Hunting of the Shark: Bookish Highlights From Lone Shark Games

Lone Shark Games’ name has come up more than a few times over the years here at ARGNet. Some of those projects, like 2008’s Citizens of Virtue, which created a fictional megachurch to create an interactive morality play, were explicitly designed as alternate reality games. More often than not, though, the company’s projects trend towards puzzle hunts that revel in spectacle in a way that crosses over into territory familiar to alternate reality gaming fans.

Cards Against Humanity’s Holiday Bullshit puzzle experience in 2014, for example, hid puzzles in a series of seasonal mailings that led players to a safe on an uninhabited island containing a quarter of a million custom “Sloth” cards. And then there was VANISH: The Hunt for Evan Ratliff, which sent WIRED journalist Evan Ratliff across the United States as the target of a month-long manhunt, with Lone Shark Games orchestrating a series of clues to help readers hone in on his location. The company has done its fair share of pen-and-paper puzzle hunts, more often than not those puzzles go beyond the page, and ask “what would it look like if we turned Jonathan Coulton’s annual cruise into a boat-wide escape room”. In short: the company excels at live experiences that are hard to reduce onto a single page.

So to celebrate their 20th anniversary as a company, Lone Shark Games is crowdfunding the production of The Hunting of the Shark: 20 Years of Lone Shark Puzzlehunts, which pulls together a highlight reel of nationwide manhunts, ARGs, convention activations, and other puzzle hunts, condensing that into a book of puzzles.

The Puzzles Come First (and Last, and Everywhere In Between)
I had the chance to take a look at an early draft of The Hunting of the Shark, and it’s worth stressing that this is first and foremost a puzzle book. The book does provide something of a history of the company by presenting individual puzzles and sometimes even full puzzle hunts from events presented in chronological order, the book largely lets those puzzles speak for themselves, with brief introductions providing context surrounding how those puzzles were initially delivered.

This book is not an oral history of the company: rather, it’s a showcase of some of puzzles worth featuring, designed for events ranging from Magic: the Gathering Grand Prix tournaments to Renton River Days duckstravaganzas. Because of that, the featured puzzles are designed with a wide range of audiences in mind. Some puzzles may be fairly easy for the puzzle-inclined, while others might find one checking the solutions in the back of the book without a group of fellow solvers.

Puzzles on Puzzles on Puzzles: Yes, Even the Kickstarter Campaign Itself
As is Lone Shark Games tradition, the Kickstarter campaign itself is riddled with a series of puzzles, with shark puppet marketing consultant Butcher T Billiard-Marker pitching a series of bad stretch goal ideas, through puzzle updates. Which shouldn’t be too surprising, as the book itself contains highlights from a few prior Kickstarter puzzle campaigns, with the book featuring highlights from a few of The Maze of Games‘ campaigns in particular. Supporting the campaign at most levels will also unlock a subscription to “The Chums Site”, which plans on releasing dozens of additional puzzles that didn’t make the cut for the book.

The campaign also offers a number of add-ons that allow puzzlers to obtain Lone Shark Games’ backlog of physical and digital puzzle books and games at a steep discount – of particular note is the Sharknado tier (which includes The Maze of Games choose your own puzzle adventure, Puzzlecraft‘s guide to making just about every form of puzzle that exists, and the Letters to Margaret cruciverbal graphic novel (along with over a dozen other digital puzzle books) for $99, to backers who support the campaign before Thursday, March 28th. The most expensive The Meg tier even throws in copies of Lone Shark Games’ forays into board game design including Thornwatch, Apocrypha, The Ninth World, and Sausage Party.

A Puzzle Book that Doubles as Reference Manual
The Hunting of the Shark is a great puzzle book, and it’s oddly nostalgic to solve through puzzle hunts from previous nerdy events. There’s even a GenCon x MIT Mystery Hunt crossover, as Dan Katz worked with Lone Shark Games to bring Duck Konundrums to GenCon with Return to Zyzzlvaria. But the book serves as much as a showcase for what’s possible when blending puzzles and the real world, whether that involves secretly stamping attendees’ hands with the key to decipher mysterious glyphs at a Magic: the Gathering event, or charging PAX attendees to take selfies with robot and elf cosplayers, trusting that of course there would be robot and elf cosplayers at the event. The Kickstarter campaign’s frequent updates also provide a window into that history, with each update providing a more narrative retelling of some of Lone Shark Games’ greatest hits, spanning decades and over a hundred credited collaborators.

Puzzlecraft remains one of my reference points to make sure my idea of puzzle design doesn’t always fall back on standard ciphers and indexing puzzles. But The Hunting of the Shark may well serve as a practical companion to that, showing examples of how those puzzle types can find their way into the real world, and how they sometimes need some adjustments to fit in a variety of scenarios.

The Kickstarter campaign will run through April 11th, but some of the deals will be gone before week’s end, so check it out sooner rather than later.