Tag Archives: Kickstarter

Let’s get it (kick)started!

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The newest tool in the arsenal of big thinkers and big dreamers is crowdfunding, wherein creators take their ideas directly to the people in the hopes that a lot of small donations will add up into capital to make their ideas reality.

Websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have literally made dreams come true — heck, LeVar Burton’s Reading Rainbow Kickstarter just raised over a million dollars in ONE DAY — and it’s quickly becoming a key outlet for worthy puzzle projects. Some top-tier constructors are going straight to the fanbase with their puzzles, and with marvelous results. Constructors like Trip Payne, Eric Berlin, and Matt Gaffney have all had success on Kickstarter and Indiegogo with previous campaigns.

In the past, we’ve covered several crowdfunding campaigns, including Rachel Happen’s Baffledazzle puzzles, The Doubleclicks’ board game and pop culture-infused musical endeavors, and a company making board games and card games accessible to the visually challenged.

And I wanted to spread the world about some other puzzly endeavors that might interest the PuzzleNation readership.

The first is Peter Gordon’s Fireball Fortnightly News Crosswords.

Peter Gordon is known across the puzzle community for his Fireball Crosswords, a challenging brand of puzzle for ambitious solvers, as well as an easier weekly news-themed puzzle for The Week magazine. So now, he’s combined the two to create Fireball Fortnightly News Crosswords!

Every two weeks, you’ll receive a crossword by email that includes as many topical news-related items in the grid as possible. So you get your news and your crossword in one fell swoop. Not as difficult as his usual Fireball Crosswords, these puzzles will still let you flex your solving muscles twice a month.

With backer prizes like additional crossword books and the chance to create a puzzle with a master puzzler, Fireball Fortnightly News Crosswords might be right up your alley!

The second Kickstarter campaign features a puzzle app for Android devices.

Blackout is similar to Lights Out, Q*Bert, and other puzzle games where you must make every icon on the screen the same color, which becomes a tougher task to complete as the patterns grow more complicated and each click affects neighboring shapes.

The game will feature multiple levels of difficulty — including one where the icons change shape as well as color — ensuring it’ll keep you thinking and clicking for quite some time to come.

Finally, we have Block Party.

Block Party is a pattern-matching game featuring several shapes, colors, and patterns, and players must find parties — groupings of similar aspects or collections of each different aspect — without touching the blocks. The first player to shout “Party!” then reveals the grouping they’ve spotted, and the game continues.

Block Party combines visual reflexes, pattern-matching skills, memory retention, and spatial reasoning to create an immersive game that appears deceptively simple at the outset.

With backer rewards like a printable version of Block Party and limited-edition versions of the game, this campaign is ready to engage solvers of all ages.

The amazing thing about all of these projects is that the audience, the potential fans, have an enormous role to play not only in sharing their thoughts with game and puzzle creators, but in showing their support for designers and projects they believe in, and doing so in a meaningful way.

Here’s hoping each of these projects finds success.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: The Future! edition

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

For those new to PuzzleNation Blog, Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and update the PuzzleNation audience on how these projects are doing and what these people have been up to in the meantime.

For today’s Follow-Up Friday post, I thought I’d do a bit of Follow-Ahead Friday by alerting my fellow puzzlers to all the joyous shenanigans afoot this weekend.

The Baffledazzle Kickstarter wraps up this weekend, and Rachel has met her goal of $12,000, thanks in part to the marvelous puzzlers in the PuzzleNation readership! Congratulations, Rachel! I can’t wait to see the final tally and the gorgeous puzzles you’ll be producing soon!

Plus, the Kentucky Derby returns today — if you couldn’t tell from our Wordplay Wednesday post — AND this Saturday is Free Comic Book Day! Check out participating comic book shops near you for more details!

As if that wasn’t enough, Sunday is Star Wars Day! (May the Fourth Be With You!) We’ll be doing some Star Wars Day picture posting across our Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Facebook accounts for the occasion, so keep your eyes peeled!

Finally, for the block-happy puzzlers out there, there’s the Sunday night premiere of The Simpsons’ LEGO Spectacular, an episode dedicated to everyone’s favorite building toy!

