This is part seven. Here are parts one, two, three, four, five and six.

It’s been five months since Hanukkah LOL ended. I’ve been reading over my notes. I can hardly believe how extensive this game was — and I wrote the damn thing. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for players to follow along, to say nothing of those folks who peeked in from time to time to see if they could contribute a little bit. They must have been bewildered.

We knew this was the case as the game was going on. Consistently sprinkled throughout the Slack and Reddit conversations were comments along the lines of “wtf is going on?!” and “It’s moving too fast!” We felt terrible and we felt dumb — why didn’t we anticipate this? We had a map of the puzzles, so everything was clear to us, but obviously no one else did. A few players tried to draw maps as they went, like this was some kind of text adventure, and it did help, but there was no obvious place for the map maker to put it so it could be available to others.

Known Knowns

So we came up with a quick fix: a page on our blog that we titled Known Knowns. Here’s how we described it:

A page maintained by Tom & Karlee that lists all the officially confirmed pieces of the puzzle, along with any solutions discovered to be true. Start from the bottom and read each section to get a sense of how the puzzle is progressing.

It helped. We tried to avoid putting information on that page until it was explicitly confirmed in the game, but sometimes we broke that rule for the sake of clarity. Players learned to use that page to help filter out noise — i.e. if something got “discovered” but it never appeared on that page, you could feel confident it was a red herring.

From there we built out another page called Solved Threads where old puzzles would go to retire, so people knew when to stop looking. We built a How to Play page that explained all the conventions of the game, like the cycle of submitting/voting/video, and where to find all the relevant hints.

Known Unknowns

All of the above was an effort to lay out for the casual player, in as-plain-as-possible language, what they needed to know, but we stopped just short of saying “here’s everything that’s currently under investigation.” We thought that if we curated such a repository, our decisions about what to include would themselves be clues about what was important.

On the other hand, we wanted such a repository to exist, so, we strongly encouraged some of the team admins to build it out themselves. That resulted in the Known Unknowns wiki. I recused myself from any editorial control over those pages. This was something that needed to be by the players, for the players.

Despite all that (or maybe because of all that — even with all the documentation, the learning curve was steep), lots of casual players were too overwhelmed or intimidated to play.

Lessons

There’s a huge lesson here. A game this big necessarily needs to be complex. But it doesn’t need to be unapproachable for a player that’s not around from the beginning. If, and when, we do this again, we’ll…

1. consolidate all the platforms for information into one single place, and
2. consider the specific user experience of the casual player. We want them to feel as included and necessary as the addicts.

Not sure what that means, exactly, but we won’t leave those decisions until after the game has started.

The escape

We didn’t really know how long this whole game would take. We knew it wasn’t solvable without the eighth and final mailing, which was slated to arrive roughly on December 22. We just didn’t know if, by that point, there’d be a backlog of puzzles to solve, or if teams would be lined up and ready to tackle the last puzzle. Nor did we know how long that last puzzle would take.

Christmas was a Friday. That Monday, the 21st, we learned that the construction workers who were working on our friend’s house were waiting on us to vacate the basement so they could start renovating it. And they had expected to start breaking down walls that week. Whoops. We convinced them to wait until Monday the 28th, but now we had an extra incentive to finish the game: we might not have a basement to play out of! We set an internal deadline to get Dad out by Christmas.

At this point, we tweaked a couple dials to accelerate the game. Instead of cutting off the suggestion form for Dad at 2 AM, we left them open all the way up until Dad went on the air at around 2 PM. The hope here was that if one of those last puzzles got solved in the morning, it could be immediately proposed and then garner enough votes to get sent to Dad that afternoon.

And, in fact, this exact thing happened with the final name, which was MAX. About an hour before showtime on December 24th, we were expecting to go into the room and give Dad five dud suggestions. Then someone cracked the record bin puzzle, proposed MAX, and within an hour, it had solicited enough votes to get it to the top of the suggestion pile. Dad got the instruction, punched it in, and lit up the final bulb.

That was December 24th. Dad was close to getting out. At this point, he had…

• discovered and typed in 8 names,
• unlocked a safe full of hundreds of English, and a few dozen Hebrew, Garbage Pail Kids,
• discovered an old phone, and
• found this final note from his kids:

Translated:

Dad, your [children] have one more trick for you
A little test of everyone’s [Hebrew] kung-fu
Find eight [Gargabe Pail Kids]
Order their numbers well
Punch them into the phone and it’s through.

There was one last puzzle to crack — which eight cards? Clearly it had something to do with those eight names, which the players knew by now were all names of Garbage Pail Kids. But those eight cards could not easily translate to sixteen digits, which Tom & Karlee had said from the beginning was going to be the length of the final, room-escaping code.

The last puzzle

What players figured out pretty quickly, was that they had to:

• look up each of the GPKs referenced by one of the Great Names,
• note the drawing used on that card, and
• match it up with one of the Hebrew cards from the safe, which Dad had carefully flipped through, on camera.

Those eight Hebrew GPK cards were each labeled with a two-digit number (different numbers than their English counterparts). Eight numbers x two digits each = 16 digits. But there were 40,320 possibile ways those eight two-digit numbers could be ordered. What to do?

Another very long puzzle thread held the answer. Here’s the short version: a mannequin’s torso was hiding in a big suitcase in the room, locked up. Written on it, in sharpie, were dozens of words. Through a days-long series of puzzles, the crowd figured out that four words were important: ORDER ENGLISH FIRST NAMES. Which meant “order the Hebrew cards by their English counterparts’ first names.” That lead them to this sixteen-digit string:

37 73 66 97 49 75 56 40

Which brings us to our final moments

I’ll let Dad take it from here.

And, finally, five minutes after that, this appeared on the blog:

Conclusion

Phew.

Twenty-five days, thousands of players, hundreds of Garbage Pail Kids and dozens of puzzles later, Dad was free. Everyone wins.

In previous years, the puzzle was won by a small community of collaborators on Reddit. This year we made a deliberate choice not to have a winner, or rather not to have one winner. Competition is fine, but because most people don’t have the bandwidth to compete in a three-week-long game, we’d rather court a large number of casual players than a small group of hard-core competitors. We had no mention of a prize, which dropped the some of the incentive to “win”, but in its place was an incentive to help one’s teammates, and help out Dad, who, I’m proud to say, people had grown attached to.

We wanted people to care. We wanted them to be nice. We were warned at the beginning about how vicious players could be. So made a deliberate decision to build in as much humanity into the game as possible. We did this by making the game be about a real(-ish) person and his sometimes-fraught-but-mostly-loving relationship with his kids. We made it clear the real Tom & Karlee were playing only slightly exaggerated versions of themselves. And, most importantly, we gamemasters didn’t cloak our own identities at all. Sarah, Jon, Wil, and I showed up as ourselves — in Slack, in emails, and occasionally in the game itself. If people had questions, we answered them. If something went wrong, we popped up and explained it. We made it very clear that real people were making this thing, and these people cared about how well it went. I believe this small detail had a huge effect on the tone of the game.

I’m extremely proud of what we did. We ended up making a thing that people loved. A few weeks after the end of the game, I got a package in the mail. It was from the admins, the group of about 20 volunteers who spent countless hours monitoring the Slacks and making sure people behaved and were having fun. The package was filled with a handwritten note from each admin, along with a custom pack of Cards Against Humanity cards that they had made and printed, with inside jokes from the game. It was incredibly moving.

If you played Hanukkah LOL, thank you. If you contributed even just a little bit, you are part of the reason it was such a success. For three weeks, this was a living thing. I built the skeleton, but you all made it move. Thank you.

Also, we had way too much fun to not to do it again.

Until then.

Stay in touch

When we’re not designing games, The Mystery League puts on puzzle hunts in Chicago and elsewhere. If you’d like to hire us, get in touch.

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Hanukkah LOL, part 7: The end was originally published in The Mystery League on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is part six. Here are parts one, two, three, four, and five.

Every puzzle is, at its heart, about information. Little bits of information that can lead you down the path to victory or veer you deep into the woods, lost and off-course. And every bit of it falls into one of four buckets:

Clues. These is what you think about most when you’re playing a game. These are are intentional bits of information that are critical on the path to uncloaking the solution. I’ve spent a lot of these articles discussing clues.

Hints. These are the nudges, often ad hoc, that are there when the core set of clues isn’t strong enough to get players to the answer. Sometimes, if a game will be played lots of times, or if the designers have lots of prep time, these will be written ahead of time. In our case, we punted on hints and wrote and delivered them as we went.

Red herrings. This is stuff that doesn’t fit the above two categories but is intentionally designed to look like it might be a clue. Red herrings (imho) should make themselves known quickly, lest they transform into rabbit holes. On the other hand, many of the puzzle’s best inside jokes came from people realizing that they had been stuck inside a rabbit hole and finding their way out.

Noise. Well-designed room puzzles need set decoration to fill out the space, but ideally the noise fades into the background. But, because this game was so long, and so many people were paying attention, pieces of the set were often confused for clues. Some of the craziest moments came from coincidences amid the noise that were so strong that players were convinced they must have been clues.

How we hinted

So much of this puzzle was designed in a vacuum. We didn’t have any way to test it. And even if we had tested it, it would have been with a small group of players, completely unreflective of the teeming mass of minds that attacked the real thing. There was just no accurate way to guess how fast people would get things, where they would get stuck, and what kind of hints would be necessary to get them unstuck.

