Anatomy of a Puzzle: Larping with Tarot
The first time I went to a Larp, one of the players on another faction went around to each of the other teams, and handed them a wooden block puzzle with the promise: “figure out how to solve this and show me what you’ve learned tomorrow, and I’ll owe you a boon.”
I didn’t end up solving the puzzle (I’m beyond terrible at physical manipulation puzzles), but the challenge captured my imagination and got me to thinking, “what does it mean to design a puzzle for Larps?”
I’ve already written about the second time I tried to tackle this question, by creating custom dice puzzles for every faction. But before I turned to dice, I played with tarot as a theme.
An Initial Thesis: Puzzles are Designed with Their Environment in Mind
During the 2021 MIT Mystery Hunt, teams of 60+ competitors were directed to enter a virtual recreation of the MIT campus to solve a series of over a hundred puzzles. At one point, teams were directed to explore the tunnels underneath the virtual school. At regular intervals, puzzlers were confronted with corridors haunted by ghosts. The only way to safely walk by? Figure out a rule dictating which ghosts are safe to walk past, and which ones are dangerous through trial and error.
After navigating to the end of the byzantine tunnel structure, puzzlers would finally reach a pitch black room, where every tile of the floor was tied to a separate sound file. Walk horizontally, and a series of crossword clues would play (along with some garbled background noise). Walk vertically, and a separate set of crossword clues would play, with the horizontal clues switching over to a garbled mess.
The team behind Pitch Black took the mechanics of video games (free movement of player avatars and the ability to trigger audio specific to puzzlers’ locations) and created a crossword puzzle that could only exist in that environment.
While this is an extreme example, good puzzle design will almost always take the context of how people are experiencing puzzles, and integrate that into each puzzle’s DNA. Escape room puzzles will try and take advantage of team dynamics and physical presence. Puzzles embedded in books will take advantage of the linear nature of storytelling to hide hints of things to come for those willing to dig a little deeper.
The Culper Ring and Beyond: Puzzles for Passing Secret Messages
The Larp I was playing (Dragon Thrones) was faction-based and had a megagaming component, so I became curious about how you could use a puzzle to send secret messages. One particularly famous method of passing secrets was the Culper Code, used by George Washington’s “Culper Ring” spy network to pass secret messages during the American Revolutionary War.
A list of common words were assigned numbers, from 1–763. Under that system, the message “Germany brigade attack , please advise” would be 761 68 38 15. Without the key, translating the message would be next to impossible.
I figured it would be relatively straightforward to create a simplified version of the Culper Code using decks of tarot cards. Rather than speaking requests, in-game diplomats and spies could pass messages undetected.
But Larps aren’t about winning…they’re about creating more fun for everyone involved. So I created a puzzle to help any faction gain access to the translation key, and built it into the tarot decks themselves.
The Tarot Deck Puzzle: Finding Order Amidst Chaos
The secrets contained within the tarot decks were written on the edges of the cards. When the decks were fully shuffled, the sides looked like an illegible mess of lines. But after sorting the decks in order, a message emerged: CHOOSE PRIMES.
CHOOSE PRIME(S) may have been made clear at this point, but the final side remained a mess, requiring one final step for the solve.
Following the instruction on the cards, puzzlers were encouraged to divide their deck into two stacks: one that only included prime numbered cards, and another that included all the rest. This revealed the final answer.
The prime numbered cards spelled out the message, “Ask for the Moon”, while the leftover cards read “Ask for the Devil”. Puzzlers who came to me requesting the Moon got the Major Arcana (along with the key for how to use the deck), while puzzlers who asked for the Devil…just got the Devil card as a reward.
Structurally, this puzzle was heavily inspired by the MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle Marked Deck, as well as a playing cards puzzle from the Gray Matter Sodality’s mail order puzzle experience.
I included one final twist in the decks: when ordered properly, the Major Arcana cards also had my character’s signature written along the side. This was left as a potential plot hook, since the Larp’s game masters gave my character a secret mission to track down the shipment of weapons he…misplaced in transit.
I informed the GMs that if they wanted to have another player discover those weapons, they could be stamped with that insignia to get my character in further trouble. Nothing came of it, but in Larps it’s always nice to reward players who accomplish something impressive by giving them potentially incriminating evidence.
Playtest, Playtest, Playtest: Identify Your Flaws Before Deployment
My intention in designing this puzzle was to create something that a single person could reasonably solve in 10–15 minutes: for a weekend long Larp, that minimized the potential for distraction.
To test that assumption, I enlisted a handful of coworkers as beta-testers, to identify potential flaws in the puzzle logic. Two issues quickly emerged: while the first step required puzzlers to organize the cards by suit, there was no outward indication to tell them that was a good idea, or to tell them which order the suits should go in. To address that issue, I added roman numerals to the third side of the decks, which made for a highly visual indicator that there was a logical method of organizing the cards.
One or two of my playtesters also had a little trouble connecting PRIME with prime numbers, so I made the word plural to avoid more potential for ambiguity.
Managing Hints at a Live Event: Finding You Shouldn’t Be the Puzzle
The tarot decks passed most of my early prototyping tests, so I shifted them over to production. But just because a handful of testers managed to make it through the puzzle relatively unscathed didn’t mean it was perfect. And this puzzle would be deployed at a Larp taking place across multiple buildings at a college campus, so people looking for additional hints might run the risk of spending over an hour trying to hunt me down.
So, I created an optional hint system, written on a folded piece of paper.
The first fold hid a warning, asking if puzzlers were sure they wanted the hints.
After that it offered a minimalist hint recommending that puzzlers order the card, followed by numeric indicators of how to treat face cards to help with the “Choose Primes” request.
The Best Laid Plans: Lessons Learned and Applied
In practice, the puzzle went off fairly well: more than half of the factions in attendance completed the challenge, and only one faction asked for the “wrong card”. The first person to complete this challenge has turned into a close personal friend over the years, and we still regularly do puzzle and theater events together.
And while one or two teams spent more than an hour poring over the puzzle (which I view as a personal failing, since there were so many other interesting things they could have been doing at the event) I was able to nudge them back on track once I visited their headquarters and noticed the problem.
However, the underlying purpose of the tarot puzzle was an abysmal failure. Culper Ring codes are great for secrecy, but the process of encoding and decoding messages is tedious enough that the cards were never used for their intended purpose.
“How can you pass secret messages at a Larp” may be an interesting question, but it didn’t take advantage of the Larp environment as much as the puzzle I designed for the following year.
