Open forum for those who completed or nearly completed the book. Ask a question, give feedback, say hi, whatever!
Hello, really enjoyed the book. Very well made and a lot of fun to solve, I think I've completed it. I figured out vaguely what was happening when I did the palindrome puzzle, which I solved fully before moving on to 8. Then after seeing the word list in nine I figured out the flipped words trick and then i went back to solve all the previous ones (before ever seeing 11, so I thought the theme for 2 was just animals and struggled for a while). Only after solving 1 fully did I realize what the numbers at the bottom meant. Then I struggled on 11 for a while since i thought the 12 theme started with l when it actually starts with L and I had forgotten the A from 6. Also that trick in 1 is absolutely genius. Do the page numbers end up being used for anything, cause I've completed it but I didn't end up using them.
This was incredible! I had so much fun solving the word searches and I’ve been recommending this to my friends.
In terms of order of solution: after getting to and solving 0, I solved 3 (which helped me understand the bottom-left numbers) and 2 (which helped me understand the format of the given words). Then I went in order from 4-11, used the information from 11 to help me with 1, and finally solved 12 (which felt like a lovely bonus lap!)
Very fun! I solved up to 7 naively, then got suspicious when I found other palindromes in the grid. Fully solved 7 and 8. After 9 I went back and re-solved all the earlier ones.
I think I have a mistake on the final board though: https://i.imgur.com/xtb99aY; the letters extracted seem to be in the wrong order?
Glad you enjoyed! Sounds like you pretty much did the intended "hard route" through the book -- puzzle 7 was the earliest intended place to start solving. If you solved the first 10 without using puzzle 11, that's pretty impressive!
Regarding puzzle 12: Nope, it's correct. Common mistake! You just need to highlight the 12th word. : )
thank you for publishing such an excellent and unique puzzle! my partner and i just spent three hours puzzling through it and we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly!
we figured it all out without any of the hints from the bottom of the page, left or right, only to be extremely skeptical of the final message telling us we were done, especially since we'd already previously been fooled by the initial (lack of) instructions. we had all this information we hadn't decoded and figured there must be one last puzzle. dunno if there's any way to fix that, but it was a little frustrating having to peek into the spoiler forum to figure out that no, actually, we were, in fact, done; the game was not lying to us, for once.
i'm not sure that changing the text of the final message would've actually helped us? since we were already assuming both that there was another layer, because we hadn't figured out what the hints even were, and also the game established that it was willing to mislead us. so "you're done! you've solved it! there's nothing left!" reads as though there is a cheeky wink afterwards (and naturally, we were greedy for MORE PUZZLE).
we can't really think of any way to actually solve this? it's probably fine as-is, but we still wanted to share our experience so you were aware.
the only thought i actually had about possibly fixing it, was revealing (one of?) the A hints, but that might also make their hintiness too obvious
Amazing work! I love how everything was so cleverly crafted to hide the many twists in this puzzle, and it was very coherent and elegant overall. You really subverted everything I knew about word searches!
I naively solved until 9, when I noticed the other planets and fully solved it. That is when it clicked for me and I turned back to try and fully solve the rest of the puzzles.
Really big fan of all the small details. Shoutout to puzzle 1 for the excellent category choice that presented seemingly unrelated words, the blue corners catching me off guard even on the second solve, and the cute gingerbread man hinting the category all along. Love the thematic puzzle titles, the thematic puzzle shapes, and even the words being bent thematically, like THREE, CLOCK, SPACEBAR, and QUESTIONMARK.
Can't wait to try more of your puzzles!
Thanks! The category and hidden corners of puzzle 1 were actually the very first things I came up with... and then I realized I needed to make a bunch more levels in order to help players solve the first puzzle. One puzzle, followed by 11 tutorials. : ) Though it didn't end up exactly like that of course.
This is a great puzzle book! I usually don’t like word searches or word puzzles that much but I enjoyed this a lot. I didn’t do anything special until I got past 0 and saw the clues on 12 that led to everything having 12 words 😂
Number 2 was actually one of the first ones I figured out being a category. I wasn’t able to complete number 1 until the end cause I don’t know that category too well. But otherwise I did 2-11 pretty much in order and then was a little embarrassed because 11 could have helped a lot with the other ones.
I don’t know if I’ve done 12 correctly though, since the last part of the message at the end doesn’t make sense to me (I have DYOWON after “MISSED”) and I also can’t find the last word in the word search - is it just the blue highlighted part, since that’s the right number of letters?
Thanks! I'm kinda shocked how many people have solved puzzle 2 first... I was in a rush when designing that one and didn't put any work into ensuring it was solvable without knowing the category.
For puzzle 12, you're right that the last word is the highlighted area. To fix the errors in DYOWON, you probably just need to look at ICOULDELIVER and the circle of ink. You almost have it.
Yay, i got it! Thanks! The slight part I could see in the blue highlighted word was clueing me in that the letters were wrong but I didn’t know how.
And for number 2 I had figured out the backwards thing after solving number 11 naively so I had gone back to figure out what the words were. At first I thought it was just animals but then realized they were the zodiac.
whew, that was fun!
solved in about 2.5 hours over 2 days. the only thing i don't get are the final messages. are the messages from the 12 puzzles meant to be read together? i get that some of them have to be flipped, but the whole thing doesn't really make coherent sense.
in case it's just my fault, are the messages: [rot 13]
ynpxvat nal
qenjre (znlor erjneq)
v pbhyq
erivyrq (qryvire?)
v jvyy tvir
n
zrffntr
sbrpnegba (ab genpr bs?)
chmmyr erznvaf qb abg
nalguvat
abjhblqrffvzfnj (jnf zvffrq lbh jba?)
and i don't get what "sire?" means in puzzle 9
thanks for the hints at the bottom too, they helped me for puzzle 1! i found the theme but couldn't figure out most of the words until i realised what the words at the bottom of each page meant. i also don't get why there are 2 "zodiac" in puzzle 11. sure, it works but it's not that creative imo
You almost have the final message right. It just needs punctuation, the flips you listed, and the message from puzzle 10.
Do you know the theme of puzzle 11? That should explain the duplicate word. Aside from that, I thought it would be funny, and that using canonical lists of 12 would reduce frustration, especially for people from different cultures.
yeah puzzle 11's theme is "category" right?
i'm just confused because i thought puzzle 10 would be "astrology" or smth
and i just figured what FIREDNOW means. (i think i forgot to include it in my previous message for some reason)
i'm just confused about the messages from puzzle 1 to 9.
i know puzzle 10 to 12 mean "wonder if anything was missed? you won!" (or i think so)
This was excellent! I actually downloaded this a month ago, so even though I just solved it, I was on 1.11. But now looking through 1.12, I have a couple comments on your changes:
- Puzzle 0, I'm not sure you've made it any less ambiguous. For example, I gave my gf the link (so she's working on 1.12), she's just "finished" puzzle 0, and she has the FIN in FINE going straight down, then the IS intersects its I. This runs into the same problem of being not unique until you realize the rules it's trying to tell you.
- Puzzle 12, the bottom blue squiggle seems to be nothing? AH, I just realized that's supposed to represent the answer to puzzle 12 being found. Was confusing. I'm also disappointed that you've broken the backwards sensible-ness of answer 12, since you used to have all the even answers in puzzle 12 work out to some sort of words backwards, but now the last one doesn't anymore.
Anyway, hoping your other stuff is as wonderful as this was, will check it out!
Thanks! I might rework puzzle 0 again then. As for puzzle 12, the solution used to be "NOW WON", and then just "WON". But it felt too predictable and anti-climactic, so I went for a longer message, and couldn't find a suitable semi-palindrome. Do you think just having "WON" would've been better?