So instead of attempting to test and fine-tune our clues and keep hints to a minimum, we embraced the unknown, and built in outlets for dropping hints when we felt it was necessary. The main outlet was the room itself, but there was only so much of the room that was meant to be a puzzle. We wanted the room to be interesting to look at, which meant filling it with stuff, but consequently Dad was asked to look behind, open up, turn over, and generally inspect lots of things that were unimportant. Occasionally, when we felt the crowd needed a boost on a puzzle thread, we turned those unimportant things into hints.

One example: during the 2014 hunt, Max, Mike and Gabby published a podcast, The Cryptex, that was about the hunt but was also a conveyance for clues. The podcast had laid dormant for a year, but it was never taken offline. Which meant that there were probably hundreds of people out there who never actively unsubscribed from it on their podcast app. We thought it’d be fun to hijack the feed and surprise those people with new content. It didn’t work, at least not fast enough. No one noticed when we published our first episode of our podcast, Memories with Tom & Karlee. So, we embedded a hint in the room. Several teams were interested in telling Dad to open a cabinet that we knew wasn’t part of the hunt, so we took the opportunity to hide a small jigsaw-type puzzle there that resolved to the logo from the Cryptex podcast. That got people sniffing in the right direction.

Another outlet for hints was the podcast itself, recorded roughly every three days. The stated purpose was for Tom & Karlee to reflect on the players’ progress and also tell a story about a Hanukkah past. There were also two unstated purposes: one, to deliver an essential clue (only understandable after hearing all six podcasts and deducing the information within) and, two, to drop hints. We used the podcast’s title to give subtle pushes to the crowd, as a way to get them to focus on the correct thing. We’d also occasionally have Tom or Karlee say a kind of non-sequitur, that, if you were listening closely, would resolve itself into a hint.

To me, all of this was the most fascinating part of the whole game. If we wanted to, we could have punted on building a lot of the room. We could have thrown a bunch of noise at the crowd, waited until they decided what item in the room it was all pointing to, then embedding the answers there. We didn’t do this, but it was tempting. Our hints were a way of giving into that temptation, and in the beginning, we gave in a lot, because I was worried that the crowd would be disappointed by misses. So if Dad was asked to inspect a dud, I would try to turn it into a hint. The flip side became evident quickly: players started to get the sense we were making it up as we went along. So we stopped doing that, for the most part, and got more liberal with marking items with red X’s, which was the room’s way of saying “This is a dead end. Look elsewhere.”

Red herrings

I put a high value on elegance in puzzle design. You should be able to look back on the puzzle, after solving it, be proud about cracking it, and think the leaps of logic were all entirely fair. Relying too heavily on red herrings or random noise to cloak the real answer is inelegant and I strive to avoid it.

But this puzzle was a different beast, and it felt necessary to dabble in the dark arts a little bit to keep the crowd busy. A spartan room decorated with only the elements necessary to solve the puzzles would be way too easy to crack. So we loaded the shelves up with books, games and VHS tapes. We stuffed boxes full of old clothes and toys. We hung weird art on the wall. All in the name of building a haystack around those important needles.

(As a way of acknowledging this, we made a reference to a red-tinted fish in every episode of our podcast. Pink salmon, carnelian cod, etc. Of course, not everyone got the joke, and several people spent their time trying to decode what all those fish references meant.)

Rabbit holes

We did our best to get in front of players who mistook noise for a clue. We didn’t always succeed. Red X’s could only be placed on things, not information. Frequently we’d find players going down deep, dark rabbit holes in pursuit of solutions that just weren’t there.

For instance, one of the puzzles solved to the name SEYMOUR. One of the clues leading up to it was “Snow White doll”. Someone did some research and found that the composer of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was named Seymour. Certainly this had to be a signal, right?!

It was not. It was a coincidence. As was the fact that someone named Seymour Mann designed Snow White porcelain dolls. We watched this happen from backstage and shook our heads. At a certain point, you have to just trust that the signals you did design will, with enough time, boost what’s real and muffle what’s not.

Inside jokes

Many of these red herrings turned into jokes that took on lives of their own. There was a woman named Jessica who started off as a bit player in a story about a Hanukkah party that Tom told on the podcast, but ended up being mentioned so many times, with increasing acrimony, that it seemed possible she was some kind of evil stepmother. (Not confirming or denying.)

On the website, where players submitted suggestions for Dad, one team started to compose all their suggestions as limericks.

There once was a dad in a basement
who didn’t know what all the clues meant.
He stares at the floor,
but we’re sure that there’s more.
Please look up! No more pics of the cement!

There once was a man with weird socks
who hasn’t had a thing to nosh
Well it’s time that he ate,
so check the food crate!
I hope that it’s not full of rocks.

And so on. It was a natural outcome of the camaraderie that the game engendered. After it was over, several teams memorialized the mythology with a pack of CAH cards that they designed and printed and distributed on their own.

Coincidences

When you have a puzzle that is overflowing with information, the law of truly large numbers or another tells you that chaotic bits of information will occasionally line up into a pattern. Just like if you drill down deep enough into π, you’ll find any pattern of numbers you want. Our lizard minds are fine-tuned to place a high value on patterns. It’s what makes puzzle-solving fun, but also what makes puzzle crafting difficult. And even though I just told you that this is expected behavior, it still shocked when it happened. And it happened a lot. Here are the top 10 coincidences from this game:

10. Business cards

Two elements of the game was a book of 100 science experiments for kids, and a set of business cards for a fake camera company called Lolaroid. Two of those cards were important in the game. Turns out, if you added up the digits of one of them, Eliza Howser’s, it totaled 38. The 38th experiment in the book, coincidentally, was Create Photos with Light. Totally unrelated.

9. Corn Holes

We had a box of CAH’s fake cereal in the room. It was just set decoration. Then, totally unintentionally, we told a fake story in our fake podcast about a corn maze. Someone noticed the box of Corn Holes featured a cob of corn going through a maze. Surely this was intentional! It wasn’t.

8. 36 baseball cards

One of the barcode puzzles solved to MARCIA AND GREG GO TO THIRD BASE TOGETHER, a clue that instructed people to look at a binder of baseball cards and sum up the third base stats for the cards in the top left and top right corners. (As in, where Marcia and Greg of The Brady Bunch sit in the credits to the show.) But obsessives also noted that the binder had four pages in it, each with nine cards, for a total of 36 baseball cards, and the phrase about Marcia and Greg has 36 letters. Sadly, just a coincidence.

7. 707 area code

One fake phone number we used in the game started with a 707 area code. Rotate 707 on the z-axis (i.e. type it on a calculator and rotate it around), and you get LOL, one of the game’s motifs.

6. DICE in the photo album

We had a photo album in the room with pictures from a trip to China. Each page had a title, a date, and a few photos. Someone applied the dates as an index on the titles and found the word DICE. Not at all intentional, but clever.

5. MORSE on the chessboard

The chessboard in the room had a letter on each square. Only 13 of them were there as part of the puzzle, the rest were random noise. Turns out that by starting in the bottom right corner and read upwards, it said MORSE. If you’re at all familiar with puzzles, this is as clear of a signal as anything that we’re talking about Morse Code. But it was entirely by accident. We felt so bad about it that we had break the fourth wall on a blog post and tell everyone it was an accident, we swear.

4. ESG

A big chunk of one thread involved the books of crime writer Erle Stanley Gardner. We picked him because he’s prolific, and his titles all follow a particular format (e.g. The Case of the Blankety Blank). It was only after we designed the entire puzzle that we noticed that ESG is also the acronym for the name CAH picked for the holiday promotion: Eight Sensible Gifts.

3. 3:14

We had a menorah in the room that had three times written on it. They were three timestamps needed for finding information on a VHS tape. But if you added the times up, you got 3:14, as in our friend in chaos, π. It wouldn’t be the only time it showed up.

2. Ida Furlough

We made 14 Lolaroid business cards. Each had a name we made up entirely using an online name generator. Only two cards served any purpose in the game — Eliza Howser and Ida Furlough. Ida’s card was there to connect one gift (the cards showcasing CAH’s gift of a week paid holiday to their Chinese factory workers) to a set of dinner plates in the room. Well. Would you know that furlough — again, a name we picked completely at random — literally means “holiday”. A player discovered that, used it as extra confirmation they were on the right track, and gave us a lot more credit for the design than we actually deserved.

1. Pi schmeters

This one really cooked our collective gourds. Some background first. The very last puzzle (besides the code to get out) involved measuring the distance between two real places on Earth, then converting that number to a name. We needed the distance to be 13,124 (because 13/1/24 translates to M/A/X) but the unit of distance could be anything. Finding two points on the globe that were exactly 13,124 miles or kilometers apart would have been very difficult. So instead, I picked two places on Earth that were easy to clue, and defined my own unit of distance — the schmeter — that would make those two points exactly as far apart as I needed.

For this to work, I needed to give the crowd a reference point so they understood the conversion to my new unit of distance. I did this by defining the radius of the Earth in schmeters. They could then use the three piece of data — the radius of the Earth and the latitude/longitude of the two points — along with the easy-to-Google Haversine formula, to find the distance in schmeters.

Here’s the kicker. The radius of the Earth in schmeters is 20,014,553.7. This is, to four decimal points, π times the actual radius of Earth in meters. I read this and had to lie down. And because it was so incredible, so impossibly a coincidence, it was presumed to be true. And it kept them in a rabbit hole for days.

Continued in part 7 »

All good things must end. What did it all mean?

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Hanukkah LOL, part 6: Signals & noise, red herrings & rabbit holes was originally published in The Mystery League on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is part five. Here are parts one, two, three and four.

The story so far: The game is afoot. Dad is trapped in a basement, and thousands of players are converging on Slack and Reddit to solve puzzles. We’re going to break from the chronological story now and talk about three specific puzzle threads that stand out for the way they incorporated the holiday gifts, encouraged collaboration, and forced players to interact with real world places and objects.

