One of my favorite activities is a puzzle. Not a jigsaw puzzle– though I do love a jigsaw puzzle– I mean a mechanical, encrypted, or otherwise challenging actvity.
What a puzzle is allowed to do
A good puzzle never tells you what it wants.
A crossword tells you. A crossword hands over a number, a length and a clue, and the whole arrangement is agreed in advance. That is fine. That is a lovely Sunday. But it is a different species from picking up an object that offers you nothing whatsoever and working out, slowly and almost entirely by being wrong, that the thing in your hands has secrets.
My favorite puzzles are hard; I like a puzzle that makes me want to give up more often than I get something right..
I maintain this is the correct ratio of misery to enjoyment for the ideal activity.
Anyway
I built a puzzle.
Not just a mechanical puzzle. Not just hidden secrets. Not just the order-that-is-not-written-on-it part. All of these things in one (hopefully) fun activity.
It is on this website. I am not going to say where it begins, but I will say that I have left a door in it, and that the door is unlocked in the sense that it is there and locked in every sense that matters.
I will not give any help. Helping is the one thing that would ruin it, and I did not spend eleven days learning that to hand it over in an afternoon.
Responses
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