My other stuff is definitely not as good (don't expect 10 Puzzles to be comparable), though I am quite happy with how Educated Guess turned out. If you haven't yet, I recommend checking out Linelith and LOK (and Abdec), the inspirations I listed for this game.
Ah, I think you do have a point on anti-climactic, as when I got it, I was kinda thinking, is that all? For predictability though, I don't think that's a problem here, as the process is the whole point, more so than finding an answer.
I'm not sure which way is better, that's a tough call. More satisfying to have a sensible backwards answer, but also more satisfying to have a significant final answer.
Stumbled upon your game after someone shared a recommendation on Reddit. First of all, thank you! I just finished solving the puzzles, and I'm honestly amazed at how brilliant the design is. Nothing is left to change, everything has a purpose and the way you see the puzzles changes so much with the information you get along the way.
When I realized how the codes on the bottom left of each page worked, I feared it would be impossible to solve as a non-native speaker, but then understanding how each page is themed (including the penultimate and last puzzles which self-reference) made everything make sense. Even the final message is brilliant, each of the even pages has a snippet that works forwards and backwards. Having one of the puzzles be a palindrome really is fitting!
Again, thank you and I hope to see a full puzzle game from you, I'll be lining up to buy it!
Glad you enjoyed! I'm especially happy I succeeded in making it solvable for non-native speakers. I tried to design it that way by avoiding difficult and random lists of cultural items (with the exception of puzzle 1, which is [edit: almost] solvable with Wikipedia).
(I saw the Reddit post this morning thanks to itch.io's bulk statistics on "referrer" URLs, so I figured all the new folks are from there. 190 downloads today!)
I also found the game from the same link on Reddit. I really loved the aha! moments – they reminded me of games like Chants of Sennah, Outer Wilds, etc. It's amazing that you were able to accomplish the same kind of feeling with something as minimal as word searches. Especially cool was seeing two different puzzles themed around different zodiacs!
Thanks! Glad you liked the zodiacs, I mainly included them just to have clear sets of 12, and wasn't sure how fun they'd be. (Though I was happy with the duplicate z6 clue.) I haven't finished Sennaar or Outer Wilds yet, since Outer Wilds gives me motion sickness, but I hope to eventually! I mostly play pretty minimalist games.
Thanks! I was definitely going for the feel of modern discovery-centric videogames... though I haven't played Tunic yet because it's very laggy on my current computer.
I haven't really made other good puzzles yet, but I hope to at some point. I think my best game other than this one is Educated Guess (https://playcebo.itch.io/educated-guess) which is less puzzle-y and more based on... well, educated guesses.
Solved 1-11, got to 12 and had zero idea what to do.
Came back several days later and it suddenly clicked, solved all of them in one sitting, ending at 3am because I couldn't put it down.
The only thing that confused me a little was the very last puzzle, with the N15 that I assumed was supposed to be the word completely covered by the line. Were we supposed to actually know what that word/phrase is?
Awesome! Glad you enjoyed it.
You're right about n15 being covered, but there's another way to find it. It's possible you found it without realizing it, because it sorta breaks an implied rule:
[rot13.no] Nygubhtu a15 svgf gur pngrtbel, vg vf ab zber bs n jbeq guna Bgntrqnhtary.
You may want to write down a proper word list for puzzle 12, with the Divider Line and everything.
Like one or two other commenters, I tripped up at the end with the interpretation of the final message. Is the note "Go back?" intended as a hint for this? If so, I mistook it as an instruction to revisit the previous puzzles and didn't give it any further thought at the end. It's unfortunate because at that point there are no more inroads to work at if you don't see the trick. I honestly don't know whether making the final clue make sense forwards would make this easier or harder (I started suspecting I'd made a mistake as it wasn't legible.)
Echoing the general praise for the game - the closest comparator I can think of is the treetops area in The Witness. Two separate laugh-out-loud moments of epiphany on puzzle 11. The first puzzle was the most difficult owing to a divergence of cultural knowledge, but that wasn't a showstopper.
Hmm, what do you think about having "WAS" added to the 12th blank? https://imgur.com/a/AYQQM4A Or I could just do "W" perhaps. (You interpreted "Go Back" correctly, I was just telling players to go back and solve 1 - 11 properly upon reaching 12. I think I'll move that message to the top of the page.)
Another thing I might do is change the Ink Ring and/or the end of the message -- I purposely hid the U to set up NOW __OY as a red herring (since it seems like potential words), which I'm now realizing was just pointlessly mean.
I'm flattered puzzle 11 was reminiscent of the treehouse -- that area is one of my favorites.
Perhaps not WAS as this can be searched for and found in the grid & could become its own red herring. Having just the W would probably have worked for me, but I'm not sure if it could also be similarly misinterpreted.
It's currently the only puzzle where one of the leftover letters is hidden, so amending that might help (by that point I had come to assume this was one of the rules.)
I'm conscious that I'm just one person & a lot of players presumably got this without the nudge. On the other side of the coin, I figured out the letters and numbers in v1.12 without any need for the new hint. Is there a case for formalising the two-tier difficulty system introduced by having 1.12 & 1.13 both available?
(Re: the treehouses, I won't go into specifics as this isn't the venue for The Witness spoilers, but I mean the early puzzles allowing for an internally consistent yet incorrect understanding of the rules.)
Additional response as I hadn't actually noticed the second image in your link:
I think the ring has value and wouldn't like to bring about its removal - in addition to lending the final puzzle a striking aesthetic and making it look more daunting than it (perhaps) is, it acts as an initial distraction from the significance of the lower squiggle.
If you were going that route, is it feasible to instead re-jig the positioning on a couple of the words so the leftovers are visible? For example, supposing the first two rows were:
LANKOWREUYD CCUINGWNR
Perhaps not ideal due to the path taken by the first answer, but the first suggestion that came to mind...
I enjoyed this! I went forward filling in the visible ones, and only went back after reaching the rules. I only figured out the hints after solving everything, which made for some difficulty, especially for #1, but google/wikipedia helped.
I forgot to save after #12, and wanted to quickly fill it in again, but the final leftovers were a bit wrong. I realized I filled in f8 a bit differently the second time - with one end up instead of down.
(v1.17)
This was beautiful. I knew something was up early on - I saw numbers begging to be marked in puzzle 5 - but it wasn't until puzzle 8's little drawings (and of course puzzle 7 making it clear we're solving Angle Searches now) that the true nature of the puzzles was clear to me. I promptly went back to solve all of them properly before moving on; I did of course get the remaining-letter messages right away (in part because I subscribed to Games magazine in the 80s and always check for those, and in part because of the 'foe carton' XD). I promptly saw the mirroring of the right-side clues; I didn't realize the significance of the letter/number pairs at the bottom of each page until puzzle 11 (the 'foe carton' was an especially nice way of confirming that), and it was only after catching that did I realize all puzzles had exactly twelve entries (despite solving ten of them already) and that their ordering around the blue line matched the bottom (except where duplicates were involved - the way that was subtly clued with the two Zodiacs was sublime)... which is exactly what I needed to find 'leftovers' in there to finish it! I saw puzzle 0 was labelled "Rules" and utterly refused to look at it any further than that (checking it afterward confirmed it told me nothing I didn't already know, although the full 150 mentioned on the back page clearly counts the six terms there) - if I were to present this to my friends, I'd omit that page entirely, as it breaks the flow of the rest of the puzzle set and feels like a slap in the face ("All that clever stuff you figured out? Wasted effort, I was gonna tell you all along."). But maybe that's just me being a professional puzzlesmith. Anyway, puzzle 12's assembly handily redeemed any bad blood from the previous page, laying bare just how genius all this comes together, and the self-reflexive final answer reveal is one of the most satisfying things I've encountered in any puzzle ever.