Jew Packs & Comic Books

Gifts 4 and 7 included two Jewish-themed expansion packs, each with 15 cards in them. CAH cards are finely tuned and carefully tested; there was no way we were going to be able to alter one to fit a puzzle. We were just going to have to use what was there.

The Jew Pack

I looked over the first pack. There were 13 white cards. I typed them all into a spreadsheet, and scanned for patterns. I noticed something interesting: exactly three of them started with a W:

Put them together and you get WWW, as in the beginning of a URL. This was very promising! Assuming I could build a clue that indicated how to order the 13 cards, then I could leave it to the players to notice the WWW and interpret the whole thing as web domain.

I played around with the remaining 10 letters: AAABCDHHSS. There are tons of top-level domains these days, and it wasn’t too long before I found a good one in the remaining letters: .cash. That left AABDHS. From there it was just a few minutes of anagramming to find our winner: www.badash.cash.

We were incredibly lucky. It was the kind of elegant pattern that players would simply assume was intentionally baked into the writing of the cards. In reality, it was an accidental signal among noise, and because we caught it early on, we could take advantage of it and parlay it into a puzzle.

(We would see lots of those signals over the next month. Some would be caught by us and turned into a puzzle; some would be caught by the players and lead them into deep, dark rabbit holes.)

BadAsh.cash

We had been looking for more ways to bring real world interactions into the game. One idea that had been floating around was to build an online store that the players would have to buy something from. The stuff would come in the mail, and there’d be a clue inside. Now that we had this domain, we had a perfect place to put our store. We just had to decide what to sell.

One of the items from our Things in a Basement list was old comics. Making Dad a comic book hoarder seemed like a natural fit. It wasn’t too long before we figured out the hook: Tom & Karlee would sell his comics to someone, who would then turn around and sell them back to the players through his online store. Now that we had a domain, we also had his name: Ashford.

I went to the comic book store and bought 13 comics from the quarter bin. These would be the comics we’d sell and mail to the players. Then we took the 13 comic book names — like The Mighty Thor and Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight — and combined each of them with words from the 13 white cards from the Jew Pack. That gave us 13 fake comic book titles that would be the bridge between the clues and the physical items.

We used the gorgeous Pulp-O-Mizer to make 13 authentic-looking comic book covers for the 13 fake comics. We added them all to our Shopify-powered BadAsh.cash website, and set the inventory for each to 1. We had our website.

The comics chest

We needed a way to clue the players about the order of the cards, so they could discover and load the URL. Something that showed a list of the 13 fake comics. We settled on a receipt, from Ashford, from when he bought the comics from the kids.

We put a chest in the room and labeled “COMICS. DON’T TOUCH.” and locked it up. After breaking open the lock, Dad found the chest empty, except for a receipt from Ashford’s Big Bad Comic Company.

The receipt information was un-Googleable and inscrutable — these aren’t real comic books, after all — until gift 4 arrived, holding the CAH expansion pack. At that point, someone noticed that the number of items on the receipt equaled the number of CAH white cards in the pack—and that each comic book title shared a word with one of the white cards. Then, after fiddling around with the data in a spreadsheet, they put the 13 white cards in the order of the 13 titles on the receipt, read the first letter of each one, and saw wwwbadashcash staring out at them.

As soon as they discovered the site, we started “selling” comics. We didn’t want one person swooping in and claiming them all, so we sold one at a time, waiting 15 minutes before adding the next piece of inventory. Every time a comic went live, it would get snatched up within seconds by one of the hundreds of players who were obsessively reloading the site, trying to grab a comic, in what ended up being a three-hour game of internet whack-a-mole.

It was really fun experiment in artificial scarcity and fabricated value — no one actually knew what they were “buying” here. They weren’t even paying money, so it was conceivable we wouldn’t be sending them any product at all. But they expected, rightly, that if we did send them something, it would be a special, tangible piece of the game. A thing that no one else had. So they went apeshit for it.

The prices

So we had 13 buyers and 13 real comics. We sent them out. The final step was to use the price of the comic, from the receipt, as an index. Each price’s dollar amount indicated a page number, and the cents amount was a letter count. So, for the comic book that cost $4.09, we were looking for the 4th page, 9th letter. (See the rightmost two columns in the spreadsheet above.)

The 13 cards led to 13 fake comics which led to 13 real comics which were sent out to 13 people, and which led to 13 letters, which combined to form this phrase: SUMMER OR TARTT. The answer: DONNA.

This was the rare distributed puzzle that didn’t have any redundancy. Only one person received any given comic, which meant that if they didn’t contribute to the final solve, their letter would be missing. I felt the risk was worth it because a) the players who bought a comic were clearly self-selecting as avid puzzlers and were very likely to contribute, and b) the final phrase could withstand a few missing letters and still be solvable.

Dad letters

Seven of the eight gifts were to include a handwritten note from a father of a CAH founder. Again, using the notes was in-bounds, but editing them was not.

One of my favorite tools to use for real-life puzzle hunts are masks — pieces of material purposefully cut to fit over something else, usually text, to reveal a message peeking through. I like it because it’s an inherently tactile act. It’s not something you can easily replicate while sitting at a computer.

The Notes From Father felt like a perfect opportunity to use a mask. First job: decide what we wanted to reveal. The scribblings were too irregular and too small to build masks that revealed just one letter. We could reveal a word, but the job of composing a sentence by extracting one word per note felt unlikely to yield a final sentence that we felt good about.

Jon eventually hit upon our answer, a combination of the two above ideas: we would build masks that revealed three words per note. The three words would be seemingly unrelated, save one property: one letter, and only one letter, would be common between the three words. For example, if the words were crisis, doctor, and act, the extracted letter would be the only one that’s in all three words: C. Find all seven letters, one per note, and together you’d get your answer.

We needed to answer three more questions:

1. What would the mask be made out of?
2. How would we get the masks in the hands of the players?
3. How would we indicate where to align the masks on top of the letters?

1. Masks

I got approval from Ben to build custom CAH cards to solve the first question. At first they were going to say #2 Dad, #3 Dad, and so on, which would indicate which day’s note each paired up with. As we were building out the masks, we got to reading the letters, which ran the range from touching to funny, from poignant to Daddishly corny. We hit on a idea way better than #N Dad. Wouldn’t it be great to have the Dads’ words immortalized on their sons’ creation? Of course it would.

Step 2 was turning these into masks. We needed a bunch, and cutting them up by X-Acto blade was proving to be tedious and inexact. I’m lucky enough to be friends with Shawn Smith, who happens to have a laser cutter in his basement. We spent a fun evening slicing up cards with frickin’ laser beams.

2. Distribution

We were already using the mail to send out the comic books. We wanted these masks to show up somewhere in the world, and force the players to go get them. Given that these were CAH cards, we hit on the idea of using a pre-existing network that already knows and loves CAH: local game stores. We talked to a few dozen stores and asked if they’d be interested in handing out a small number of secret cards to a small number of people, and almost all of them said yes. Everyones loves to be in a secret club.

We ended up making 10 copies of each card and sending each store 2–3 copies of a single card, with instructions to keep them hidden until someone asked for one of the cards.

3. Alignment

To indicate alignment, we figured out which word was covered up by the top left corner of each card. We then wrote those words on seven pieces of paper, labeled them to indicate which letter they went with, and planted them in the room.

4. Announcement

We had our cards and we had our businesses. The last step was informing the crowd where to go. To do this we set up a fake Foursquare account that listed all the game stores which were holding cards. To point players to the account, we drew a miniature foursquare court on the floor of the room in chalk, and covered it with a small rug. All the players would have to do is ask Dad to look under the rug. Which they eventually did…

… which led them to the hanukkahlol Foursquare account, which led them to this list…

… which led them to visit fifteen game and comics stores all over the country, which got them the sliced-up cards…

…which revealed the words, which distilled to letters, which combined to form the answer: CLIFTON.

Missing cats & Starbucks

Among the list of retail chains prevalent in dense cities, Starbucks stands out as the only ones that are, in a very small way, customizable. Starbucks shops position themselves as centers of their communities, and some even encourage it by hanging a bulletin board that citizens can use to broadcast their events, as long as they’re not for-profit. And a bulletin board is just the right kind of medium for disseminating information.

We looked over the CAH gifts again to see what we hadn’t yet used. Every year in their holiday promotion, CAH includes a small newspaper zine called Funny Pages, filled with custom strips by their favorite web comic artists.

It was too late to embed clues in the comics themselves. But, printed underneath each comic was the URL of their online home. What if we could host something custom on these websites?

The headlining comic on the Funny Pages is always Diesel Sweeties, by Richard Stevens. We wrote Richard with this idea, which he then called and raised. Not only would he be willing to hide stuff on his site, he’d be willing to write an entirely custom comic for us. And, if we wanted to, he’d replace any comic in his archive with this comic for the duration of the game. The man is truly a saint.

Our rough outline for the puzzle was as follows:

1. Players find a clue in the Funny Pages that points them to an archived comic on dieselsweeties.com.
2. They load the archive page only to find a new, custom comic there, cluing them to several Starbucks locations around the country.
3. They go to the Starbucks to find a poster for a free “concert” pinned up to the bulletin board.
4. Comparing all the bulletin board posters reveals a final, hidden name.

1. The Funny Pages

We wanted the first instruction, the one that led people to dieselsweeties.com, to be in the Funny Pages. This wouldn’t be easy, because we couldn’t change any text — the paper was already printed.

Our first attempt around this was to scan all the panels and hunt for words that could be extracted from their contexts to form a message. We couldn’t get that to work.