So much for puzzle lovers to enjoy this weekend!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

Follow-Up Friday: Kickstarter edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

For those new to PuzzleNation Blog, Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and update the PuzzleNation audience on how these projects are doing and what these people have been up to in the meantime.

And today, I’m happy to update you on some of the Kickstarter accounts we’ve featured in recent weeks.

First, the Board Games: Now Blind Accessible Kickstarter — dedicated to modifying existing card games and board games to allow visually impaired people to play — wrapped up yesterday with great success.

In total, the campaign met its goal nearly three times over! (Over $20,000!)

I’ll be sure to keep you posted on further updates from 64 Oz. Games and this very worthy cause.

And second, one lucky solver will be getting a set of Baffledazzle Code Breakers puzzles, courtesy of Rachel Happen!

In Rachel’s edition of 5 Questions, she not only discussed her Kickstarter campaign for high-end, high-quality, challenging jigsaw puzzles — 80% funded with 9 days to go! — but she snuck a puzzle into her interview answers!

And intrepid solver Caroline Kerstens was the first to unravel Rachel’s puzzle by spotting the clues and following the breadcrumb trail!

From Caroline’s post:

Hey, I was wondering if the puzzle you hid in the Puzzlenation interview has already been solved. If not, I think I have the answer!

Clues:

  • a “clever British spy” (female) 
  • translating Polish sayings 
  • French public transport 
  • navigating into new waters

There was a woman of Polish nobility who worked as a spy for the British SOE during WWII, which combines the first two clues. She outwitted the German Gestapo on various occasions and even tricked a Gestapo officer into carrying her package of illicit documents into Poland by making him believe it was a bag of black-market tea for her mother.

(You could link French public transport to her as well: the most famous public transport system in France is the Métropolitain or subway, which is an underground network. She, as a spy, was also part of an underground network, and she also operated in France.)

Her whole life was a series of “navigating new waters”:

  • from Polish nobility to adventurous spy 
  • she had a “varied” love life 
  • She skiied into occupied Poland with British propaganda, so if snow counts as water, this would work 🙂 
  • After the war, she worked as a cruise ship stewardess and literally navigated new waters.

So, is the answer to the hidden riddle Christine Granville? Or am I thinking in the wrong direction?

She was, in fact, correct, and will soon receive her very own set of Baffledazzle Code Breakers puzzles.

Here’s hoping Baffledazzle sees the same sort of wonderful success as the folks at Board Games: Now Blind Accessible.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

We interrupt your regularly scheduled post for something wonderful…

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I originally had our latest session of 5 Questions scheduled for today, but yesterday I stumbled upon a marvelous, time-sensitive story, and I really wanted to share it with the PuzzleNation audience, because it exemplifies the very best of the puzzly gaming community.

In last week’s Follow-Up Friday post, I briefly discussed Joe Michael MacDonald’s marvelous version of Qwirkle designed for colorblind players. And lo and behold, here is a Kickstarter campaign with even loftier goals.

The folks at 64 Oz. Games are in the final hours of a project called Board Games: Now Blind Accessible, wherein they produce specialty sleeves and other modifications for established board games and card games, allowing visually impaired players to play alongside their sighted pals.

Not only have they developed a touch-based game called Yoink! that is based on tactile gameplay, but a combination of Braille and clever use of QR codes has opened up games like Munchkin, King of Tokyo, and numerous roleplaying games to a previously excluded audience.

This inclusive spirit is brilliantly typical of the puzzle and game communities, since so many members — both designers and players/solvers — want nothing more than to share their love of games with the world.

And numerous board game, card game, and puzzle game companies are supporting the endeavor. Not only the folks at Cheapass Games, but also companies like Rio Grande Games, 9th Level, Living Worlds, and (hilariously, considering their reputation) Cards Against Humanity. (You can check out the full list of companies here.)

It’s an absolutely wonderful idea, and although there are only a few hours left to donate to this very worthy cause, I’m overjoyed to say that they’ve raised more than double their hoped-for campaign total!