Also, yay, dwarf planets! And I wonder how many people knew of 'lengua de gato' right off the bat (I certainly didn't) and caught a theme immediately. (Cookies being "little warm-ups" is a TOP-TIER fridge-logic hint and I'm guessing most solvers never realized it at all!)
The only criticism I could levy is that some of the puzzles technically had multiple solutions with how the letters in the grid are apportioned to the words (such as the 'ra' at the start of 'rat' and 'rabbit' in puzzle 2), but none of the remaining-letter messages are affected by that (and of course puzzle 6 is that way unavoidably and hilariously) except of course for needing to choose the right 'a' in puzzle 11 (which is obvious enough). I also really wish there was no puzzle 0, but I understand why it's there - I can't fault that.
For the record, I solved this entirely on paper, with the "for printing" edition of the file. I used a highlighter to start, inspired by how 'eclipse' is pre-marked in puzzle 1... which proved to be an unforseen boon, as it didn't interfere with when I used a pencil once I started actually solving the puzzles XD
Thanks, it's great hearing that all the little details were appreciated. I did try to avoid the RAT/RABBIT situation, but some puzzles, especially 2, were a bit too constrained. In fact, its only sheer luck that I was able to use "error" and "reset" there.
I've uploaded additional versions with Puzzle 0 omitted and a "__/144" total.
This was a truly excellent set of puzzles, thank you!
Some things I appreciated beyond the more obvious ahas:
Just finished this, it's a GREAT puzzle and I loved every moment of it. Managed to solve everything perfectly with the slow progression of putting all the hints together. I think it strikes a perfect balance of every little piece of each puzzle being a hint to the other puzzles. I also loved the little trick of how Puzzle 11 had two identical words, I was laughing when I realized that. The shapes of puzzles and words are also very fun. Overall just extremely well done!
There was only one time I ran into an issue: The leftover letters in Puzzle 1 seem to be giving me the word "ARCKINGANY" instead of the seemingly intended "LACKINGANY". I'm not sure if I'm somehow doing it wrong or if it's an actual issue with the puzzle...
I just finished this morning and I loved it, it was so much fun!
There is one thing I just didn't understand at all though; the letters and numbers in the bottom margin. You said they were supposed to be hints?? What did they mean? I was thinking they could be coordinates, but many of the letters were too far ahead to even fit in the search grids.
Never thought a word search would become one of my favorite puzzles of all time...
That being said, this experience blew my mind, thinking about how each puzzle was made to accommodate both the beginning and end solutions. Everything beautifully fell into place at the end, and it made me feel smart. (i also liked how the titles subtly alluded to the theme of the puzzle)
Some things I was left wondering though:
On #5, are the blobs on _ _ _ I S _ just red herrings and it's actually only X I S?
On #6, were there supposedly twelve "a1"s hidden behind the blob?
Either way, amazing design! 10/10, took ~4.5h.
Just played this and wanted to say how good it was. Many layers and tricky but fair misdirections, like how in puzzle 2 you could find MOBSTER and NOTARY before realizing the theme and the mirroring rule. Very well done!
I just have a bit of feedback about where things didn't quite feel so fair and maybe could be improved.
Thanks for all the feedback. Glad you appreciated the misdirect in 2, that was my favorite bit.
1. For what its worth... all blotted letters are actually there, under the blots!
2. Ah, good to know. It was meant to reference the previous puzzle's theme, astronomy. I'll see about finding a better name. Perhaps just "Signs".
3. Oh, right! I've been meaning to clue that a bit better. Any suggestions? I might add a second single-letter clue to a different blank, like the "A" clue. Or And I could add something to the last page like "Message received?" in green ink or "Message Received: [checkbox]" in an orange box.
3. How about extra hints and individual __s, to nudge players toward filling out the word list? https://imgur.com/a/VAZhG0Z The "D" and "N" on the right would hopefully clarify the proper orientation of words. (I specifically want the message spelled out via a two-column list because the canonical leftovers are, e.g. "reviled" (r7) not "deliver" (d7), as shown by the bottom-right corners.)
You still left the last slot in the list starting with A, though. As I already tried to explain, "the last message (which is the same as the puzzle 12 solution) is shown starting with A, and that's also the direction it's read, which breaks the pattern of messages on the right side needing to be read backwards." So replace the A with an N, or put the A at the end. The last clue on the bottom-left (under the smudge) also needs to start with 'a', not 'n', as the clues correspond to how the terms are read, aren't they? Or am I misunderstanding something?
Personally, I would only see those nudges as helping to confirm what to search for in the last puzzle. They wouldn't make me any more inclined to write everything out in the columns. And even if I did write them out, there's no guarantee that I'd realize they're meant to all be read in sequence. I still feel my previous suggestion is the best way to ensure players reach the intended ending. But that's just my opinion.
Regarding the orientation of the final "word" (n15), here's how my logic for how it works:
The trick with Puzzle 12 is that its 12 "words" don't need to actually be words, they just have to be the leftovers.
All leftovers are read top-to-bottom, so the canonical leftovers include nonsense like "foec@rton" (f9). The leftovers are not the reversed versions like "deliver" (hence no "d7" clue). You can confirm this via the bottom-right hints, and also the bottom-left hints of puzzle 12. So for consistency, the bottom of page 12 must say "n15" just like it says "f8". *
The reason I did it this way is so that when the leftovers ( "reviled", "foecart0n", "nowevahwonuoysa", etc.) get written backwards on the right side, the result is a perfectly-readable left-to-right message that's hard to miss.
Hope that makes sense!
*unless I changed the bottom of 12 to have hints like "n8" for "notraceof".
I think I finally get it. The reason it didn't click for me is that thus far, terms on the right column seemed to follow a rule that they always had to form a valid word or phrase when read from right to left. "nowevahwonuoysa" would be the only one not to follow that rule. Actually, more than that, it breaks the bigger, more important rule of these "word searches" always involving searches of actual words, not simply nonsensical letters, so long as you see right-column terms as simply being reversed.
I didn't notice that the puzzle 12 hints were all the same as the bottom-right corner hints, even for ones that go in the right column, which would indeed necessitate writing them backwards. I think I would in fact find it more intuitive if you instead switched up the puzzle 12 hints for the right-column terms as you say ("n8" for "notraceof"), so that they would get written the same as on the previous pages, and this would allow the final term to also follow the pattern of being valid when read backwards from how it's written. Then you could do one last page after where everything gets written out properly, with the right-column terms only reversed there for the final message.
I can see what you were going for, with the elegance of having the final puzzle also serve as the final message all at once, and maybe this isn't an issue most people would be confused by like I was. But speaking for myself at least, it almost made me miss the final message entirely, and I think my suggested approach would help ensure that people understand exactly what you want them to see at the end.
I'm here via the Thinky Awards - congratulations on being a finalist in two categories! (I think it would have also been a great candidate in Best Cursed Game :D ) I loved it, thank you so much! I'm running around recommending it to people.
I played the advanced version. I compared the two versions while solving the very last puzzle and realized that I already got the rules from page 0. I'm not sure how different the experience would have been, but I enjoyed my playthrough and I was glad I chose this version.
Here are the places I got stuck:
1. The first puzzle. After I got the theme, I realized that I just didn't know the names of that many cookies in English. I noticed it was a problem when I found "lady" and couldn't think of a single cookie with "lady" in its name. I ended up looking at a "List of cookies" page on some baking website and that helped. (I have been living in the US for over a decade at this point, but I'm allergic to multiple things that often go into cookies... I hadn't realized how much this affected my vocabulary, lol!)