Our second idea was more fruitful — find longer words that included the words we wanted in our message.

Then it was just a matter of cluing the unused letters — i.e. the parts of those words that were not in our message. For that we composed a note from Tom & Karlee that Dad would find in the room on Day 3. Some of the letters in the note appeared to be cut from newspapers, ransom note-style.

Two weeks later, when the Funny Pages arrived in the mail, they would be able to finally recognize those cut-out letters. By comparing the letters to the paper, and finding the words those letters came from, they could extract the rest of each word, and finally form the message: PAGE ONE FIVE FOUR AT DIESEL.

2. Starbucks

Before we were able to write the comic, we had to know which Starbucks we were using. We started by picking cities where we had friends who’d be willing to help us pull this off. Then we hunted around on Google Maps in those cities, looking at the stores’ interior photos, trying to find locations that were well-trafficked and had a bulletin board. We confirmed with a phone call that each location would be willing to let us put a poster up.

3. The Diesel Sweeties comic

Once they loaded dieselsweeties.com/archive/154, players would be greeted with a custom comic. Richard gave us a blank canvas to work with. After some back and forth with him about tone — I wanted the comic to feature regular DS character Clango the Robot but also someone from CAH— we settled on eight panels: one intro panel, one outro panel, and six panels that each clued to a Starbucks location.

At first we tried writing clues about the intersection that each Starbucks was at. This didn’t work out, because some stores weren’t on intersections, and some street names were boring. I also wanted to clue in a way that was completely non-arbitrary. I finally realized that each of these stores has a canonical ID number, so, as long as we hinted somewhere that they were looking for a Starbucks, and we clued the number, they could home in on the exact location.

The final comic was a story about Clango stealing the six cats that appeared in the printed Funny Pages comic. (See above.) In the online comic that Richard made for us, Clango boasts about his crime while holding a Starbucks-branded cup. Then he spends six panels, each titled with a city, describing in flowery language the cat he hid there.

The solution is in enumerations of the six Clango quote balloons. For the words in each of the six balloons, count up the number of letters in each word (or 0 if it’s an ellipses), then combine those digits together. That gets you get the ID of the store in question. The city name is there as confirmation that you deduced the right place.

4. The posters

The last step was designing these posters and getting them in the hands of our friends across the country. I turned again to Amy Schwartz, designer at CAH, with this request:

• Six posters…
• each advertising a free concert…
• in a nearby park…
• by a particular band…
• which was all made up of cats.

What she came up with is a thing of beauty.

We had to play a little game of chance with the hanging of these posters. We needed the posters hunt up before the crowd solved the puzzle, and we didn’t know when that would be. We could track the online conversation but by then it might be too late to send our team out to hang stuff. But if we hung a poster too early, there was a chance some hyper-observant Starbuckian would take it down before a player got there.

In the end, we got the posters up one or two days before the puzzle was solved. Five of the six posters were still there when a player showed up to find it. Only the New Orleans poster got taken down.

5. Solution

The final bit of the puzzle was in interpreting the band names, which were:

• Roma & Juliet
• DJ Danger Diggybeats with special guest Q. Uniform
• The Sierra Purrs
• Frankie Likes To Tango
• India Jones
• Ivy and the November Miracle

The bold names are all from the NATO alphabet. Taken together, they spell JUSTIN.

Continued in part 6 »

The perils of scripting a dynamic game, how we learned to give hints, and some of the craziest false signals that arose from the noise.

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Hanukkah LOL, part 5: Three massive, real world, nationwide puzzles was originally published in The Mystery League on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is part four. Here are parts one, two, and three.

The story so far: The Mystery League is designing a puzzle game for thousands of Cards Against Humanity fans, called Hanukkah LOL. In its simplest form, it’s a room escape game with one player, whose actions are controlled by a crowd of thousands. The clues to solve the room’s puzzles are embedded in CAH’s Eight Sensible Gifts, which will be delivered to 150,000 people. It’s the last week before the game begins.

Mapping out the puzzles

Our bulletin board wall, riddled with notecards, yarn, stickies and chaotic Sharpie scribblings, may have encouraged snarky serial killer-themed comments, but it really was a revelation. There was incredible value in externalizing our thoughts into physical form. Writing them down and pinning them up freed our minds to spend their bandwidth on solving problems.

Problems like ensuring a fluid flow between various items and puzzles. For example, at one point we decided we wanted Dad to break open a wall. Great, sounds fun. But we had to make sure two things:

1. There was a puzzle that solved to an instruction to break open a wall.
2. There was something important behind it.

This is why our puzzle path map was so important. It lets us write down “Dad breaks down wall”, literally put a pin in it, and tack it to the board. Then, later on, when we found ourselves with a puzzle based on a stack of business cards, and we asked ourselves “how do they find these cards?”, we looked back at that broken-down wall card and connected the two elements together with string.

It turns out that a system reliant on precise lengths of string is very tedious to work with, so eventually we moved the whole thing online. I pushed the bounds of Google Drawings and reconstructed our puzzle map there.

We assigned different colors to: things in the room, things found online, things found IRL, information from the gifts, codes, lockable things, and most important, in yellow, things that still need to be designed.

This map was a living document: I updated it and moved things around every day, and as people solved boxes or discovered elements, I would cover up the box with a smiley face.

My life was to make sure those yellow boxes stayed well ahead of that encroaching horde of happy solvers.

The medium and the message

Two crucial elements remained before we could go live. We knew Dad was going to communicate with the crowd via daily Periscope broadcasts, but we hadn’t quite solved the problem of how the crowd was going to communicate back, or how they were going to agree on what to say.

Part 1: the medium

We tested out the Periscope chat functionality and found it very overwhelming. Messages went by way too quickly for someone to be able to watch and process them all, while also checking inside boxes or opening a lock. Also, which instructions would Dad listen do? It would quickly devolve into a shouting match. We needed something simpler.

We considered mounting a monitor or iPad in the room, viewable but inaccessible, that was constantly tuned to a webpage that showed Dad’s instructions. Too costly, too many ways to go wrong, and too aesthetically fancy. We considered putting up a whiteboard in the room that showed Dad’s instructions for the day. Un-fancy, yes, but it broke the fiction of Dad being locked in the room by himself.

At some point I remembered a box in my closet that held a Berg Little Printer. This was a device that was designed to print out little missives or information from the Internet. I had never used it. Unfortunately, the online service had shut down, but the printer should’ve still worked. I wondered if I couldn’t get it fired up again. After a couple hours of hacking, I eventually got a message to print:

I was ecstatic. The aesthetic was perfect — a little face that sitting there, smiling, taunting Dad, and once a day spitting out a few lines of quasi-helpful instructions. The device needed to be connected to the Internet in order to print, but that was solvable; I could set up a mini-hotspot in the room.

Part 2: the message

So we had the printer, but what to print? How do you distill several thousand people’s opinions into a few discrete instructions?

We never sat down ahead of time and calculated exactly how many steps Dad would need to get out of the room. But just looking at our map and its dozen of boxes told us he’d need to get multiple accurate instructions per day in order to end the game before the new year.

We had four teams, so we figured four instructions a day, one per team, would be a good place to start. To implement this, I built a small web app and developed a schedule which, after a few tweaks at the very start of the game, we used consistently through the weeks.

• Solve. All day, every day, teams sift through the information and come up with suggestions for what Dad should look at, open, reveal, or do during his next broadcast.
• Suggest. Every day, as soon as Dad’s broadcast ends, anyone can log on and suggest something for Dad to do the next day, along with a reason for suggesting it. They can do this any number of times, until 4 AM CST.
• Vote. From 4 AM to 2 PM CST, players are allowed to vote for one of the suggestions made by their own team.
• Select. Shortly after 2 PM, I scan the top three suggestions from each team, and pick one from each team.
• Stream. Every afternoon, Dad broadcasts on Periscope. He follows the instructions sent to him, opening things, looking in things, unlocking things, until he’s finished or until his wi-fi cuts out.
• Repeat until Dad escapes.

Introducing Tom & Karlee

We had an unusual premise, and we thought the best way to explain it was through video. The story and game would be centered around Dad, but we didn’t think Dad would be the best person to explain how he got there, since our story was that he had been drugged and involuntarily locked down there. Instead, we relied on his kids. And by “kids”, I really mean Tom & Karlee, superstar CAH interns. Totally not related to each other, totally not Jewish, but very energetic, photogenic, and willing.

This was the first thing people would see after getting their first gift, reading the letter inside, and visiting our website, hanukkah.lol. It also held, in that last shot of the marquee, the key to solving the first puzzle.

We built it, and the people came

I wish I could tell you that in all this planning, we thought about how several hundred or thousand strangers would peacefully interact. I had previous worked at EveryBlock, an online discussion forum, so the value of strong community management was baked into my brain. But the truth is I just … forgot.

December arrived, and the first gift started to be delivered to people’s mailboxes. They started to sign up.

At first, as people trickled in, the Slacks remained quiet. No one was really saying anything, numbers stayed very low, and my first thought was that the whole thing would fall apart due to lack of participation. As the numbers inched up slowly, I set a modest goal of just 400 people total. Okay, I thought, 100 people per Slack is enough to sustain an active, fun game.

But what I was actually seeing were just folks on the East coast, very close to the mail distribution center. The real bulk of mail got delivered on the next day. By the end of December 2nd, 800 people had signed up for the game, putting each Slack at roughly 200 people. By December 3rd, we had over 2200. Those quiet forums got very noisy, very fast. Suddenly I realized what my real problem was: no one was in charge of the asylum.

