Tag Archives: media

Puzzle e-books for charity donations

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The Maze of Games front cover, copyright Lone Shark Games

You probably know about this already, but just on the off-chance you hadn’t heard about it:

Humble Bundle currently have a bundle of puzzle e-books available. Humble Bundle work on a “pay what you want, and you can choose to donate it to a charity of your choice” system; as far as I can tell, any charity with a UK charity number is eligible for your donation, though I like the look of the three defaults which are suggested.

Pay/donate US$1 or more and you receive links to download .pdf versions of seven books, notably including “Logical Leaps and Landings: An Adalogical Ænigmas Collection” by Pavel Curtis, descirbed as follows: “Think you’re up for a truly serious test of your logical-reasoning powers? Every month, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, often credited at the world’s first computer programmer, presents to the solving public (with clerical assistance from Pavel Curtis) a new logical “ænigma”. This book collects the first two years of Ada’s series, 24 logic puzzles ranging from challenging to exceedingly difficult. Each puzzle is accompanied by author commentary and a full solution, along with explanations of how to read any Easter eggs that Ada might have concealed somewhere on the page. NEW FOR THIS BUNDLE.”

Pay/donate US$7 or more and you get eight more books in the same way for a total of fifteen, headlined by Dr. Thomas Snyder’s “The Art of Sudoku” and Mike Selinker’s “The Maze of Games”. Increase your payment/donation to US$15 and up for a total of twenty-one books plus the audiobook version of “The Maze of Games” and one more, containing puzzles pointing to hints to a super-meta for “The Maze of Games”, once it is written in a couple of months’ time. Increase your payment/donation to US$42 or more and US$25.01 of it will cover the cost of a hardback copy of “The Maze of Games”, but you have to pay shipping on top… and shipping a hardback book overseas is seriously expensive, raising the effective price past the GBP 50 mark.

Being cynical to a fault, it looks like several of these books could not actually have previously been bought as dead-tree books (except possibly via print-on-demand services…?) and it’s possible that several of the puzzles may well have been published elsewhere previously, but you’re still getting an awful lot of high-quality puzzles for a remarkably low cost…. which could be entirely a charity donation if you wanted it to be one. The star attraction is probably “The Maze of Games”, and it’s likely that you might have backed it when the Kickstarter campaign was in progress. However, if you didn’t, you can get a wealth of wonderfully well-realised ideas at an extremely attractive price.

Highly recommended!

Real Escape Game TV

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Television set
(Tip of the hat to our friends at Clavis Cryptica and Bother’s Bar; this post is something of a team effort.)

Real Escape Game is the English-language brand that SCRAP, the pregenitor of the genre, use for their exit game activities. Their games have proved so popular, and so well-established, that they have extended the brand into the world of TV. My Japanese is not great, but Google Translate and the Wikipedia page suggests that 2013 (and the first three days of 2014) had four episodes of “Real Escape Game TV” broadcast in Japan. An English-language press release from TBS, the network on which the shows were broadcast, suggests the show “has been nominated for the 2014 International Digital Emmy Awards“.

The press release describes the show as “a real time viewer participation telemovie”, which is an unwieldy but accurate description. Imagine a race-against-time action drama in the style of 24, with a heavy emphasis on puzzles. Viewers can solve the puzzles, in real time, on a web site, hopefully before they are solved on-screen as part of the story. Solving early puzzles leads to later ones. A frequently-upated real-time display counts the number of participants and the much, much smaller number who have solved all parts of that episode’s puzzle.

A spin-off drama (again, use your favourite online translator on the Japanese Wikipedia page) details the progress of five girls through a series of much more literally-interpreted locked rooms, with much less time pressure on the play-along-at-home puzzles.

I speak little more Japanese than I speak Hungarian, by the margin of “a year of night-school classes long ago” to zero, but you may get a feel for the sense of event in the first episode, even if you – like me! – cannot crack the puzzles.

It’s delightful to see the TV companies of the world giving this sort of show a try at all!