A puzzle-design lab where letters, words, geolocation, and stories combine to invent new puzzle mechanics. Each card below is a playable prototype.
A word mosaic with a hidden theme
Twenty letter fragments spell five keyword answers: two or three of them, filled out with bonus words, build a sentence one find at a time — and all five also share a hidden theme, revealed only once every keyword is found, the way the original Quartiles works.
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Rotating letter lock
Each row of a grid carries a fixed ring of four letters — the right one and three decoys — that the player rotates until it lines up with a shared target column, like dialing in a combination cryptex.
Jammed signal, a figure to guess
A biographical sentence loses its spaces and gets jammed with five intruder letters. The player clears the signal letter by letter, then tries to guess which historical figure was hiding in the decoded message.
Manuscript restoration
The description of a Canadian city — never named — loses seven fragments; its name loses three more. The player drags ten fragments, sorted alphabetically, back into place to restore the text, then discovers which city it was describing all along.
Archaeological dig for sentences
The same grid as Verticode, but fractured into connected tetromino-style letter blocks, scattered across a workbench. The player drags them back one by one to reconstruct a sentence drawn from a bank of treasure-hunt riddles.
Column-by-column cipher
A sentence is laid into a four-row grid. Each column shuffles its own letters vertically: the player re-sorts them, column by column, until the sentence reappears.
Cartographer's sliding puzzle
A classic 15-tile sliding puzzle, dressed up as a cartographer's dossier: the default image is a map to piece back together, but any photo can be dropped in. The studio's generic template, ready to carry any visual clue.
Letter switchboard
A word's letters, mixed in with decoys, are scattered around the edge of the page; each one trails a tangled wire toward the center. The player follows the wires by eye to sort the real letters from the rejects.