I felt incredibly stupid for not having predicted this. Fortunately, I followed up that feeling with one of the smartest moves I made during the entire game: I broadcasted an invitation for volunteer moderators. It was the quickest job posting-interview-hiring process ever. Within an hour, I had talked with a few people in each Slack, made sure as best I could they weren’t sociopaths, then crossed my fingers and gave them Slack admin powers.

Not only did none of them turn out to be sociopaths, but almost all of them were passionate, dedicated, highly motivated leaders. I got extremely lucky. They self-organized and assigned each other shifts. Each admin team — which eventually numbered 5 or 6 per team — almost always had someone online. They kept people focused on the right problems, they neutralized tension, they fostered energy, they basically kept the ship running while I was going crazy trying to finish the puzzles and make the broadcasts. They were a godsend; they did a tremendous amount of work, for no pay, and made the game orders of magnitude more fun for the players.

The first Periscopes

Before the game started, we pre-recorded the first Periscope video, of Dad waking up in a locked, dark room, with just a sleeping bag and a toiletries kit and no explanation of how he got there. We wanted the video to be available to anyone who discovered the account, which they would do by solving the first puzzle. Here’s what they saw:

There was just enough to give players a hint about what to do next, if they had been paying close attention to the welcome video. But we didn’t let teams give Dad any instructions the first day, in order to account for the delay in mail delivery. We wanted as many people to be playing the game when it finally got started. So the second video was more of the same.

Revenge of the printer

On the third day, Dad got his first set of instructions, via a piece of paper slipped under the door.

Now he was out of the inner room and into the main space. Our Little Printer was due to make its appearance the next day, and serve as the mechanism for delivering instructions for the rest of the game.

Then it shat the bed.

The printer was working by connecting to a very untested, very alpha version of the software. It had worked before; now it wasn’t. Clearly it’s alpha-ness had gotten the better of it. Certainly there was a chance it would recover in time for the next broadcast, but given how central it was to the game, there was no way we could risk it. I realized how stupid it was to bet the whole game on a service that had no guarantees of uptime.

I was in a frenzy. I started to look into building my own Little Printer server to run locally, on my computer, or on a Raspberry Pi (a small, cheap, monitor-less computer). I wasn’t sure I had the programming chops to build it, nor did I even own a Pi, but it was my only option, short of going back to the whiteboard idea.

I blasted my office Slack, asking if anyone had a Pi that I could borrow. Incredibly, Amy, designer at CAH, immediately responded that she had one from a project she had done in college. It was sitting in a box, and I was free to use it. Even more incredibly, the college project she mentioned, i.e. the thing the Pi was already configured to do, was… printing messages on a thermal printer. And she had the printer.

What stupid, stupid luck. I got the Pi on Thursday night. Friday morning I hooked up a monitor and fired it up. It immediately started printing out an never-ending supply of advice about design — Amy’s project coming back to life. I fiddled with the Python code, got it to stop giving me design advice and instead print out some hard-coded instructions, and all of a sudden we had a working message-delivery system. Just a couple of hours before our fourth broadcast was scheduled to start.

We took it over to the room. We set up the Pi and monitor behind our false wall and threaded the cords through to the printer in the room.

We were ready to recorded Day 4. Dad turned on his camera, and there was our little printer, our little instruction robot, only 18 hours after being brought into our lives, making its very crucial Hanukkah LOL debut.

Continued in part 5 »

I break down some of the bigger, crazier puzzles we made.

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Hanukkah LOL, part 4: Puzzle paths, Pesky printers, and Periscope was originally published in The Mystery League on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is part three. Here are parts one and two.

The story so far: The Mystery League has been holed up in a conference room for weeks, designing a month-long Hanukkah-themed game for thousands of Cards Against Humanity fans, called Hanukkah LOL. They are crafting puzzles that can be solved by hundreds of players at once. Each puzzle thread will lead to a Garbage Pail Kid card. They’ve decorated the bulletin board wall with cards and yarn, like a serial killer might do. The hunt is weeks away from starting, and there are still lots of holes to fill in.

Reddit starts to stir

The first two CAH holiday puzzles were competitions. Both times, the winner was the /r/holidaybullshit hive mind. They had been a feverish mass of honeybees poking at each puzzle until it broke apart. They were formidable. The hive had been in hibernation since January, when the last puzzle hunt died down. In early November 2015, CAH announced Eight Sensible Gifts, and the hive woke up.

This was my coming out moment. The previous hunt had been orchestrated by Mike Selinker, a towering figure of the puzzling and gaming world. He’s got a reputation. A great one. I don’t have one, and I was scared of being instantly compared to him. I was confident I could build a good puzzle, but I was not at all ready to be the focus of the attention of all those hungry bees.

Fortunately they were pretty nice from the get-go, and I even earned a few accolades on Reddit from someone who had played in my puzzle hunts before. Also, I got a nice show of support from Mike himself:

Mike Selinker on Twitter

Confirmed: Yes, there's a puzzle in the @CAH Hanukkah packs. No, it's not by us. But given @santheo is involved, I expect it'll be faboo.

Up to now, I had been working anonymously on a theoretical exercise. Now, I was the very public face of a very real puzzle.

Retrofitting the gifts

Every day we’d come in and stare at the conference room wall. By now, we knew every thread started with something on or inside the envelopes, and every thread ended with the name of a Garbage Pail Kid. There were just lots of holes in between.

CAH was very lenient in letting us design the game however we wanted. However, they were very reluctant to alter the gifts themselves. There were lots of cooks in the Holiday Bullshit kitchen already, and deadlines were very tight, so the less we were involved in changing the recipes, the happier everyone would be. The Field Notes Recommended Listening list (described in part 2) was the only gift into which we were able to embed a puzzle of our creation. For everything else, we had to build the puzzles around what was already there, or make only very tiny changes.

Here are three examples:

Socks

Gifts 1, 2 & 3 were each a pair of socks.

Each pair came attached to a piece of card stock emblazoned with a “quote” written by CAH staff and attributed to someone famous: Gift 1’s quote was Benjamin Franklin. Gift 2 was Gandhi. Gift 3 was Hitler. Even though the quotes were completely fabricated, their wording was already settled, and we couldn’t change them to incorporate a puzzle.

We thought about other things that were connected to all three men. Eventually we considered news magazines — surely there would be one that at one point had featured all three men on the cover? Thankfully, TIME Magazine has a very easy-to-use online vault, and it didn’t take us too long to find covers that featured these men.

We built a puzzle that involved looking up these magazines, then searching through the magazine (using TIME’s online vault) to find the page number for a particular advertisement. The three page numbers together formed the combination to a lockbox.

Investment certificate

For one of the gifts, CAH was giving away $1 security investments. They designed a sharp-looking certificate of ownership. The design included two rows of 12 identical hexagons.

A couple weeks earlier, when we were building the bar code puzzles, we designed one that was meant to resolve to IKEA product codes. We hid the eight-digit IKEA codes inside 12-digit barcodes, like so:

When we designed this puzzle, we punted on designing the clue that would explain how to turn those pairs of extra digits into decimals. We figured it would end up being something in the room. Now we had this certificate, with its row of 12 hexagons. If we simply altered the design of four of them very slightly, we could indicate which digits were important and which were not.

By mapping the positions of the eight hexagons with lines onto the 12-digit bar code number, you end up with an eight-digit number, broken up into three sections. Just like an IKEA product ID.

Letters from China

Gift 6 was a pack of real letters from Chinese factory workers, thanking CAH for giving them a week of paid holiday. The letters were printed in both Chinese and English.

One lock in the room had a four-letter combination. So we used the actual Chinese characters in those letters to build a puzzle that resolved to an English word. We picked four Chinese characters, one per letter, which were each partially composed of a stroke that resembled an English letter. For example, this character means child, but, taken visually, it looks like an English L plus another vertical stroke:

We looked through the letters for Chinese characters that had any English letters embedded in them. It was a big enough set — E, I, J, K, L, O, S, T, U — that it wasn’t difficult to combine them into a four-letter word that also worked on our lock. We settled on LOOT.

Then we relied on items in the room — a photo album from a trip to China and a box of china plates — to tie the elements together and clue players to the final solve. (The full explanation will come in the final walkthrough.)

The basement

After four weeks of feverishly posting scribbled index cards on the wall, sweet-talking CAH employees into writing geocoding software and redesigning stock certificates, and imagining our Dad in his locked room, it was finally time to actually build a physical space for the puzzle.

One of the reasons we had settled on an escape room concept in the first place is that we knew someone who was renovating their house and could give us free access to their unfinished basement for our shenanigans. The basement was perfect: spooky and huge. But it was actually too big, and we realized we were going to need a real professional to help us build a few walls and turn it into a fully functional escape room. We needed a set designer, and we got incredibly lucky when our friend Matt Hooks said he would do it.

This basement was more than a bare room. Even though it was unfinished, it had some weird artwork and design details, which proved to be both an asset (they added character) and a hindrance (they led players down dead ends).

But it was also way too big. We only had so many things we needed to embed in the room. Too big of a room, and we’d have to fill it up with an unreasonable amount of red herrings. So we had Matt build a false wall along one side.

Once that wall was in place, all we had to do was fill in the room with stuff: furniture, boxes, toys, clothes, televisions, stereos — anything we could find that might found in a basement. Some of these elements were related to the puzzles, of course, but these puzzle items weren’t enough to make the room feel full. Furthermore, part of the game would be determining which items were part of the puzzle, and which were just set decoration.