2. Why does "zodiac" appear twice?!? I eventually got it...
3. The very last puzzle - I got the entire message, including the part in the individual letters, but somehow thought the bottom line was covering a different expression! I gave up, went to sleep, and realized right away the next morning from the letter shapes showing under the bottom line that it was the same message.
I'm not sure what my order of solving was, because I also worked on some of the puzzles in parallel. The last few were 11, 1, 12. I guessed the themes of most of them and then I only tried to add them into 11 after that. (Except "timepiece".)
Also, I used xournal - it is quite fast for me (I use it for taking notes if a lot of graphs/drawings are involved) so maybe it depends on the platform? This was the Linux version.
Thank you again for the great game!
Oh, thanks for mentioning Xournal... when installing it I somehow hid the top menu immediately (F10?) and thought there was no preferences menu to enable right-click erase! That's what I meant by slow. After looking into it, I've updated the page to recommend it more highly.
The 3 points you got stuck were definitely intended to be the hardest, but for puzzle 1, looking up lists is absolutely expected/recommended. I think I'll add that info somewhere to the no-zero edition, since I put "using an encyclopedia is permitted" on page 0.
I'll also be pushing the latest updates to no-zero edition since lots of people seem to be downloading it. Though I'm not sure I recommend that version.
I've had a fab time with this, and so has my son (14) for whom I printed a separate copy. He assiduously followed the instructions and highlighted only the given words until the proper time; I spotted what was going on in #4 and completed it, then was on the lookout (but couldn't do them all until #0). On the other hand, he noticed the reason for the doodle on page 10 and had to tell me, and he quickly got what the codes at the bottom were (which I didn't twig to at all, despite it being really obvious in retrospect, especially on #11! Which made #1 a lot harder).
I am in favour of the with-zero version, which we used: the confirmation of the suspected rules is very helpful.
(But on that note, perhaps a bug? v1.17 had a total of 150 for the with-zero version but v1.19 landscape (ie with zero) has a total of 144.)
I like the new checkbox at the end; I do think it's a good idea to let the user know they've seen "the ending". I do The Listener cryptic crossword, and there's often an endgame that involves highlighting something or writing something below the grid, to wrap everything up nicely, and it's very satisfying. Would there be any value in having the checkbox text be (eg, apologies for how hackneyed it sounds) "The word searches are done / _______" and a box or line intended for the player to write the final message on. That idea could be terrible, ignore it at will and you're obviously a better designer; the idea is that more than a score or checkbox, the player is asked to enter the final thing that it's all been building up to, and the context (and the cheap rhyme) confirms that it's the right thing to have written.
My own journey at the end involved not noticing the meanings of the even-numbered leftovers and thinking it was all a bit random, until I revisited it and read #4's item in the grid "incorrectly". Fortunately that quickly got me to the end.
Anyway, loved it, great work and well done on finding so many fun things to do around the word search concept. I've been spreading the word among my peers. Oh, and I came here from the Thinky Awards too.
Cheers,
Steve
Ooh interesting, nobody else has mentioned starting at #4! I did purposely make all the words orthogonal on the off-chance somebody would. I wonder if anybody will start sooner than that... I suspect #3 is the earliest possible (with its small green hint in the printable version).
Poetic considerations aside, "The word searches are done / _______" would actually be counterproductive since the checkbox is for the players who just found "as you now have won" and thought that was the whole message. I might revise the checkbox message to "Fill out 12th word list" or "Write 12th word list" or something. (I assume you found the full message since you mention the "meanings of the even-numbered leftovers"?)
(By the way, I reduced the listed total from ___/150 to ___/144 in v1.18 so that players like JoePlaysPuzzleGames won't worry that there's 6 secret words if they forget about Puzzle 0. And to give stuck players a hint that there are 12 groups of 12.)
I see what you mean I think, that extracting the final phrase and reusing it in a different context leads to more problems. I was thinking about the possibility of not picking out the final part of the message, but really I suppose it's more likely that someone would miss the full message itself (but I think in post 1.17 versions you've added more letters to the "notes" part which should make it clearer). I'm probably concerned about nothing. :)
(Yes, I had the whole message and was being unnecessarily cryptic about spoilers.)
My son finished this evening and found the final leftovers (then struck off the "extra" A). Interestingly he didn't go to highlight it in the grid, but he did write it in the final slot on #12. He also enjoyed it very much.
Fair enough on the 144 vs 150!
I do like the idea of somehow checking or requiring that the player gets the message, but I'm not sure how to do it.
I could perhaps make the blanks more enticing to fill in, at least for the printable version:
But this might tempt players to try solving it too soon? And it might be too helpful? (e.g. spoiling puzzle 6) And tedious when solving on PC.
Re the blanks on #12, I'm pretty sure my son didn't bother with them for the longest time because he could just go back to previous pages to refer to them, so had no need to write them down (and even then wouldn't have written them backwards in 1.17, but probably would have done with the newer hints).
How about this idea - 12 checkboxes on each page corresponding to where the words would be written, which may inspire the player to write each word down and then check it off. Checking boxes is satisfying and it's easy, and perhaps it encourages us to write in the thing that's being ticked off to make it more satisfying? So the simple thing with no details is offered, and paradoxically we spend more effort (writing the words to find) just to get the small dopamine hit of a tick.
(Whether the boxes are always to the left or always to the right, or always on the inside or always on the outside, I don't know.) Separating out the blanks like that feels unnecessary to me -- having the faint horizontal lines with letter hints (that I see in 1.19 vs the 1.17 I solved) seems to me a huge improvement already.
I also think a player doesn't care about the order of items (#1-#10 don't use any order; possibly the two zodiacs _could_ use one, but does that make the player look for ordering in the others that isn't there?) -- and they may fill in the #12 word list in the order they're solved! (I filled it in in puzzle order, but went down each column in turn instead of going row by row, which didn't help.) Possibly they respect the order in #11, where it does follow the ordering of the puzzles, but it's just as possible that (if they write the categories in at all) they write the first two above KEY where there's a big blank space. Having placeholders (lines and/or checkboxes) to show the word placement in #11 may encourage more careful placement in the word list, and thus help guide the player to correct placement in #12. (Again the new blanks with some letters on #12 helps hugely.) And does that mean it's needed on all puzzles, and does that add too much clutter?!
Oh right, I forgot that players don't care about the order! Thanks for the tip. That actually makes me more inclined to use the separated blanks, to give guidance on which word goes where... otherwise players might think the D clue is for REVILED instead of DRAWER. Plus, that'll help avoid the situation where you went down each column. I will keep the bottom hints uncovered.
I don't want to add blank lines to #11, as I want to officially reveal the 12 Words twist at #12, but I might add one green glyph to #11 to discourage players from placing word randomly at the top.
(By the way, every puzzle does have some sort of ordering, but sometimes its just alphabetical or has an arbitrary starting point.)
good puzzles! I did not notice that the right side of the page had reversed words, and when they did unambiguously show up starting at 9, I was mostly just confused. 0 didn't help with that a ton; it still didn't click for me (because all of them were valid words reversed) so I further distrusted the bottom left to tell me the first letter of the word (figuring that perhaps it could tell me the start or end -- surely "si" wouldn't count as a word in this all-english puzzle (of course, there's also "lengua de gato" but I was far away from finding that))
Adam Duritz the singer from Counting Crows said he once wrote a whole EP of music, then he listened to the new album from Gangs of Youth and he threw all the songs he had been writing out, cos the Gangs of Youth album was so incredible. Anyway that's how I feel playing this book, it's so good, it makes all my ideas for puzzle books look silly. I'm gonna make them anyway, but this is the gold standard, Playcebo rocks.
