Just a quick post today to talk about a puzzly event this weekend, two more coming up, and a brand-new one announced for next year!
Lollapuzzoola always happens on a Saturday in August, and this Saturday, August 15th IS that Saturday in August.
Trenton Charlson, Carina da Rosa, Will Nediger, Ada Nicolle, Adam Wagner, and Amie Walker have constructed puzzles for this year’s event, “Around the World.”
(And those aren’t the only names contributing this year! Laura Braunstein constructed the tiebreaker puzzle, Crossword Gentleman Doug Peterson constructed the crossword meta suite, and Scott Weiss constructed the variety puzzle meta suite.)
If you’re missing out on Lollapuzzoola, don’t fret. There’s another NYC puzzly event next month!
The 2026 Bryant Park Crossword Tournament returns on Saturday, September 19, with singles and pairs division solving available!
Mike Shenk has constructed all three puzzles for the event and will be co-hosting with Amy Goldstein, who is genuinely one of the nicest people in puzzles.
Registration is open (and is nearly full, so sign up ASAP) for this year’s edition of the Midwest Crossword Tournament! Mark down October 3rd, 2026 on the calendar.
Shannon Rapp and Sally Hoelscher are organizing the tournament, and Christina Iverson and Tracy Bennett are signed up as editors, so you know the tournament is in good hands!
2026 has been jam-packed with puzzly fun, and 2027 is looking just as bright. A new tournament will be debuting in March!
The Rain City Crossword Tournament brings puzzly challenges to the Pacific Northwest, as Seattle can now claim its own destination tournament!
Registration opens in early Autumn (I’ll keep you posted!) but you can click here for more details as the inaugural event approaches.
Will you be participating in any of these events, either in person or from home, fellow puzzler? Are you excited for a new tournament to be hitting the West Coast? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.
Ever since I first saw it played on Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop YouTube series, I was hooked. I bought my own copy a year later, and for over a decade, it has been in regular rotation on board game nights. I’ve included it in every Holiday Puzzly Gift Guide since I started the blog.
Tsuro is a beautiful, simple game that only takes about twenty minutes to play. You can play with as few as two players or as many as eight. It can be the centerpiece of a game night or the perfect palate cleanser after a more stressful round of another game.
In Tsuro, each player adopts the role of a flying dragon soaring through the sky. Players choose from the tiles in their hands in order to build paths on the board, representing their paths through the sky.
Naturally, these paths will eventually intersect, and you need to be careful to avoid colliding with another dragon or following a path right off the edge of the board. (Both of those scenarios cause you to lose.)
And despite the potential for competitive gameplay, I’ve found most Tsuro games to be peaceful affairs, each player watching their dragon token loop and swirl across various intersecting paths, hoping to be the last one standing on the board.
Calliope Games, the publishers of Tsuro, are celebrating 20 years of dragon-soaring gameplay this year. And not only are they releasing a special 20th anniversary edition of the game, but they’re hosting a celebration at this year’s Gen Con: the First Annual Tsuro National Championship!
On Saturday August 1st, players will convene in Hall D at 6 PM, competing in two preliminary rounds before those with the highest scores advance to the finals.
The winner will receive this gorgeous Limited Edition version of the game (valued at $350, the Luxury edition!), and every participant will receive a copy of the new 20th anniversary edition (pictured above, which also looks beautiful).
You can click here to reserve your seat and compete! I’m bummed I won’t be able to attend, but I’ll probably be picking up a copy of that 20th anniversary edition for my shelf (to sit alongside the other four editions of the game I have).
And yes, they ALL get played.
Good luck to everyone competing! And here’s to many more years of Tsuro and the spirit of gameplay it represents.
So, to mark this lovely anniversary, I’ve got a little puzzly challenge for you.
How many words (five to seven letters long) can you make that include all the letters in TSURO at least once? And let’s exclude plurals to keep it manageable.
I came up with 22 words. Can you top that?
And while I’m asking questions, what board game offer your best chance to compete for a national championship, fellow player? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.