On red herrings

In actual room escape games, where you only have an hour to get out, designers try to avoid placing too many red herrings. The thing that takes time should be the puzzles themselves, not going down pointless rabbit holes. But in our room, which was to take place over the span of weeks, not minutes, we didn’t have that luxury. Without visual noise, the game would have been too easy, and it would have been over too fast. So we hid things in plain sight, and forced players to solve other clues in order to decide where to focus their attention.

The menorah

We were designing the room while building out the puzzles, and at some point it occurred to me that we needed a mechanism that confirmed when they had ended one of the threads and successfully guessed one of the eight Garbage Pail Kid names. It was Hanukkah, and there were eight names — it was only too obvious. We needed a menorah in the room. We had just constructed a huge, flat empty wall—so we built a menorah into it.

Our plan: when the players figured out one of the GPK names, they would tell Dad their guess, he would type it into a keyboard in the room, and if he was right, the corresponding menorah “candle” would light up. Matt wired each of the light bulbs to a switch on the other side of the wall, so we’d just need someone standing there, listening to Dad type in the name, and flipping the right switch at exactly the right time.

Of course a menorah actually has nine lights: four on each side and a shamash in the center. We made the eight lights white and the middle shamash light blue. It would stay unlit until Dad solved his final sixteen-digit code, the one that would get him out of the room.

Slack

One of the first principles of this game was collaboration. Many of the puzzles would only be solvable if players collected their pieces together to form a coherent whole.

We knew a core group from previous years would want to collaborate using Reddit and IRC. But we also knew that those forums could be intimidating to newbies, and that we were hoping to bring many, many voices into this year’s puzzle. To me the answer was obvious: Slack. Slack is free for unlimited users, super simple to use, and it would give us the opportunity to build hint- and clue-delivery tools right into the discussion forum. Seemed like a no-brainer.

I have a couple friends who work at Slack and I told one of them about our plans to use it for this game. We didn’t know the exact numbers, but based on previous years, we guessed participation would be around 2,000 people. They ran it up the flagpole, and the word that came back was not great. Slack was designed for business teams; an application like ours could be unpredictable. They were concerned that thousands of random people together in one Slack would lead to an unmanageable free-for-all, where necessary information would get buried in noisy discussions or in disparate channels. They wished us luck.

But I really wanted to use Slack. If user count was an issue, would it be so terrible to have multiple Slacks? It would mean that every collaborative puzzle would need to be solved multiple times, since there’d be no easy way for people to share information across Slacks. (Note: I way underestimated players’ ingenuity in getting around this barrier.) It would also be harder for us to moderate. On the other hand, it would mean smaller, tighter communities.

We were only a few days away from launching and we were still waffling on this decision. Then I realized what I’d call each of the four Slacks if we did split them up: nun, gimel, hay, and shin, i.e. the four Hebrew characters on the side of a dreidel. It was a perfect joke, which I took as sign.

I can’t overstate how smart of a decision splitting up the Slacks turned out to be. First of all, we had over 6,500 people sign up to play the game — far higher than the 2,000 people that had worried Slack HQ in the first place. But more importantly, sorting people into teams led to a camaraderie among teammates. It helped build up team spirit. Even though the game wasn’t actually a competition, it imbued a slight competitive edge to the whole thing. By the end, the Slacks developed such strong identities that they were able to map themselves onto Hogwarts houses. (Griffshindor, Hayvenclaw, Gimelpuff, and Slythernun.) And Slack’s natural ease-of-use got people hooked on the product; I heard from many players that they spent their working hours clandestinely working on the puzzle instead of doing their actual jobs. What better testimonial could there be?

Continued in part 4 »

Our puzzle paths grow more complex, I wrestle with a Raspberry Pi, and the games begin.

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Hanukkah LOL, part 3: Reddit, Fake Walls, Socks & Slack was originally published in The Mystery League on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How The Mystery League built the 2015 Hanukkah puzzle game — a 6,000-person, month-long escape room — for Cards Against Humanity.

When we last left our intrepid puzzle makers, they had just finished designing eight barcode puzzles for the envelopes that would hold Cards Against Humanity’s Eight Sensible Gifts. Only one of the eight had a discrete solution. Each of the other seven had a solution that led to an object or phrase, though it wasn’t yet clear what those objects and phrases would lead to. And, even more pressingly, they were operating without a theme.

Everything is Garbage

One of our war room brainstorms caused me to remember a certain box living high up in a closet at home. As a kid, while my friends collected baseball cards, I obsessed over Garbage Pail Kids. I collected hundreds of them, and when I got to an age where that habit started to feel foolish, I did the natural thing — stashed them in a box until a time when they would be worth millions of dollars. I took that box to college. Then to my first apartment. Then to my next apartment. I intellectually knew how foolish this was, but emotionally they were impossible to let go.

Twenty-some years later, while brainstorming a puzzle hunt in a conference room, their destiny finally became clear. It fit our themes very nicely: kids, cards, trashcan humor. And that would have been enough, but it turns out this box didn’t have just any old collection of GPKs. I had gone to Israel during my collector days, and while I was there, picked up some Hebrew GPKs. Kids, cards, trashcan humor, and now Judaism.

It’s a perfect piece of pop culture to build a puzzle around because while everyone has heard of Garbage Pail Kids, no one spends much time these days thinking about them. If we started drop first names (without the identifying adjectives), it was unlikely someone would hear them and immediately guess what we were up to.

A structure was finally coming into focus:

1. Each puzzle would be part of one of eight threads.
2. Each thread would resolve to a Garbage Pail Kid card.
3. Each card would pair with a Hebrew card from my collection.
4. The numbers on these Hebrew cards would combine to form the code to get Dad out.

The first name

Soon after we settled on this structure, we learned of our next deadline. One of the gifts was going to include a special edition Field Notes, and there was a chance to build a puzzle into it. On the inside back cover of every edition of Field Notes is a different list of Recommended Applications. The list for this edition hadn’t been written yet, it needed to get written right away, and we could write it. But we had to write it quick.

The Field Notes was part of a package that included a membership to WBEZ, Chicago’s local NPR affiliate. So we decided to turn that list into a list of Recommended WBEZ shows. This part wasn’t difficult — we were all avid WBEZ listeners and were more than happy to compile a list of shows we liked.

As for the puzzle — we’d just come off a week of building puzzles with answers that led to nowhere, and we’d just settled on our theme, so we had the puzzle solve to one of eight Garbage Pail Kids names. We knew it would be weird, later on, to have a one-step puzzle thread, when the rest of them would have five to ten steps, but it felt really good to finally build a puzzle that led to something concrete.

Here’s how the list came out:

Field Notes puzzle solution

To solve this, you need to either be a WBEZ superfan or do some quick online research. Because it turns out this list isn’t 100% truthful. All of these shows are real, but only 25 of them currently or have ever been heard on WBEZ. Five of them are non-WBEZ podcasts:

• Friendshipping (by CAH employees Jenn & Trin)
• Reply All (no connection, we’re just huge fans)
• Roderick on the Line (made by friends of CAH Merlin Mann and John Roderick)
• Hello from the Magic Tavern (staff favorite and part of the Chicago Podcasting Cooperative)
• The ZED Show (made by yours truly)

These shows are scattered throughout the list, but not arbitrarily. The number of their position is a reference to a specific episode. By looking up that episode’s title, and taking just the first letter, you get, in order:

• Did Errol Morris’ Brother Invent Email?
• Unfollowing Friends
• A Walk to School
• No Arnie
• Eventually My Scabs Healed

Duane, as in Clogged Duane, as in this guy:

We got the green light from WBEZ, and sent it to print.

We had gone from having no theme, to an idea for a theme, to committing to that theme in just a few days. No time to let the ideas marinate. No time to test. The pace of this thing was starting to freak me out.

Thickening the threads

For the puzzle room to work, we needed to build in locked gateways that could only be opened with a solution to a puzzle. This was crucial to controlling the pace of the game. Now that we were past those recklessly built bar code puzzles, I wanted to be more deliberate going forward. So we started a lot of lists.

List #1: Lockable Things

This list was the most fun to make.

List #2: Basement Things

Not all gateways needed to be locked. The information needed to solve a puzzle can be in plain sight, but missing a key to properly interpret it. So we made a list of Things That Go In A Basement:

Baseball cards, Bike, Board games, Camping equipment, Chess board, Clothes, Collections of coins/stamps, Comic Books, Framed art / Empty frames, Furniture, Golf clubs, Hobby stuff, Jigsaw puzzle, Legal docs in filing cabinet, LEGOs, Lunchbox, Mural on wall, Musical equipment, Old clothes, Old video games, Paint cans, Photo albums, Record album, Skis, Tools, Toys, Very old iPhones, Video game consoles, Yearbooks

List #3: The Eight Sensible Gifts

We also had the gifts being sent out to all the recipients — i.e. the content of the envelopes. This included:

Thank you notes and letters from Chinese workers.
A map of a the Sensible Castle and surroundings.
Two mini expansion packs of CAH cards.
Certificate for being a king for a day.
Seven letters from the CAH dads.
A certificate for a $1 investment.
Several informational inserts.
Field Notes.
Socks.

(More explanation about these gifts can be found on the Eight Sensible Gifts website.)

List #4: Real World Things

We already were forcing people to visit a library. (See part 1.) We wanted to bring people into the world as much as possible, and we didn’t want to unfairly favor Chicago or other big cities. Some things that were on the table:

Game stores
Post offices
Highway rest stops
Starbucks

List #5: Online Things

We’d have Slack at our disposal, as well as a website, as well as any online account, social media or otherwise, that we could think of. These were our failsafes; if a piece of information couldn’t make it to another list, we could distribute it online.

Smash it all together

These three lists formed the framework for the rest of the hunt. If we were going to add a puzzle, it needed to start with and solve to items on these lists.