Loved the game. I got so hooked I stayed awake until 5 am solving it! Everything fits together so beautifully and intelligently, and there are so many moments of sudden realization where things finally click which felt really great. I didn't know a word search puzzle could have plot twists lol. Figuring out the themes and words for each puzzle was especially a joy. And I genuinely laughed out loud a bunch of times! Like when I realized the gingerbread man was a clue the whole time. I felt really smart for figuring things out and at the same time really stupid for not figuring them out sooner.
The only criticism I have is that wasn't clear to me whether the leftovers from puzzle 12 were really supposed to be the intended final word. Considering the nature of the game, I think it's to be expected that players won't so easily accept being told there are no more puzzles and that they've won. I felt the game was pushing me to do something else to uncover a different word under the squiggly line, like there was a secret 'true ending' lol. I spent over an hour on that until I realized that it makes absolute sense for the 12th word and the leftovers to be the same since all the other words are the leftovers from the previous puzzles...
I don't know what could be done to change this, or if it's even worth it as I don't even know if my confusion at the end is a common enough experience or not. Having said that, maybe you could have the letters for the final word be completely covered by the line? Seeing parts of the shapes made me think I could find a different word with other letters that also fit there, like an X instead of an A or G or Q instead of an O. The blotch on n15 also threw me off since it looks like it could also be an M, an R or a Y. Also, both the letters inside the circle and the fact that there's exactly 15 letters (excluding the E that's left over) covered by it felt like they could be clues. I even tried rearranging them to see if they could form a coherent phrase. Maybe there could be individual blotches on some of the letters instead of a circle?
Anyway, thank you so much for making this and giving it out for free! Have you considered making a patreon or a ko-fi or something?
this was absolutely incredible. hardest parts for me were unquestionably figuring out the cookies and the theme of puzzle 2. i kept thinking it was "animal", despite how many times i realized that "animal" was impossible on puzzle 11. also, googling "foecarton" led me straight to this page, so i quickly closed the tab before clicking on it. which answer both my questions: 1. foecarton is not a real thing and 2. yes this is the right solution for this game. WAIT THE IMAGE IS AN ANGRY MILK CARTON oh my god this game is so good. the craft put into this is truly incredible. thank you for the time. i wish you well in everything you do after this :3
These are some really amazing puzzles! I made it all the way up to the final blanks of puzzle #12! The only one I have left is the final n15 clue. Every puzzle is so creative, and the subgame of finding out what the categories are is very rewarding to figure out. This was such a fun puzzle! Thank you, and keep being awesome!
Thanks! The idea of having hidden categories was what initially inspired me to make this.
Hope you enjoy finding n15, I actually just added that challenge in the most recent update. If you watch Icely's playthrough, you'll see that puzzle #12 is quite different. (And JoePlaysPuzzleGames played a version with a simpler n15 solve.)
I had an absolute incredible experience solving this with one of my friends. Took us about 4 hours to fully solve over the course of 2 days! I learned about this from a youtube channel called Icely Puzzles, and paused their video to try it out and got totally sucked in. While completing this, I never really felt like I was totally lost, and always felt like I had a way to try and push forward in figuring it out (even if it took me a while to figure out the meaning of the bottom numbers/letters, page numbers, and some of the hidden words in general!). There were a bunch of pretty funny moments as well, such as every step involving the "Aaaaa" page and the double zodiac catching us totally off guard in puzzle 11. Had so many "aha" moments that we lost count. Had the most difficulty with Puzzle 1 and 2 since the theme eluded us for a while, but it clicked really quick once we got it. Ironically puzzle 11 helped find the themes to go back and complete puzzles with. I liked all the hints, it all felt intentional while still making us think so much.
The only part we couldn't understand and something I wanted to ask about was the pumpkin/jackolantern-esc drawing on puzzle 8, right in the corner next to the f9. Does it mean anything? :o We couldn't figure out how it was connected or what it meant/what hint it was giving!
Amazing set of puzzles and wonderfully crafted, never thought I'd be so into a word search!!
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed puzzle 6 and the double zodiac, those were some of my favorites. Puzzle 11 was absolutely meant as a two-way street, I'm actually surprised that many people didn't use it as a key to the remaining puzzles. I guess it's because of the "puzzles should be attempted in the order given" thing.
In puzzle #8, the f9 glyph is an evil milk carton, to help players confirm that "foe carton" is correct.
I really enjoyed this puzzle book! This was the perfect game to share with my currently long-distance partner over video call. We love doing puzzles together, and we had so much fun solving this last night.
We started off solving the word searches naively (though we definitely noticed some pieces of information that had yet to make sense) up until puzzle 7 when we started finding other words that matched the theme. By the time we had hit the rules page, we had already more or less figured them out and had started applying them to the later puzzles, but then we realized we had to fully redo the first two once the rules were fully internalized. I really like how you could play all of the searches naively but then realize you had done them completely wrong and then find new orientations for words you already found while re-doing them.
I thought the mechanic of alternating which text was read forward and backwards was very fun. We noticed some of the text flips very quickly, though it didn't all fully click until the very end. Super satisfying!
I thought it was awesome that we really had to use every detail to solve every last bit of the book. Noticing the little green highlight at the bottom of the puzzle 11 page really changed everything - previously, we weren't sure what those letters and numbers at the bottom meant. For a couple of the puzzles, we even had to start counting letters to figure out the missing blobs. We realized we had missed marking off just the single 'A' a couple times, which tripped us up, but all was figured out by the very end. :))
Overall, great mechanics, and it felt like there was a lot of cohesion across the puzzles despite the different themes. I liked how everything worked out with 12 words per puzzle (+ meta clue/puzzle 12 word). I think the blobs that were covering letters were used in interesting and creative ways, and I especially love how they were used in puzzle 1.
Thank you so much for making and sharing this!
Hi! Loved the game, I just wanted to say that the way that I played it was via the Lumin PDF editor app in Google Drive. The freehand drawing tool has color, thickness, and opacity options, as well as support for Ctrl+Z, so it worked very well for me. I then also used the text box feature to keep track of some other things (you know).
I found 12 Word Searches on reddit yesterday, and I have not been able to stop thinking it about it since. I finally just solved it after a few hours and enjoyed it a lot. I loved the "oh shit this is getting serious" feeling after naively solving the first 11 puzzles. The last times I had that feeling was when I played Outer Wilds and Subnautica.
My favorite part was definitely finding the second "zodiac" in the 11th puzzle. I had already finished the 2nd puzzle and I was searching for "animal". I searched for it way longer than I care to admit. The grand finale with "as now you have won" present twice in puzzle 12 (present once normally and once as leftovers) is also a high point.
At least in the puzzle genre, the best games are often the simplest, and 12 word searches shows this principle really well. This honestly might be one of my favorite games of all time, and it's not even a video game. Every puzzle is so well crafted, from the base puzzles tricking you into thinking you know the rules to the meta puzzles that have been there since the beginning. I would put this up there with the likes of baba is you and n-step steve. I can't put into words how much I love this game. wait actually, I probably could.
Firstly, the page telling you to go through each page carefully in the order given, only to find the misplaced rules page telling you to complete it in any order was hilariously smart.
Second, the amount of "I thought I knew this was true but actually wasn't" moments was astounding for a 16 page pdf. every single twist and turn was mind-boggling.
Third, the small details made it 100 times better. the way QUESTIONMARK made a question mark and that the little dude on the very first page was a pictogram clue was super charming and added to it tenfold.
