -0500

Q: These phrases all share a certain quality. Add another phrase to the list.

A mouth too cold to speak (13, 75)
It was a graveyard smash (03, 70)
Ready to Die artist (46, 88)
Lemon-lime soda (95, 09)
Accident in heavy congestion (00, 04)

https://twitter.com/pzlr/status/1050032027897081856

yesterdaysprint: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri, March 31,...

Sat, 04 Mar 2017 13:20:32 -0600

yesterdaysprint:

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri, March 31, 1910
Did you know that in the early 20th century ginger ale wasn’t even ginger flavour? Some manufacturers skipped the ginger and used carbonated sugar water and capsicum (“red pepper” - tabasco peppers) to give it a kick.

Why didn’t we name this company the Riddle Bureau?

An Escape Room in a Box!

Thu, 22 Dec 2016 15:59:08 -0600

puzzlenation:

In today’s blog post, we look at an escape room event next week in Chicago!
http://imgur.com/EPZpbrg [Image courtesy of Escape Game Addicts.] Escape rooms have been all the rage lately, as teams of people pit themselves against riddles, puzzles, codes, and other challenges in order to escape a room within a certain amount of time. It’s about as close as you’ll get to being MacGyver or Batman in this life, and it can be great fun. They’ve been around long enough that…
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Hey this sounds interesting. 🤔 Thx PuzzleNation!

Just try not to go mad: Publisher to release 898 exact replicas of mysterious book no living person can understand

Sun, 25 Sep 2016 09:11:49 -0500

Just try not to go mad: Publisher to release 898 exact replicas of mysterious book no living person can understand:

historical-nonfiction:

The swirls of script filling the pages of the book — known as the Voynich Manuscript — are as inscrutable as the slime trails left by a garden slug. But this new printing will put more people than ever on the job

Mystery League featured in Crain’s Chicago BusinessAlina Dizik...

Fri, 19 Aug 2016 11:12:27 -0500

Mystery League featured in Crain’s Chicago Business

Alina Dizik wrote a lovely piece for Crain’s about me and The Mystery League. She interviewed a couple clients, The Children’s Museum and FCB, who fortunately had only nice things to say. She even got a plug in for Puzzled Pint, the free puzzle event I put every month. Really happy with how this turned out.

If you are a fan of The Mystery League and want to see us do more cool things, please pass this article on to all Chicago-based boss-people that you know who like to do nice things for their employees. Or even to friends who work for such bosses. It’ll really help!

nique: Buttersafe. 👏🏼

Thu, 11 Aug 2016 19:11:21 -0500

nique:

Buttersafe.

👏🏼

itscolossal: This Incredible Wooden Book Is a Series of Puzzles...

Fri, 05 Aug 2016 20:56:28 -0500

itscolossal:

This Incredible Wooden Book Is a Series of Puzzles That Have to Be Solved to Continue Reading

We made a Humble Puzzle Bundle and you will want it

Wed, 20 Jul 2016 14:07:03 -0500

lonesharkgames:

It’s been a bit of challenging year in the puzzle world, what with the deaths of some of our most legendary constructors and a horrible plagiarism scandal. The team at Lone Shark Games thought, “What could we do to bring all the puzzle people together around something positive?” So, working with our fellow genius puzzle designers and our friends at Humble Bundle, we made something positive: The Humble Puzzle Bundle. You can click that right now and get it.
In case that’s a new thing for you, a Humble Bundle is a pay-what-you-want collection of games or books that you will never, ever, ever get for that price again. Like, you could only pay a dollar if you want. No, really, it’s an insane deal, and it only lasts two weeks. But that’s not the only cool part. A whole bunch of each person’s contribution goes to charity. So that’s your incentive to pay more than a dollar. Maybe a lot more.
In our case, we wanted to raise money in part for Worldbuilders, the It Gets Better Project, and Child’s Play. Those are really fantastic charities, and so we needed the best excuse for you to throw your money at us.
We started by throwing in a PDF of our popular puzzle novel The Maze of Games, and made the hardback available at a temporarily reduced price. Then we added a truckload of new content from us like a Crosswords of Wisdom collection and the Killer Cryptics book (which you’ll also get free in Puzzazz). Then we got our best puzzle friends to contribute PDFs of their own books. Crossword gods like Brendan Emmett Quigley and Francis Heaney and Matt Jones joined with logic masters like Pavel Curtis and Thomas “Dr. Sudoku” Snyder. And we got all the Puzzle Patricks: Patrick Berry, Patrick Blindauer, and Patrick Merrell. Many of these folks contributed books that have never been seen before. You will never see this stuff in one place again, I promise.
And hey, just in case that’s not a sweet enough deal for you, we’re making this:
Yes, that is a BRAND NEW MAZE OF GAMES BOOK. No one has yet alerted us to the fact that they’ve solved the final maze in The Maze of Games. That’s a real shame, because it’s a great final puzzle. So we decided to ask you to help us develop this book, and raise money for our favorite causes at the same time. For every $20,000 our Humble Puzzle Bundle raises, we’ll add a bonus hint puzzle to this book. The more you guys contribute, the cooler it’ll be when we put out the PDF in October. And maybe someone out there will crack that final maze.
If you’re a puzzle fan, we can’t imagine coming up with a more attractive opportunity for you. But you don’t have much time. In fact, you have from right now till August 3. Please share this with everyone, then go puzzle your brain!
Mike and the Sharks

Amazing. Get this.

text-mode: Russian postmen fix an error caused by an...

Fri, 22 Apr 2016 11:39:34 -0500

text-mode:

Russian postmen fix an error caused by an ASCII-illiterate e-mail client in France. New aesthetic, anyone?

This letter was sent to a Russian student by her French friend, who manually wrote the address that she received by e-mail. Her e-mail client, unfortunately, was not set up correctly to display Cyrillic characters, so they were substituted with diacritic symbols from the Western charset (ISO-8859-1) The original message was in KOI8-R.

The address was deciphered by the postal employees and delivered successfully. Some of the correct characters (red) were written above the wrong ones (black).

Encoding problems are usually called Mojibake (from Japanese) but other languages refer to it as monkey’s code, letter salad, chaotic code and even little bushes. Read more at Wikipedia.

Makes you wonder how common this ‘mojibake literacy’ is among postmen…

This gives me an idea for a puzzle.

Dash 008 is nearThe greatest day of the year is approaching....

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 19:54:12 -0500

Dash 008 is near

The greatest day of the year is approaching. DASH — Different Area Same Hunt — is arriving on April 30 in 16 cities. I have nothing to do with the organization, intentionally, so I can play. It’s always a blast. The Chicago registration page is here.

If you’re in another part of the world, check out this page to find your city.

Happy π Day. Here is your annual reminder that everything is...

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 11:10:35 -0500

Happy π Day. Here is your annual reminder that everything is chaos and nothing means anything, except for this.

http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/My-name-is-Purple-Henry-and-I-am-a-badger-at-midnight-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i14282615_.htm

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 15:20:50 -0600

http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/My-name-is-Purple-Henry-and-I-am-a-badger-at-midnight-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i14282615_.htm:

Sublime.

maxistentialist: Tonight the whole office went out to play The...

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 07:14:19 -0600

maxistentialist:

Tonight the whole office went out to play The Last Defender, a room escape play in Chicago by The House Theater. The puzzles were designed by @santheo, and I helped out a bit with the story.
This is almost certainly the best escape room ever made, and it’s running for the next few months. If you live in Chicago, get tickets. If you don’t live in Chicago, travel here to do it.

hanukkahlol: Behind the Scenes of Hanukkah LOL I’ve been...

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 09:46:14 -0600

hanukkahlol:

Behind the Scenes of Hanukkah LOL

I’ve been writing up, on Medium, the long story of how we designed Hanukkah LOL. I go into detail about how we came to structure the hunt and how designed the puzzles, including lot of stories and pictures that didn’t make it onto the AMA. I’ve published about 10,000 words so far, in four parts. Start at part 1 and go from there:

Part 1: The beginning

Part 2: The theme

Part 3: The gifts and the room

Part 4: The community

More to come. Follow The Mystery League on Medium or on Twitter to be notified about new posts.