The big board

Our Google docs and spreadsheets were getting large in number and scope. We needed a better system. We turned to notecards, starting out on the table:

Then quickly abandoning that for the bulletin board that allowed us to plot out the elements over time.

This helped, but was missing something crucial: how did puzzles feed into each other? If we had learned anything from watching A Beautiful Mind, Homeland, and any number of police procedurals, we knew our next step: yarn.

How to make a puzzle for thousands

We were operating on the maxim that we couldn’t make this game hard enough. This was the lesson of the previous two years. What makes a puzzle difficult for one person — very subtle patterns, obscure references—evaporates when a crowd attacks it. It only takes one person to see the signal hidden among the noise. More people in the hive, more chances that one of them will see the signal.

So we took a different tack. We went wide instead of deep. Instead of making puzzles that were high in difficulty (though we did that too), we made puzzles that required participation from lots of people. That way, more of the players could feel involved, even if they weren’t the ones to crack the puzzle’s final code. They had had a piece of the puzzle. They were essential. It’d be like doing a jigsaw puzzle with hundreds of other people, where each person contributes a single piece.

In the last article, I mentioned this:

We could print one line of text under the address.

Meaning: we could add a different line of text to each recipient’s address. We could build a 150,000-piece jigsaw and give everyone a different piece.

Of course there’s a huge caveat to this idea: of the 150,000 recipients, only a fraction would be playing the game. And only a fraction of that fraction would be engaged on a regular basis. So whatever distributed puzzle we built needed to have enough redundancy built in so that it could be solved with just — and this was a big guess—1% of the full set of data.

Also, we didn’t want to simply throw all the jigsaw pieces in a pile and send one to each person. We wanted the distribution to be deterministic, based on metadata about each recipient. It would be another layer to each puzzle that the crowd would have to figure out.

We knew only five things about each player:

• First name
• Last name
• City
• State
• ZIP code

With that foundation, we set to coming up with ideas for distributed puzzles. We came up with the following:

• Give everyone a color and have them build an image together.
• Give everyone one number in the combination to a lock.
• Give everyone one clue to a crossword puzzle.
• Send people to a store near them to pick up a secret prize.

We ended up doing all four. Here is one.

Directional lock puzzle

Looking over our lock list, I realized that the directional lock could handle a ten-part combination. That fit nicely with the ZIP codes, which — to spell out the obvious—were all composed of exactly five digits, each from 0 to 9. We couldn’t guarantee an even distribution of ZIP codes, but we could roughly guarantee an even distribution of final digits.

At this point, we knew two things:

1. Our directional lock would have a ten-part combination (it ended up being N-E-E-S-N-W-E-W-S-S).
2. Everyone’s final digit would map to one of those directions. So: anyone who had a ZIP ending in 0 would get N. Anyone whose ZIP ended in 1 would get the E, and so on.

But simply giving the direction on the envelope didn’t feel like much of a puzzle. There had to be one more step. Our first idea: use that extra line of text to print the name of a city, somewhere in the world, that is precisely in that direction. For example, if you were in ZIP 60601 (downtown Chicago), and your direction was east, your envelope would say “Sawyer, MI”, which is on the same latitude as 60601.

Turns out this is a tremendously difficult thing to program, at scale, for 150,000 addresses. It would have greatly exceeded rate limits on the Google Maps geocoding API. I presented the problem to Scott Robbin, developer for CAH, and he came up with a much more elegant solution: use airports instead of city names. Three benefits:

• There are many fewer airports in the world than there are cities. This made the calculations easier.
• Much less text to print on each envelope —a three-letter code instead of a city and state (or country) name.
• Finding a list of the lat/long of every airport in the world is one savvy Google search away. That means we can do all the calculations locally, instead of pinging an API.

So Scott wrote up a script, comparing everyone’s ZIP (technically, the geographical center of the ZIP) with a sorted list of all the lat/longs of all the world’s airports. If your ZIP’s last digit was 0, the script looked north. If your last digit was 1, it looked east. Repeat 150,000 times, and voila, everyone on the list had an airport assigned to them.

The puzzle worked great because it required solvers to collect a large amount of data before being able to find and confirm the pattern. This forced players to work together. It turned out to be a bit harder to decode than I had anticipated, but with a few hints, they got there.

Continued in part 3 »

Embedding more puzzles in the world, Reddit wakes up, and figuring out how to retrofit all these damn gifts into the game.

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The Making of Hanukkah LOL, part 2 was originally published in The Mystery League on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How The Mystery League built the 2015 Hanukkah puzzle game for Cards Against Humanity

“You wanna build the puzzle this year?”

That was Max Temkin, in August of 2015, asking me off-handedly as we passed each other at the office we share in Chicago. “The puzzle” was shorthand for the secret layer embedded every year in the Cards Against Humanity holiday promotion. The previous year’s puzzle had beguiled and entertained thousands, and had ended, famously, with an intrepid team of solvers canoeing across a freezing Maine lake to reach Hawaii 2, an island owned and named by CAH, to find and unlock a safe that held 250,000 cards, along with an expensive bottle of Scotch.

This year there would be no safe, no island. The safe was grandiose, but a logistical nightmare for the winners, who inherited the overwhelming task of figuring out how to distribute those cards to everyone who had played. My challenge was to make this year’s puzzle even harder — with no possibility of finding the answer via hacking, or brute force solving — while also making it more accessible.

“Of course I do,” I said, entirely unaware of what I was stepping into.

By the time the puzzle concluded, at 2:00 PM on December 25, we had written several dozen puzzles, turned an unfinished basement into a makeshift puzzle prison, made 24 live broadcasts, enlisted the help of friends across the country, created and corralled four multi-thousand person communities, and, along the way, invented a new kind of interactive game.

This is the story of how we did it.

The premise

2015 had seen the rise of the escape room, and like puzzle makers everywhere, my friend Wil and I had been scheming about building our own. We sat down over coffee in late September to brainstorm. How could we fold a puzzle room into the CAH game?

We spent an hour throwing a bunch of ideas into the scrum and eventually landed on this:

A man is locked in an escape room. But the clues to solve the puzzles are not available to him — they’re embedded in and distributed across the eight Holiday Bullshit mailings. The players will congregate on Slack and collaborate on finding the solutions needed to break our hero out. But: he can only communicate to the outside world via a few minutes of live video per day. And they can only communicate to him via text.

As soon as the idea emerged, we both lit up. Because:

1. We’d never heard of anyone doing something like this before. We were giddy about the possibility of creating a new kind of puzzle game.
2. It focused on community solving over competition. In previous years, a small group of solvers on Reddit had barreled through the puzzle, making it intimidating for others to join, or to compete. By creating our own community, it would put everyone on equal footing.
3. The pace of the game would be heavily throttled by the (in)frequency of the mailings and the short amount of time the captive had to broadcast. This would prevent the more advanced solvers, or those with extra time on their hands, from solving everything before more casual players had a chance. And it would give us a bit of control over the game’s pace.

We presented the idea to CAH. They loved it, and gave us the go-ahead. But, they said, most of the gifts are already settled, so you’ll have to build around what’s there.

Also, the first deadline is ten days away.

The Team

The Mystery League is myself and my wife Sarah. Sarah is the voice of reason to my voice of madness. She’s also an ace researcher and writer; without her help, all the puzzles I build would be dry skeletons of logic and wordplay. But she’s not full-time; she’s got a job, and we’ve got two young kids.

Wil also had a full-time job keeping him busy. The prospect of building this whole thing more or less alone was giving me a case of the fantods. Then I learned that my friend Jon had just quit his job—and while his reasons for doing so weren’t explicitly to spend his days building out a puzzle game, he certainly was happy to have that to fill the void. Jon’s inexperience with puzzles was a huge asset; he would be our litmus for whether any given logical step was in fact a leap too far.

Finally, we had Tom, humble Minnesotan, intern-at-large for Cards Against Humanity and, now, intern-on-loan for The Mystery League.

The Dad

At this point, there was just the roughest outline of a story. We had a room. Someone trapped in it. But who? Some combination of the year’s theme — Eight Sensible Gifts for Hanukkah— and the fact that I’m a father got us to this: a puzzle-loving dad, trapped by his two twenty-something kids, who, after a lifetime of getting puzzle hunts instead of proper Hanukkah gifts, turn the tables on Dad by knocking him out and locking him in a basement puzzle dungeon that will take him weeks to break out of.

We wanted Dad to be able to communicate live with the players, so we hit on the idea of using Periscope. For a while, we even thought that he should receive instructions from the crowd via the stream of messages that appear in the app in real time. How gloriously chaotic! How insane! (We eventually came to our senses and came up with a system that was a lot more measured. Later on, when I did the first live Periscope, I realized how impossible it would have been to try to focus both on solving puzzles in the room and watching a perpetual stream of comments and instructions fly by.)

But we had very little scaffolding for the puzzle itself. Normally with puzzle hunts you start at the end and work backwards. We didn’t have the luxury of time to map out the whole puzzle path, then work out the best possible puzzles to fit that path. The game was still seven weeks from starting, but we had a deadline staring us in the face: the envelopes had to go to the printer in ten days.

The Envelopes

Here’s what we were told by CAH:

• Players would get 8 gifts, each delivered via USPS in an envelope.
• The envelopes would be delivered roughly 3 days apart, from December 1 to December 22.
• We could print something different on each night’s envelope, as long as it fit with the style: sensible.
• We could print one line of text under the address.