Although, there were a couple issues that I ran into. I see a lot of people talked about the double zodiac thing, personally I didn't mind that. What I did mind was CATEGORIES and LEFTOVERS. As far as I could see, you just had to stumble upon the right letters in the right order to get these. There wasn't a super obvious theme to those ones like the other ones had and I ended up having to find a playthrough to get these ones (thank you Joe Plays Puzzle Games). Another thing that I stumbled a bit on was figuring out the rules from the rules page. there was a bit of confusion as to whether the rule was you can't have overlap, you can't have straight lines, or both. eventually I got it, but it was a little rough.
Fantastic game overall. This really takes me back to messing around with the kids menus at restaurants, trying to find "secret" words in the 5x5 crossword puzzle. This really shows the "ah-ha" genre of puzzle game in a very simple way that I think anyone can get behind and not find very confusing. This is a 10 out of 10 game in my eyes and I'm recommending it to all my friends.
Thanks! N-Step Steve is certainly a high compliment, it absolutely has those crazy moments of realization that I try to replicate.
Regarding puzzle 11: It seems I accidentally made LEFTOVERS too hard in v1.21 when I changed it to cross KEY (to remind players that words can cross). I forgot how hard it is to find words that cross over diagonally. I think I'll do a tiny update to revert that tonight.
Hi! I really enjoyed the entire game, but there is just ONE thing bugging me after my completion: puzzle #2’s name. Like, I know the last word has to be Zodiac because of the topic of the puzzle and the C sticking out at the end, but the first word is JUST out of reach for me. I matched the font and size that you used for the titles, but every idea I immediately thought of, one of which was “Creature Zodiac,” got debunked because of the length! I really hope I can see what the intended title is supposed to be soon, because it has been annoying me ever since I solved this thing. I also attached an image of the “title.”
I figured out the answer literally RIGHT after you sent this message. I seriously don't know why I didn't try "Chinese Zodiac" before this! I am so smart for figuring everything else out and so oblivious that I didn't even think of what the theme for the level even was at the same time! I am so sorry for asking such a dumb question to the creator of the entire game.
This was brilliant!
So many clever little touches and those precious "aha!" moments.
I played through the normal (with-zero) version using Xournal++. I started by highlighting only the listed words, and after reaching page 0 I went back to puzzle 3 (as suggested), where I started to figure out the tricks before going through each puzzle again sequentially to find the hidden words. I hit a few little snags (ANIMAL / ZODIAC, grr...) but no major blockers.
I absolutely loved this. I printed out a copy for my mom (who is also a fan of puzzles) before I was even finished. She laughed out loud when she got to 6. The dwarf planets clued me into to most of the tricks (I like astronomy), and 9 is the first puzzle I totally completed, but I didn't actually figure out what the bottom clues were until I only had puzzles 1, 2, 11, and one word of 3 left. Puzzle one definitely gave me the most trouble, but it took me longer to realize that puzzle 2 was also zodiac, (which was hilarious). Everything came together so beautifully at the end. A wonderfully crafted puzzle.
Good game! I realized there was a metapuzzle almost immediately (also that's part of how I found it in the first place), got inklings of what it was near the end, made a second copy of the file, figured out Puzzle 11's gimmick pretty quickly because I happen to know the names of plutoids off the top of my head, and had a lot of fun. It took me most of an evening.
If I have any criticism it's that Puzzle 1 is (still) too hard, but, maybe that's the intended difficulty? There's definitely other stuff in here where you'd need to know trivia to connect it to the theme, like with HAUMEA and QUARTZ, and the theme for Puzzle 1 can't be too obvious. I ended up solving 12 first by guessing and then going back and doing 1.
Stumbled upon this game thanks to a reddit post and oh my goodness this was such a wonderful game! I ended up solving pretty much everything on puzzle 9, except for the bottom right corner hints (which I completely forgot about for a few puzzles) and the backwards final solutions (which I worked out on question 8). Everything else went very smoothly, with some fun "aha!" moments thrown in there thanks to puzzle 11. The only part I felt was a little tough was Puzzle 1 having the required first letter L be in the top right corner - none of the puzzles have hidden letters in the remainders (except for 12 but thats part of its puzzle) so it feels a smidge illogical. I could have easily missed an alternative solution though.
Overall such a wonderful gem of a puzzler, thank you for creating it :)
Thanks!
Yes, the L is always hidden. In case you missed it (though it sounds like you didn't), you can logically deduce it by using the L10 clue. You can also deduce it in puzzle 12 with no ambiguity (if you know "_acking any"). Early versions of the book had another hidden leftover in puzzle 5, but I removed it when remaking that puzzle. If I do another update, I might foreshadow the mechanic early on using a partially-covered leftover letter.
My gf and I just finished the game and we loved it. My only criticism is that IMO "zodiac" should appear twice in puzzle 11, one for puzzle 2 (chinese zodiac) and one for puzzle 10 (western zodiac), otherwise, puzzle 11 has one word less than all the other puzzles which breaks the rules/consistency. I wasted a bit of time looking for a way to fit a twelfth word in puzzle 11 because of this. Also, isn't the "total words count" 143 then?
Great puzzle book so far but i cant figure out the category to 1.. i assumed it was "Cookies", But thats no where near 8 letters.. Unless i'm dumb and thats the category covered up by the blue splotch next to the half covered z6
Edit: Yep- thats it- the clues at the bottom of the page are in order of the puzzle categories. the c8 i thought was gonna be similar to "cookies" is actually "Category" because thats the 11th thing on the bottom, and this is the 11th puzzle-
late to the game but just saw a video recommended on YouTube and decided to play before watching.
what an awesome game! I’ve sent it to several friends and recommended it to cracking the cryptic also.
loved the multiple journeys through the puzzles.
and having the same word twice in puzzle 11 was hilarious! I thought I’d gone wrong so many times.
loved it
That rocked! Spent an extra about 20 minutes trying to figure out why there was an extra a, and kept thinking the end wasnt "message" because of it, before finally realizing it was "a message."
I loved the foe carton, made me certain I was on the right track! :) I did all of them up to 0 according to their most basic form first. Then it gave me LOK vibes, and I saw it was an inspiration after I did 0, so I tried to solve a bunch of things by jumping gaps and doing wrap arounds, like SIRE, and the Rules, before finishing a couple of the other puzzles and being confused why it hadnt been used (I solved 9, 4, then 7, while thinkin that the rule was "only self crossing is allowed" and that you were able to wrap and jump gaps like LOK). Then I went to back to three, got stumped for a really long time, had some wacky stuff going on, and finally tried enter crossing question. That was when I had an epiphany, went and fixed Rules, and then solved the rest.
Im excited to play more of your puzzles, this was an amazing experience! :))))
Fully solved 8 or 9 of them and my interest came to a screeching halt when I realised solving number 1 would involve me having to locate a list of cookies that includes everything the dev included. When the first couple didn't include the palindrome one already given that was me out. That or sit googling ' cookies that begin with b, cookies that begin with s' which either way, nah. Shame, was having a lot of fun until then.
I somehow managed to stumble my way through the word searches and get all the words found, except for the second to final search (with palindrome and timepiece). Though, knowing how the formats and everything worked, and using the list of words found for the 12th search to reverse engineer the missing piece, I was able to solve the final word search. (I still haven't gotten that 11th puzzle completed though)
I just finished this and really enjoyed it! Excellently done! I had seen it recommended by Board Game Blitz on Youtube. I did version 1.23 on paper.
I found puzzle #1 to be the hardest part. After I tried to do all the crosswords, and went back and changed my answers on them after realizing the words could bend etc, I used puzzle #12 to help me figure out what the leftovers were on the puzzles I hadn't finished yet. Then after getting the final message, I didn't trust that I was actually done lol because I had no idea what the letters and numbers at the bottoms of the pages were and assumed they were an additional puzzle to do after the word searches. I came here to find out how to use those clues, and I used them along with like four lists of cookie types to finally finish word search #1 haha!