It’s hosted by our friends at Club Drosselmeyer, who are amazing performers, puzzlers, and event planners who have been branching out in recent years to great success!
That’s so many new opportunities to check out this delightful “playable theater” experience. Who doesn’t love a wedding with all the pomp and circumstance and spies and secret plots and potentially world-endangering threats?
You know, wedding stuff!
And that’s not all! If you’re in the Boston area, you’re absolutely spoiled for puzzly choices this summer!
On Saturday, June 13th and Saturday, July 18th, The Big Dig Treasure Hunt challenges you (and a couple of teammates) to walk through Downtown Boston, solving puzzles for a few hours.
Stephanie Yang (who created some of the puzzles for The Wedding Party) has masterminded this event, and as someone who has participated in The Great Urban Race and similar city-based puzzly challenges, this one sounds like a winner!
Click here for more details and ticket information.
Choose your class, interact with guild members, help them solve problems, and enjoy a few drinks along the way! It’s a casual D&D LARP-style event that sounds like a great time for longtime RPG fans AND a marvelous way to introduce new players to roleplaying in a fun setting!
As the organizers say on Eventbrite: “You’ll solve puzzles, make choices, drink potions, argue philosophy, and possibly die.”
What more could you ask from a pub crawl?
Will you be attending any of these amazing events, fellow puzzlers? Is there an event near you that you’d like to see featured on PuzzCulture? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.
There are all sorts of immersive puzzly experiences available these days. Crossword tournaments, treasure hunts, escape rooms, puzzles by mail, puzzles by email, puzzles on your phone…
But nothing mixes music, art, showmanship, and puzzles quite like a Club Drosselmeyer event.
Although they’re best known for their holiday puzzle events set in the early 1940s during World War II, they’ve recently begun branching out with other themes. Last year, they hosted a Cthulhu-inspired luau event.
It seems our good friends, Jack and Norah, are finally getting married. You know Jack and Norah, right? Of course you do, EVERYBODY knows Jack and Norah! They both work at Harmonics Inc. (Not the game studio, the global telecom services company founded by the Lane family. Right, that one.) Their reception will be at the W Boston Hotel downtown. They’re thrilled that you’re coming and we’re absolutely certain it will be an entirely normal wedding with absolutely no surprises at all.
…
The Wedding Party will have all of the Drossely, Luau-ey craziness that you love but set in 2026 — and with dinner! This wedding will have it all: wonderful food, champagne and custom cocktails, decorations, a charming bridal party, spies, puzzles, intrigue… all the best things of a totally regular normal-person wedding.
Unlike traditional Drosselmeyer shows, which are often limited to a few select weekends, The Wedding Party will run from May 1st through June 14th! You’ll have tons of chances to nab tickets for a singularly lovely puzzly event. And you can play with a group of up to six people.
It will be hosted at the W Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts in collaboration with Toronto’s Secret City Productions, and you can click here for tickets and all the details!
I cannot say enough good things about the Club Drosselmeyer team. They’re not just great puzzle designers, they put so much into the aesthetics of the event, adding music and performances and a thousand little trappings that bring their fictional world to life for guests.
(I know it’s Halloween season, but it’s never too early to look forward to holiday puzzly goodness for later in the year!)
If you’re a puzzle fan, you’re absolutely spoiled for choice when it comes to puzzly events to explore. Crossword tournaments, treasure hunts, escape rooms, puzzles by mail, puzzles by email, puzzles on your phone.
But I guarantee you’ve never experienced anything like Club Drosselmeyer.
Imagine getting all gussied up in your best 1940s-era-appropriate garb and grabbing your tickets before heading out to a show in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
What kind of show, you ask? Well, a vaudeville-style variety show with live music, enchanting and exciting performances, and all sorts of mysteries and intrigue playing out before your eyes, all set during the heady days and nights of World War II.
And what if there was an elaborate puzzle hunt tying the entire event together?