Oscar Food 2016The Oscars are coming, which means it’s Oscar...

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 11:43:34 -0600

Oscar Food 2016

The Oscars are coming, which means it’s Oscar Food Menu time. Here is the list of movies nominated for Best Picture this year:

The Big Short
Bridge of Spies
Brooklyn
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
The Revenant
Room
Spotlight

The full list of nominees is here. Some dishes we’re considering making for our Oscar party:

Mad Max: Curry Road [Mad Max]
Big Short Ribs / Sub-Prime Rib [Big Short]
Ruffalo Wings [Spotlight]
Leonardo DiCapicola [Revenant]
Mad Tex Mex [Mad Max]
Gumbo [Trumbo]
A Tasteful Eight-Ounce Ribeye sauteed with Jennifer Jason Leeks [Hateful Eight]
Baked Brie Larson [Room]
Rooney Calimara [Carol]
Potatoes [The Martian]
Saoirse Ro-naan [Brooklyn]
Force A-bacons [Star Wars]
Christian Kale [Big Short]
Rocky Road [Mad Max or Creed]
Fridge of Pies [Bridge of Spies]
Fig Shortbread [Big Short]
Almond Joy [Joy or Inside Out]
Tartian [Martian]
Brooklyn cocktail [Brooklyn]
Daisy Cutter Pale Ale [Star Wars]
Fifty Shades of Grape Juice [50 Shades of Grey]
Rye-lance Cocktail with a Smidge of Spice [Bridge of Spies]

Thanks to Michael, Amy, Catherine, Erica and Kevin for help with the above. Got anymore?

Shel Silverstein Puzzled Pint is Tuesday Feb 9And it will...

Mon, 08 Feb 2016 13:47:08 -0600

Shel Silverstein Puzzled Pint is Tuesday Feb 9

And it will feature two poetry-based puzzles by yours truly. There are also puzzles by Wil, Jimmy and Veronica, of the Chicago GC crew. To see if Puzzled Pint is in your city, and to find out where to go, visit puzzledpint.com.

Today is International Puzzle Day. Which is appropriate, because...

Fri, 29 Jan 2016 13:55:39 -0600

Today is International Puzzle Day. Which is appropriate, because it’s the opening night of the The Last Defender, a project I’ve built with Nathan Allen and a few dozen other incredible people at The House Theatre of Chicago. What is it? It’s a puzzle room, but in the service of a bigger story. It’s theatre, but there are no actors. It’s a game, but there’s no way to win or lose. It’s interactive, but you’re not performing. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.

You put on a jump suit, descend into a missile bunker with 15 others, and spend a harrowing 90 minutes attempting to prevent a well-intentioned but tragically misguided computer from initiating nuclear armageddon. And you’re assisted by a trio of silent, smart, black-clothed rabbits. I can’t believe this thing actually exists. It’s so good.

Tickets are available through March.

hanukkahlol: Get your hands on some medium-quality basement...

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 14:23:15 -0600

hanukkahlol:

Get your hands on some medium-quality basement stuff!

You asked — we delivered. You can now own a historic piece of the Hanukkah LOL basement. We’ve put 27 items up for sale on eBay, from the dreidel to the fake shaving cream to a bunch of the GPK cards. 100% of the proceeds will be donated to Heifer International.

Auction ends mid-day Wednesday. Almost everything can be signed by Dad, Tom, Karlee, or Sandor. We’re happy to do it.

Happy bidding!

We made a charity auction for a bunch of stuff from the basement. Locks, GPK cards, and dirty socks, oh my.

Eric Berlin, prolific puzzle writer and author of three puzzle...

Thu, 07 Jan 2016 09:05:08 -0600

Eric Berlin, prolific puzzle writer and author of three puzzle books for kids, is out with a new Kickstarter that offers a subscription of puzzles aimed at kids 9 and above. My son is only 6 ½, but I’m backing anyway because I love Eric’s work and I’m happy to see projects like this that introduce puzzles to kids.