Anyway that was really fun and I didn't want to put it down to go to bed last night! Great work!
very fun! printed it off and did it with a pencil
somehow managed to do the entire thing without realizing that specifically the right-hand side of the dividing line had mirrored words, just figured that “some” of the words were mirrored. and totally fell for the TH–E misdirection in the numbers puzzle. worked out in the end since most words don’t make sense mirrored and I figured you wouldn’t have me looking for made-up words 😌
Hey, a thousand "thank you"s for this wonderful game. I had a blast solving it, even if it cost me my sanity (I literally stayed up until 3am trying to finish it, but it was so worth it). The first one was the most difficult because I'm French and half of the "items" listed here don't exist (or they go by an entirely different name).
I have some ideas to make a French version of the game, would it be alright if I did it? Of course it would be free, you would be mentioned as the sole creator and there would be a link to your itch.io page. I already made some headstart, I got the final message all found out. I know I can make something good and very close to yours. But I won't make it until you give me the thumbs up.
Thanks again for this game, it is - by far - the best pen and paper game I played!
Absolutely, go for it!
Feel free to let me know if you have any questions while designing it. My main advice is to place words in a stretched-out shape (like the planets were) rather than bunched in on themselves (like "rooster" was), when possible. And also that puzzle 2 will likely be the toughest to design -- make sure that the player feels confident they solved it "correctly". Also, I recommend picking an obscure Otagedaugnel, perhaps leaving it as-is. But feel free to change the words and even the themes as needed! Oh, and puzzle 8's words are listed chronologically; I tried to put all the lists in some sort of order, but puzzle 1 is not. Puzzle 1 can perhaps be listed alphabetically, but IMO it's more important that the shape of the visible word list feels natural, not like it has gaps in it. Okay, I think that's about it!
Thanks! I'll do my best!
Damn, I didn't even realised the words were listed in a certain way (except for the numbers and the months)... My objective here is to make a game as close to the original as possible, so I'll make sure the translated words lists are correctly arranged.
And thanks for your advices, they're greatly appreciated!
I just have one question regarding the shape of the grids: I figured the timepiece one has the shape of a watch and the solar system one is... Well, it's obvious, really. But what about the Chinese zodiac, or the numerals? Does the shapes all have a meaning or did you make them like this just based on the number of characters you had to put?
Here's a recent (very messy!) version of the game files you can use, and a few quick notes on all the grids and word lists. 12WS - shared
Most stuff is fine to change if needed, the most important thing is the word list order for puzzles 11 and 12.
Oh, and my typical process for puzzle layout (excluding puzzles 1 / 2 / 5 which must be built around red herrings) is to start with a cute gimmick or two like the shape of Question Mark, and build the rest of the puzzle around that while minimizing ambiguous word placement. (e.g. having two Ds to choose from for the end of DEIFIED.)
Hello,
Sorry, I forgot to keep you updated on the translation... Anyway, it's finished!
Here are the pdf and some notes about the translation
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1lktkme7VdOxySfNfUUU0sU4qupidtTn7
It's not out officially yet, I wanted to know what's your preference:
1: I post it on my own itch.io profile (which I created especially for this) but, as always, by crediting you as the creator of the game
2: you post it on your profile as the French version of your game (and I remove my itch.io address on the front page)
Let me know what you want to do (if you still want to do it).
Wow, this looks incredible! Puzzle 2 and the final message seem perfect, I was worried they'd be impossible to get right. I played through levels 7-10 and they seem great as well. Puzzle 7 was actually a lot of fun to do without knowing french -- the logic for KAYAK is really great, seeing the k clue and connecting it to the only possible other k. I think I made the palindromes too easy in my version.
I greatly enjoyed the words ESERPACATROT and NOIL, and SPAM is a good choice for a red herring. I was happy to see the Obelisk shape and the two half-fish-half-hourglass things. Oh, and the scorpion stinger blot! I almost missed it. Great blot shapes overall, mine were a bit repetitive and chaotic.
I assume it's just a coincidence, but I like that the center of #9 apparently spells "I thought" in Portuguese. (In mine, I made it so the center would say "Le remains" as a vague hint, in terrible half-french, to look at leftover letters in reading order.) It also worked out nicely that BALANCE and MARS get to appear twice -- I wonder if that'll make #4 easier or harder!
It looks like you pretty much got everything important in there -- and even some little things like KEY/TOUCHE being a confusingly vague category name! I just noticed two potential errors:
And then I have a few small suggestions:

When you're ready, go ahead and put the book on your own account, so you can update it or respond to feedback if desired, and have a French comment section. I will link to it in the description, probably "French translation available at chapeltok.itch.io/whatever". Feel free to keep your chapeltok.itch.io link on the title page if you like.
Thanks again for making this! It was kinda wild to see my own book but different, and I'm glad more people will get to play it. (My next puzzle book will be much, much easier to translate.)
By the way, I got most of my anacycles/anadromes/semi-palindromes by piecing together bits from https://foxhugh.com/word-lists/list-of-heteropalindromes/ and some list of palindromes I forget. As for BONE-based timekeeping, I think I got it from https://www.history.com/articles/ancient-timekeeping. Wikipedia categorizes these bones as "tally sticks" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick) and Google says "tally stick" would just be "baton de pointage", so BATON is good!
Thank you, glad you enjoy it! And thanks again for your trust, translating your puzzles was a wonderful experience! I may already have told you, but 12 Word Searches was easily the best pen and paper game I had the pleasure to play, and the first "metroidbrainia" paper game I played. 😉
About your notes:
I'll make the final changes this week, and a landscape version too, and I'll post them on my account. I'll tell you when it's done.
Great! The vector graphic for TOMEDECART is in the same folder I shared before (12WS - shared).
OK, it's officially done, the French version is online!
https://chapeltok.itch.io/12-mots-meles
BTW, I tried to email you but I may have the wrong address...
Seems like our journey was quite different to several people here! Maybe because the puzzle's been tweaked (we were playing version 1.25) or maybe because we're used to Mystery Hunt style puzzles. We spotted the cryptic numbers at the bottom of each puzzle and considered a few interpretations, though we progressed through puzzles 1-3 in the normal way (MOBSTER, RESET etc). We were carefully noting down each letter that was obscured in case those spelled something. It was around puzzle 4 or 5 that we realised what the letters at the bottom mean (it helps that we're veterans of Edrith's Quizzes that use the same notation, and puzzles 4-5 are two of the easiest sequences to spot) - though even there there was some reconsideration of inferred rules because 4 can be solved in "ortho-Boggle" style with no diagonals, but 5 can't. At that point we went back and solved 2-5 in the true way, though we still had no idea what to do with 1 or 6. Around this point we had the idea to start highlighting leftover letters and found the connection to the bottom-right clue as well. From that point 7, 9 and 10 were straightforward (though 10 played some fun tricks with the blobs); we'd realised some of the words are listed reversed, but 9 was I think the clearest confirmation that it's specifically the right-hand words that are mirrored. We'd been expecting a metapuzzle so solved 11 fairly easily, and found 0 didn't really tell us anything new - only confirmed the rules we'd already inferred. Then on about the third or fourth look back at puzzle 1 we finally worked out what 1 was doing (I've only heard of one of the five given kinds of cookie, but thankfully my wife reads American recipes) and knocked that one out. 12 was a very satisfying conclusion, drawing everything together, and so delightful how the final extraction could only by solved by combining three strands of "leftovers of 12", "traceable string in 12" and "English letter patterns". Amusingly, the one thing we missed until the final page was the count of answers - we hadn't noticed that there were exactly twelve words to find in each puzzle, even though we'd found them all!