This is Kickstarter and the puzzle and game communities at their best, and I’m glad I discovered it in time to share it with my fellow puzzlers.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

PuzzleNation Reviews: Cirkusu (by Baffledazzle)

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In our most recent edition of 5 Questions, I introduced you to Rachel Happen, the puzzler behind Baffledazzle, a Kickstarter to create high-end jigsaw puzzles that are aesthetically pleasing and more challenging than the average puzzle.

She sent us a review copy of one of the five initial Baffledazzle puzzles she’s created, so let’s give Cirkusu the full PuzzleNation review treatment!

[Note: This is intended as a spoiler-light review, so while I do discuss the completed puzzles in vague terms, I won’t include any pictures of completed puzzles.]

Cirkusu is a series of jigsaw puzzles centered around the history of games. It’s up to the solver to complete each puzzle, and once they’re assembled, to unravel the identities of each game.

cirkusupiecesall

[A fleet of puzzle pieces awaits the solver upon opening the box.]

First off, these pieces are beautiful. The wooden pieces are well cut, visually interesting, and simply fun to play with. Despite the curious shapes and inscribed patterns, it’s still a very challenging jigsaw-style puzzle. And since there’s no picture on the cover to bias the solver, it becomes a matter of matching words, patterns, and different fonts in order to solve the seven puzzles included.

cirkusupieces

[Just a small sample of the variety of Cirkusu puzzle pieces.]

Each puzzle is inscribed with text, presenting historical context for the game’s creation or rules on how to play, enriching the solving experience and offering clues for the second part of the solve: determining each game’s identity.

Also included are numerous miscellaneous bits and bobs, made from wood, plastic, acrylic, and other materials. These allow some of the puzzles to become full playable games, encouraging the solver to experiment further with different play styles, perhaps even inventing your own game along the way toward figuring out the actual game. (Other puzzles explain how to create a given game on your own, even providing blueprints for how to do so.)

close-upforreview

[A close-up of a few individual pieces.]

What separates a Baffledazzle puzzle from the average jigsaw is not only the fine craftsmanship and attention to detail, but also the exploration each puzzle encourages. You can hit the library or take to the Internet in order to find out more about the puzzles, or you can play with the games and make it your own. You dictate when the puzzling experience ends (particularly when there are hint and solution envelopes included).

Solving the puzzle becomes one part of a greater journey. And that makes for a truly memorable solving experience.

[You can check out all of Rachel’s Baffledazzle puzzles, including Cirkusu, on her Kickstarter page.]

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

5 Questions with Puzzle Creator Rachel Happen of Baffledazzle

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Welcome to another edition of PuzzleNation Blog’s interview feature, 5 Questions!

We’re reaching out to puzzle constructors, video game writers and designers, board game creators, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and puzzle enthusiasts from all walks of life, talking to people who make puzzles and people who enjoy them in the hopes of exploring the puzzle community as a whole.

And I’m overjoyed to have Rachel Happen as our latest 5 Questions interviewee!

Rachel is the entrepreneur behind Baffledazzle, a Kickstarter campaign to create visually striking, challenging jigsaw puzzles for a new generation of savvy puzzlers. Baffledazzle originated as Tumblr and Twitter accounts that encouraged viewers to try different activities and explore Rachel’s unique brand of visual and mental puzzles.

As an avid puzzle solver herself, Rachel strives to turn every new puzzle into a learning exercise, making Baffledazzle puzzles an intriguing mixture of hands-on puzzling and solver-driven exploration.

Rachel was gracious enough to take some time out to talk to us, so without further ado, let’s get to the interview!

5 Questions for Rachel Happen

1.) How did you first get into puzzles?

Honestly, I can’t remember! I have always been really into puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles were my school-break staple for many years. I’d spend snowy days lying on the floor, sorting pieces by color. In fourth grade I had a math teacher that would give us those grid-based logic puzzles to fill time. I just devoured them. I solved them all and collected them in a binder. She had no idea what to think of me.

But my interest in puzzles really ramped up a couple of years ago when I stumbled on a 1960s-era Springbok and it knocked my socks off. They were doing things that pushed the jigsaw puzzle medium forward, visually and conceptually. I absolutely love exploration and challenges so finding both in a jigsaw puzzle was heaven.