The instruction to keep things sensible was actually a very helpful constraint. I worked with Amy Schwartz, CAH’s lead designer, to determine what kind of element would work well within her envelope design, which could be best described as bureaucratic. We quickly landed on bar codes, which are about the most boring and ubiquitous thing in the world, but have tons of potential as a mechanism for encryption.

(Our instinct was confirmed when, on day one, one of the experienced solvers took a look at the bar code on the back of the envelope and dismissed it out of hand, sure it was just something put there by the Post Office.)

Wil, Sarah, Jon, Tom, and I took over the conference room at the office for the week, and banged our heads against the table and whiteboards, coming up with every possible way to encrypt information in bar codes. Actually, it was more than that—we had to juggle three categories of things:

• How to encode information in bar codes.
• What information that would be.
• How that information would tie into things in the room.

We were starting from nothing here; the options were boundless. Were we looking to encode numbers or letters or words or codes or what? Answer: yes, sure, maybe, who knows. Whatever solutions we settled on would be set in stone, and we’d just have trust that our future selves would be smart enough to figure out what to do with them.

To make things more challenging, these eight bar code puzzles would not connect with each other. Because they were being delivered days apart, each would have to trigger a cascade of other puzzles — involving material found online, in the locked room, and in the real world — that would keep the players occupied until the next envelope arrived.

We built, tested, trashed, rebuilt, and retested. We got the last one done at the wire and sent the whole set off to the printer, praying that a) the resolution would be good enough for those slivers of black to show up and b) we didn’t screw anything up. One errant black line and the puzzle would be ruined.

Here are three of the bar code puzzles we came up with. (I’ll post the full list of puzzles at the very end of this series.)

Bar code #1: four books

The very first puzzle of the whole game was the bar code on the first envelope. This puzzle had the job of both confirming to players that, yes, there was a puzzle here and also telling them where to go next. (i.e. the Periscope account.) So we wanted it to be direct, but not obvious.

We concatenated four UPCs together to form the series of stripes above. This may look inscrutable to the untrained eye, but actually it’s easy to decode using any free bar code reader app. Give it a shot.

Bar code #1 solution

The bar code resolved to four books:

• 9781434701923 — Follow: A Simple and Profound Call to Live Like Jesus
• 9780546890648 — Periscope: Webster’s Timeline History, 1854–2006
• 9780983493020 — Username
• 9781602640436 — Smashed, Squashed, Splattered, Chewed, Chunked and Spewed

The book titles resolve to FOLLOW PERISCOPE USERNAME .… and then seven words that are way to long to be a username. We picked the longest title we could find, in order to build a simple indexing puzzle — taking one letter from each word in the title to form a final word. Within “Smashed, Squashed…” we found the letters for DUPEDAD, which nicely fit our theme. Satisfied, we stopped there, punting on how exactly we would clue the numbers needed for the extraction, since the clock was ticking and we had just a few more days to figure out all the rest of the bar codes.

Bar code #2: four products

The barcode on the back of the second envelope also resolved to four UPCs. This time they were nested, Cloud Atlas-style, with one barcode inside another inside another inside another. (I thought this would slow people down, but it didn’t, at all.) Starting in the middle and going out, they resolve to:

• 0681706040714 — Chronicle Card Game
• 0097368035041 — DVD of The Day Reagan Was Shot
• 0042284744522 — CD of Chess (Original Cast Recording)
• 0746775269456 — A Disney Snow White Doll

This puzzle was built for the second envelope out of eight, but it wouldn’t be received until people had been playing the puzzle for four days. Which felt like just about the right time to throw in a curveball. The intent here was to force players to snap out of the mentality that the whole puzzle could be solved on computers, and get them into the real world.

Bar code #2 solution

Taken together, the four items are a hint to find the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, from MARCH 30, 1981, look up the CHESS COLUMN, and take note of all the WHITE pieces. And if you’re wondering how far back the Chronicle’s online archives go, it’s 1985. I checked.

How this would all resolve to a message? Who knows. We took a note to stash a chess board in the room, and then vowed to solve that problem later.

Bar code #3: four ________

Four UPCs again, though this time none of them represented actual products:

• 0222767114169
• 0316348814798
• 0229111431842
• 0131092103826

I learned a lot about bar code formats when making these puzzles. In a nutshell: UPC (the common format) is split in two halves. Each half is has a different encoding, which is a neat trick that allows a bar code scanner to read any UPC right-side-up or upside-down. Also, the final digit of a UPC is a check-sum, meaning it’s deterministic, based on the previous 12 digits.

Bar code #3 solution

For this puzzle, each left half of the bar code was a latitude, and each right half was a longitude. This one would take them a little longer to crack. They map to:

• 22.2767, 114.169 — Hong Kong
• 31.6348, -8.14798 — Morocco
• -22.9111, -43.1842 — Rio de Janiero
• 1.31092, 103.826 — Singapore

We needed lat/longs that mapped to those places, but because changing the final digit of a lat/long coordinate doesn’t move you too far, geographically, we had some flexibility. So we picked a final digit that made the whole number into a valid UPC code. This was crucial because a bar code scanner would fail if you showed it a UPC with an improper check-sum digit at the end.

Of course, latitudes and longitudes only go up to 180°, so how would a solver know where to put the decimal within these numbers? And are we talking positive or negative? Because most lat/long combinations land you in the ocean, there actually aren’t that many valid options. So we left that to the solvers to figure out.

As for what those locations mean, ever seen a Hope & Crosby movie?

Continued in part 2 »

Lots of pieces start to fall into place, a theme emerges, and we do our best Carrie Mathison on the conference room wall.

The Mystery League

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The Making of Hanukkah LOL, part 1: The World’s First 6000-Person, Month-Long Escape Room was originally published in The Mystery League on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I teach HTML & CSS, there’s a point early on, after the basics have started to soak in, when students start to get The Interaction Itch. They’ll say something like:

“Okay, we get the CSS stuff. Could you please teach us some JavaScript? I want to make it move.”

I can’t really blame them. When I was learning how to make websites, the first thing that I got really excited about was that damn <blink> tag, which was of course terribly useless. Yet it was ever-present. I suspect there must be something fundamentally human about wanting to make things move. We’re all little Frankensteins at heart.

So, when I teach, I know I have to balance the important-but-yawn-inducing stuff (see: float vs. inline-block) with the trivial-but-engaging (see: cartoon eyes that track your cursor around the page). Or else eyes will glaze and thoughts will wander and lessons will refuse to stick.

After a few weeks of pleading by the students, I’ll break down and agree to drop some JavaScript on them. They’re excited. But now I’ve got another problem: divergence. There are always some students who don’t care to learn this kind of programming at all. How to help them and the more eager students at the same time? My solution was to wrap it all up in a digestible abstraction. A little code for a lot of payoff.

Step one: Describe the interaction

This is the blueprint for the whole process. It starts by understanding what interactions are possible in a browser. Given that all students have used a browser almost every day of their adult life, this ends up being pretty intuitive. Usually it takes the form of: When X gets clicked, do Y.

Let’s say we’ve got a gallery of animal pictures, and when a user clicks on the button labelled “Mammals”, we want the following things to happen to all images of mammals:

• The image gets a blue border.
• The image becomes 100% opaque.
• The caption text turns black.

That’s our blueprint.

Step two: Prep the CSS

The next step is defining a single CSS class. This is the class that will appear on a single HTML element when the interaction happens, affecting its style and the style of its descendants.

For our example, given HTML that looks like this…

<figure class="mammal">
  <a href="#" class="pic"><img src="..."></a>
  <figcaption>Capybara</figcaption>
</figure>

<button class="show-mammals">Mammals</button>

… we might define a CSS ruleset like this …

.active {
  .pic {
    opacity: 1;
    border: 1px solid blue;
  }
  figcaption {
    color: black;
  }
}

… which does nothing on page load, but lays in wait until it’s called up. (This is written in Sass; here’s a translation into vanilla CSS.)

Step three: Pseudo-code

Before we get to the JavaScript, I have the students write up the interaction they want, using English, and following this framework:

The colors will become important momentarily. If they’ve done the previous steps properly, all slots will be easy to fill in. The only real restriction is that the interaction slot must be a documented jQuery event.

Step four: jQuery

Earlier I called this whole technique an abstraction. Actually, it’s a second-level abstraction, because it’s layered on top of jQuery, itself one layer removed from real JavaScript. jQuery can be a helpful introduction to JavaScript, but it still has a learning curve even steeper than what some people need. What they need is something simple. Which brings us to our star, The Most Powerful jQuery Pattern:

By moving the four colored elements from step 3 into this block of code, surrounding it with a <script> block, and adding the jQuery library, students now have a working JavaScript interaction. The result will be something like this:

<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.0/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>
$(function() {
 $('.show-mammals').click(function() {
   $('.mammal').addClass('active');
 });
});
</script>

By following these steps, we can achieve a tremendous amount with just a little code. All the heavy lifting of defining the interaction falls to the CSS/Sass. Our jQuery code is simply adding one new class to one element. By drawing up a whole different set of CSS rules that only go into effect when the new class is present, we’ve opened the door to an endless supply of interaction possibilities.

At this point the students’ brains melt little bit. Then I remind them we have CSS transitions at our disposal to make these interactions fluid, and their brains melt a little bit more.

Simple vs. optimized

Does this technique offer an abstraction as a crutch, when learning real JavaScript would solve the problem too, and for much less weight? For sure. But it’s a trade-off, simplicity vs optimization, and one I’m very comfortable with, for the simple reason that it gives students quick results.

After they understand this pattern, students have a choice, depending on their level of comfort and interest. They can strip away the facade and learn how the springs work. Or they can move on to the bigger lesson: taking these interactions and figuring out how to make them useful.