Thanks so much for making the puzzle, and now we're very much looking forward to trying the sequel :)
I'm *so* close to finishing the final puzzle, I have 11 out of 12 words from what seem to be the final message. But I'm confused on where to go from here? I'm not sure what I have missed to decipher the final word. I've figured out that the bottom right of each page indicates the remaining letters, but what am I to do with the leftovers from page 12 itself once I solve?
Alright, I think I got it, but not sure if I happened to notice it by coincidence or if that is the intended way. Is the intent to see that you have duplicate letters left at the end, and then figure it out that way? I did not do this; I saw the word "won", and traced it backwards since I knew the "N" was the final letter and of course knew the total number of letters I was looking for.
Also, what is the box next to 12th word list on the final page meant for?
Yep the intent is to use the leftovers as a guide for the 12th word, but your way works fine too.
The box is just a little checkbox to mark off to affirm you've gotten the final message, in case you didn't get 144/144 in doing so, or got all 144 but missed the message due to not writing out the list.
Hmmm. The most similar game I can think of is LOCK for PS Dreams. (Although I haven't played it myself, I just watched Keith Ballard's play-through.)
I don't play a lot of word games or puzzle hunts, so everything else that comes to mind is just normal puzzle games with good epiphanies -- Linelith, Öoo, Slicecraft, Pâquerette, Bee Magic, N-Step Steve, Insight, A Monster's Expedition, etc.
In terms of books, ABDEC might be the most similar to 12 WS (consistent rules, fleshed out over time) but it is fiendishly difficult at one point. Oh, and the excel-based puzzle Rainbow Challenge / INTAO 🟥🟧🟨🟩🟦🟪⬛ seemed excellent, though I got stuck halfway through, and it's structured such that the rules change for every puzzle.
I just finished v1.25! Thank you! From my texts with a friend, it took me exactly 30 minutes to figure out I needed “AS” in the final message. Oops! Afterwards I did go watch Icely Puzzles video on your book and I do like the updated 12th :) I like the omega theme too.
Personally I needed 0Rules. I “solved” 1-11 in order without looking at ANY of the meta puzzles. I did mark some palindromes but didn’t make the connection with any metapuzzles. I really had to study the bottom left a-z0-9 on the 0th puzzle to understand how it works for everything else.
Here’s a photo of my completed 12! https://imgur.com/a/NF38UOd
Oh my gosh, thank you! I remember getting Puzzlecraft probably a decade ago now, and getting inspired to make some riddles for my (rather mediocre) 10 Puzzles project. Oh, and coincidentally I just ordered Betrayal a couple days ago -- didn't know you were involved with that until I googled it. Excited to play it this Halloween with my family.
Awesome.
If you liked the old version of Puzzlecraft, there's a new version on our store. https://shop.lonesharkgames.com/collections/puzzlecraft Happy to send you a free PDF if you'd like one.
Cool puzzle book overall! I really like how the the idea of themed word searching works well with word choices and the puzzle designs, especially the visual designs in 8, 9 and 10 and the small jokes in 3 and 6. The letter arrangement in individual puzzles also makes them more solveable, beautiful and interesting, even in pre-0 levels.
The only two puzzles I found less appealing than others are 1 and 11. I personally knew nothing about cookies so the four given words in 1 on the left made me really confused. Even after knowing the theme, I could only do the puzzle by ctrl+F-ing the first letters of hidden words on Wikipedia, which makes it less fun than all other puzzles where I can search for familiar words in the pdf rather than searching for seemingly random words online. In 11, the theme is clear, but although knowing the theme makes searching for most hidden words easy, it helped little in finding "category" and "leftovers", since the themes of 11 and 12 do not directly lead to those two words. The only source of those two words seem to be the wordsearch itself, which is made difficult by the significantly large number of leftover letters. (Also, the titles of 2 and 11 were not helpful because I believed in the word choices "animal" and "theme", which prevented me from reading the titles.)
Other levels are fun! In addition to the jokes and visuals, I like most of the titles, the design of fake dots in 5, the entirety of 6, the good demonstration of the theme in 12 through using the answer of itself as a word searched for.
Hey - I've been having a lot of fun with version 1.25 and have a question to confirm if I'm interpreting puzzle 0 correctly...
[Rot13] Vf Chmmyr 0, gur Ehyrf chmmyr, fhccbfrq gb grnpu gung yrggref pna'g or erhfrq (Yvxr gur B gung vagrefrpgf aBg naq nyyBjrq), be gung jbeqf fubhyqa'g or va n fgenvtug iregvpny/ubevmbagny yvar?
I have been trying to solve Puzzle 2, but I haven't been able to find a way to find/solve... [Rot13] "Ebbfgre" naq "Qentba" jvgubhg er-hfvat gur E. Nevermind, I found a different way to map Ebbfgre and should be set.
Thank you so much for the puzzle/game! I've been having a nice time working on it with my wife.
amazing, amazing, amazing puzzle. i have a knack for solving this kind of tricky lateral thinking puzzle far quicker than intended so the real test of a puzzle is whether it holds up even when that is the case. i cracked what was going on by puzzle five — i had solved the "normal" way through the first three, at puzzle four i saw all the month names and chunked the letter space up by month but was still confused at the may/yam interaction. this still gave me the click i needed for all the numbers in the bottom of each page (including the bottom right), so i went back to three and... couldn't figure it since i was looking at my previous naive solution and assuming those words were correct. i went onto five and the numbers really made it obvious that in some cases, there are weird diagonal connections. after solving it i went back to three and saw question mark and from there everything just broke open, i looked back at one and groaned seeing the rules and realizing what they meant. at this point the backwards words on the right side clicked and my last bit of confusion with the numbers at the bottom of the page resolved.
so, having discovered the logic of the whole book far earlier than intended, was the book a very rote solve? absolutely not, oh my god. i loved figuring the theme for 1 and 2, i particularly love the misdirect for 2 and the slow realization that it's zodiac animals and not just the random matching words we'd figured out, i loved that we had to re-populate the inkblots in 3 and that we used that sneaky little one i was wondering about at the bottom of the crossword, i was tickled that three became eight in 5, i LOVED the trick with the corners in 1, i had a great time using 11 to actually figure out the theme for one, which had still stumped me, as well as figuring out leftovers for 12 before even seeing 0! oh yes, and who can forget zodiac/zodiac??? i laughed out loud upon picking up on that one. realizing that parts of our metapuzzle were backwards was delightful, and i was grinning from cheek to cheek upon realizing that the final phrase is both in the gaps and as a contiguous region that we have to circle. this is EXACTLY the way a good metapuzzle should collapse in on itself at the end of a sequence.
good god. this was an incredible thing to play. you really nail the way that a puzzle is supposed to smoothly and cleverly twist and turn both on the macro level and the micro level. i'm so thrilled with every second that i spent on this!
(admittedly, 7-10 were straightforward given much of the above, but it was fun observing the way that the book tutorialized for people who hadn't yet figured the mechanics out)
Thank you for making this super unique game!
I saw a post about it on the metroidbrania subreddit and decided to check it out. Initially I thought I would abondon it since it was not clicking for me, but omw the moment it did I could not stop until I completely finished it. Absolutely amazing work and I loved it so much. Especially the last bit of search nr 12, which felt so cool.
Only after finishing did I read some reviews and saw people discuss how they had figured out the letters and numbers at the bottom which alluded me the entire time. I went back and figured out the page numbers which made me figure out the other numbers, it seems so silly in hindsight, but oh well.
Ima check out if you have made some other things because this is exactly how I like my metroidbranias