I started buying up old Springboks and learned all about Par and Stave and the centuries-old tradition of beautiful wooden jigsaw puzzles. Then I read Anne Williams’ excellent book on jigsaw puzzle history and just thought, “I have to try making my own puzzles.”

[A glimpse at Code Breakers, one of Rachel’s puzzly designs.]

2.) Many of your creations, both on your YouTube channel and in your Kickstarter campaign, have both a puzzle aspect and a research aspect. Is it safe to say that your optimal solving experience goes beyond paper or puzzle pieces? What appeals most to you about that style of puzzling?

Ah, you put this so beautifully! Yes that’s exactly right. I want to use puzzles as a path, instead of making puzzles for puzzles’ sake. I aim to make puzzles that take you somewhere new, show you something you haven’t seen before. The solving experience I’m looking for is one of discovery.

I love that style of puzzling because one minute you’re quietly solving a puzzle and the next you’re combing through the history of public transit in France or plugging common Polish sayings into Google Translate, hot on the trail of the next clue. It pulls you away from your desk and pushes you out into the world. By making puzzles about real things (facts, people, moments in history, cultural traditions, etc.) I’ve tried to give solvers another way to engage with the world, another way to explore it.

I also love that there are no rules! They’re puzzles where you’re supposed to look up the answers on your phone. I wanted to make puzzles that acknowledged the omnipresence of information. I’ve tried to draw on that skill for searching by asking solvers to harness it and navigate into new waters, find new sources, and piece things together.

[In this video, Rachel discusses the Baffledazzle Kickstarter
campaign she launched earlier this month.]

3.) You mention in your Kickstarter video that you’re also a dancer and a clothing designer. How does the creative process for those activities compare to creating a BaffleDazzle video or puzzle?

Ooh, good question! I feel like the creative process is very similar because I’m hyper-focused on experience. Creation of any kind usually starts with an experience of my own. Maybe I saw something, learned something, or felt something that I thought was worth sharing. From there I think about how I can capture that experience in an object, activity, or performance.

For me, it’s not enough to just share the thing. Seeing a picture of that hilarious dog isn’t the same as walking around a street corner and just seeing it there. You don’t feel that same silly elation of encountering something bizarre out of nowhere. Similarly, reading a couple of sentences about a clever British spy isn’t the same as sliding a dusty book off the shelves of a deathly quiet library, flipping it open, and seeing her face, discovering her story like some forgotten treasure.

I do everything I can to capture that experience, then iterate and iterate and iterate! I credit my love of “let’s try it again!” to years of training in a ballet conservatory, where you can never practice too much.

When it starts to feel done, I take a step back and ask if I’ve made something that rewards people for their time. Have I captured the experience? Does this deliver something new? Will people walk away seeing the world a little differently? If the answer is yes then I push it out into the world!

[A few of the intricate pieces that make up the Baffledazzle puzzle
Cirkusu, which we’ll be reviewing on Tuesday!]

4.) What’s next for Rachel Happen and Baffledazzle?

More puzzles!! I have a big backlog of puzzle ideas that I’d love to create. Having my own laser cutter will make prototyping new puzzles much easier, so I’m putting 110% into this Kickstarter campaign to (hopefully!) fund that purchase.

Aside from puzzles, I’d like to explore other experiences that could be paths to discovery. We’ll see what sorts of shenanigans I can get up to with a laser cutter in the workshop!

5.) If you could give the readers, writers, entrepreneurs, and puzzle fans in the audience one piece of advice, what would it be?

See how many chips you can eat in a stack! But seriously, I would say: make things first, then worry if they’re any good. The only difference between someone with a business and someone with a good idea is that one of them acts like they know what they’re doing.

But wait! There’s more! Rachel has hidden a puzzle in this interview! The first person to provide the answer — either in a comment on this post or on one of Rachel’s social media platforms — will win a set of four Code Breakers puzzles!

(This offer is not contingent on the success of the campaign; she’s already produced these Code Breakers. And this puzzle never expires! If someone solves it years from now, she’ll still send them their prize.)

Many thanks to Rachel for her time. You can check out (and support) the Baffledazzle Kickstarter by clicking here, and be sure to check out Rachel’s other creative endeavors by following her on Facebook, Twitter (@Baffledazzle), and on her Tumblr page.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!