Anatomy of a Puzzle: My Office Door
Looking for my office? You’ll have to solve a puzzle, first. But I have a perfectly reasonable (if convoluted) explanation of how things got to this point.
It Started With a Prank: The Case of the Sudsy Ransom Note
One of my colleagues, David Brown, runs the Atria Mystery Bus TikTok account, and it’s everything I’d want to see in a corporate TikTok account. Yes, they talk about the Mystery and Thriller books Atria is releasing…but it also provides a surprisingly accurate window into what it’s like to be coworkers with David. From empathy building exercises for pregnant coworkers by taping a stack of books to his stomach to attempting to solve the Mystery of the Missing Batteries, the team goes out of its way to justify having “Office Chaos” as the lead words of the account bio.
One video I found particularly funny featured David getting annoyed that the Mens bathrooms in our office were stocked with inferior soap. Which convinced me to buy a bar of literary-themed novelty soap, and anonymously leave it on his desk with a ransom note. Y’know, the kind of behavior regular people would engage in.
The ransom note was filled with references to past Atria Mystery Bus videos: in addition to referencing David’s aforementioned desire for quality soap, I also offered citations to the various times he abuses books in his possession (e.g., bending spines past the point of no return and using a rubber band as bookmark) to justify his need for Lady MacBeth’s soap.
David was amused by this anonymous delivery (don’t worry, I warned his colleagues it was me ahead of time in case things took an unexpected turn), and I initially planned to deploy an in-office scavenger hunt for him to uncover my identity. Those plans got scrapped for a number of reasons…but not before I had drafted the puzzle that currently hangs on my office door, which I intended to use for the grand reveal.
Creating the Corpus: A Bookish Puzzle for a Bookish Office
Remember, this puzzle was created with the intention of revealing my identity. So it would either need to literally spell out my name, or direct the solver to a location where that information would be revealed as final capstone. Since I work at a book publisher, it felt right to make the puzzle out of the books we publish.
So, I came up with a concept for the puzzle to spell out my name by taking popular S&S titles, changing one letter to make a different title that could still plausibly exist...and using those changes to spell out my name. The only problem: that’s some fairly specific criteria to satisfy. The answer? Throw a bunch of information into a spreadsheet, and hunt for promising titles.
“Throw it in a spreadsheet” is actually fairly common practice in puzzle design. When I worked on Aphrodite’s Plutonic Affection Connection for the MIT Mystery Hunt, my main contribution to the puzzle was manually creating a database of dozens of anime series where character heights were both canonically known and didn’t change over the course of the series, so we could make a puzzle where character heights formed literal “love triangles”. When I worked on The Obelisks of Sorrel Mountain, the database was centered around Yelp reviews featured in Subpar Parks illustrations.
Luckily, since I work in book publishing, a more manual discovery process was unnecessary. I was able to go into Bookscan, a database that is typically used in the industry to track sales data, and download a list of titles published by Simon & Schuster sorted by sales so I could focus on titles that are well known enough that most people would be able to clock something was wrong.
To make this puzzle satisfying, I layered on a few extra constraints: I wanted to include both older and newer titles, and the title text on the covers had to be something I could modify without calling in favors from actual graphic designers.
The result of that initial step? A spreadsheet “puzzle”, that looks almost identical to what you’d pull together when attempting to solve this kind of puzzle. I had initially added in the “New Letter” column in hopes that I could spell out both my name (Michael Andersen) and my role (Audience Insight) using book titles.
The result would be a more elegant puzzle since it uses more of the elements of the puzzle, but the added constraints were so restrictive that I could only make it work by using less recognizable titles. So, I traded off elegant design for solvability, especially since I planned on inflicting this on people who weren’t as puzzle savvy.
Refining the Puzzle — Testing Out Multiple Drafts
Now that I had a workable spreadsheet edition of the puzzle, I spent a night mocking up the first draft of the puzzle, modifying covers until I was happy with the results. I tried to test it against two groups of people: puzzle friends who might be less familiar with book names, and publishing friends who were less familiar with puzzle tropes.
Both groups came across the same challenge: the puzzle was easy if they first focused on what the book titles should have been, but took on added difficulty if their first inclination was to focus on the letters that were swapped into the puzzle.
That’s when I added flavortext to the puzzle, attempting to draw solvers’ attention to the [S]omething missing — and that seemed to resolve the issue.
Reusing Puzzles — The Crossword Con Sequel
A few weeks later I attended Crossword Con, and the invitation to the event encouraged attendees to bring puzzles for fellow con-goers to play. So, I combined two prior puzzles so that attendees could learn the name of the puzzle constructor by solving the puzzle.
The “Something missing…” door puzzle could spell out my name, and the MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle What’s the Pointillism solves to a particularly appropriate word to pair with my name, for a puzzle event handout.
The door puzzle didn’t take much in the way of adjustments to work…I just had to shrink down the sizes a little, and make sure the letters were still legible at that size. “What’s the Pointillism” required initial tweaks to make the clueing fit, but I was able to make that change topical by adding the topical phrase Crosswordcon Makes You Rapidly Grasp Brainteasers, with CMY RGB hinting at the mechanism for extraction.
It’s a great reminder: as long as your puzzles aren’t shared publicly online, it’s often possible to reuse them, as long as you’re willing to tweak the design for its new purpose.