There are performances set for December 5th, 6th, 7th AND December 12th, 13th, and 14th for a two-hour whirlwind of puzzly theatricality. As the organizers themselves say, “Prepare yourself for another season of magic and mayhem, romance and revelry, champagne and sugarplums.”
Although I’ve never gotten to attend a Club Drosselmeyer event in person, a few years ago I participated in their virtual Club Drosselmeyer Interactive Radio Broadcast of 1943, and it remains one of my all-time favorite puzzle experiences.
I enjoyed two hours of wonderful music while tracking a rogue flying toaster, unraveling a criminal conspiracy during an air raid, decoding secret messages, helping a starlet choose the right lipstick for her show, and even performing a magic trick!
Club Drosselmeyer is run by a small and incredibly dedicated group of writers, performers, puzzlers, and musicians who put their all into this event every single year, and I simply cannot sing their praises loud enough.
The goal? To share research, showcase games, and discuss the future of game studies through the lens of BIPOC experiences (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color).
Here is a bullet point list of themes the conference was designed to explore:
Representation and Identity in Video Games
Digital & Analog Games as Cultural Artifact
Games By & About Black and Indigenous Communities
Decolonizing Game Development & Design
Integration of Indigenous & Black Knowledge Systems
Afrofuturism in Gaming
Cultural Preservation & Digital Heritage
Social Impact & Activism Through Games
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in Playful Technologies
Both board games and video games were topics of discussion across the three-day event, with panels and presentations covering properties as varied as Yu-Gi-Oh!, collegiate Esports, The Last of Us, murder mystery games, Dragon Age, virtual reality, the cultural value of arcades, and more.
“I think one of the most important things to recognize about games is that they are kind of a cultural artifact. And being a cultural artifact, it’s important to ask questions about what these things mean in society, or what these things mean to the people who make them.”
“… One of the things I think is really interesting in game studies is we have the opportunity to think critically about the kinds of problems we’re solving and then also the kinds of solutions we’re offering. So a lot of what people talk about in, say, decolonizing games is about reinvestigating those two questions, what’s the real problem here? What’s the source of that problem? Similarly, how are we solving the problem?”
For years, I have discussed in this blog how the world of puzzles and games not only reflects our culture and choices, but why that’s important. But I can only examine those things through one particular lens, that of a white cishet male. There are blindspots I’m unaware of and experiences I simply don’t have, despite my best efforts.
That’s why it’s so important to have other voices included in the discussion, and events like this are crucial to the health of the games industry and our understanding of why we play games at all.
How the experiences of Black users suffer in virtual reality due to whiteness as a default in so many games.
How the roles of Black and Latinx characters in games like Overwatch and Marvel Rivals contribute to not just representation, but reinforce perceptions of particular ethnic groups only in violent situations, not those of support or providing nonviolent solutions.
How video games are being used to preserve Latinx culture and the artistic legacy of the Hmong.
I learned about topics like Quare Theory and Misogynoir (how racist and anti-Black depictions affect the public perception of Black women), explained through the medium of video games.
But the article I found myself returning to several times over the last few days was “Decolonizing Play: Exploring Frameworks for Game Design Free of Colonial Values.”
It was startling to realize just how many video games are foundationally built on the values of Colonialism, and how easy it would be to NOT reinforce those harmful cyclical patterns.
From the paper by Elaine Gomez: When the topic of colonization arises, many game developers often hesitate to get involved in meaningful and constructive design conversations around how to mitigate values that are heavily ingrained in game theory and player expectations.
Some of the conversations broached by these panels and papers are uncomfortable, but difficult conversations are worth having. Challenging the biases and preconceived notions that games are often built upon is worthwhile. (I’m hoping to reach out to some of the Conference’s participants for more details in the coming weeks to follow up on these enlightening discussions.)
In the meantime, I encourage everyone to read the proceedings from the event and take some time to really ponder the topics presented.
The world of puzzles and games is big enough for everyone, and only gets better when everyone feels included. The 2025 Conference on BIPOC Game Studies is proof of that.
PuzzCulture 