Rocking On the High Seas

Available now is my second puzzle set, Sailing. The theme is Yacht Rock. I was introduced to Yacht Rock as a genre last fall, when our friend Eric took my brother and me on a memorial weekend sail in honor of our father. I’d grown up with most of the music in the genre, but I’d never known Yacht Rock was a “thing” until then. So this set is dedicated to Eric. So breakout your favorite Yacht Rock playlist, and come rock on the high seas. Hints are already available, too, if you want them, on the same page. Enjoy!

Play Ball! Hints

The hints for Play Ball are now implemented. If you go to the Play Ball! page, you will see a button for them next to the answer checker button. The hints are categorized, and go from gentle nudges to explicit instructions.

I had more trouble than I expected implementing them due to some of the vagaries of WordPress, but I’m pretty happy with the final results, as I can leverage it easily for other puzzles.

Also, a second set is well under way, so stay tuned for that!

Welcome to Enigmatic Ephemera

I’ve been a avid puzzler all my life. My favorite kinds of puzzles are variety puzzles. Growing up, I spent a lot of time with Games Magazine and other variety puzzle magazines, like Penny Press. About five or so years ago, however, I fell into the rabbit hole of meta puzzles, puzzle hunts, and augmented reality games. And I discovered I love crafting puzzles as much as I like solving them. I started this site a while ago, but life intervened for a bit. But now I think I’m ready to go with it.

With so many people sheltering at home for the pandemic who are in need of distractions, I wanted to share a set of puzzles I made for my baseball-loving husband. I felt this was a timely puzzle set, given the baseball season has been postponed. So here is my initial foray into a public offering: Play Ball! The set is aimed primarily at the small, casual puzzle hunt level. (For those steeped in the various puzzle offerings out there, it’s more like Puzzled Pint than the MIT Mystery Hunt.)

If you have never done puzzles with a meta puzzle, the idea is that you need information from the regular puzzles (usually the answers) to solve the meta puzzle. Play Ball! has six regular variety puzzles. After solving the obvious puzzle, you should be able to extract a word or phrase that is the answer to that puzzle. Those answers will be needed to solve the final puzzle, Damn Yankees. Another feature of puzzle hunt puzzles is that there aren’t always explicit instructions on what to do or how to get your final answer. There are some built in hints in the introductory text of each puzzle, and the layout and title sometimes offers clues, but part of the fun is trying to figure out what you need to figure out. But yes, I am working to get up a hint system online for those who may need more help.

I hope you enjoy solving these puzzles as much as I enjoyed creating them.