Learn Puzzle Design

Partie 1

Introduction — Play and Puzzles

Before designing a puzzle, we check what 'play' is and where 'puzzle' sits inside it. The vocabulary here underpins every later chapter.

1. Chapitre 1What Is Play?Huizinga's magic circle, Caillois's four categories, Wittgenstein's language games. We begin by naming what we are making with tools left by philosophers a century ago.8 articles →
2. Chapitre 2Words for Talking About PuzzlesMDA, lenses, verbs, mechanics. We trace where the shared vocabulary of designers came from, and place this site's Mechanics Lexicon as its continuation.6 articles →

Partie 2

Lineage — Where Puzzles Came From

Most mechanics that feel new have a predecessor. Paper and wood, pencil, Flash, game jams — we follow what was invented and what was inherited, era by era.

1. Chapitre 3Puzzles of Paper and WoodFrom the 15 Puzzle to Rubik's Cube. Pre-digital objects had already invented today's verbs: arrange, rotate, fit, transfer.11 articles →
2. Chapitre 4Pencil Puzzles and NikoliHow Sudoku travelled the world, and the magazine its readers built. Pencil puzzles handed digital logic games the norms of guess-free logic and the unique solution.12 articles →
3. Chapitre 5Origins of the Digital PuzzleSokoban, Tetris, Boulder Dash, Lemmings. A handful of 1980s games fixed the grammar of pushing, falling and indirect control — the strata beneath everything made forty years later.13 articles →
4. Chapitre 6The 2000s Turn — Flash, Mobile, JamsToday's thinky scene grew out of browser corners and game jams. We trace, with examples, how something built in 48 hours becomes a classic a decade later.15 articles →

Partie 3

Verbs — The Grammar of Mechanics

Puzzles are made of verbs — push, roll, flip, rewind, nest. For each mechanic we take apart what choosing one verb decides, and what it leaves open.

1. Chapitre 7Push, Roll, FallStarting from the 'you cannot pull' that Sokoban invented, through rolling, gravity flips and track laying — the lineage of verbs that move things on a board, and the constraints each one imposes.7 articles →
2. Chapitre 8Perspective, Time, ClonesWhen what you move is not an object but your viewpoint, the clock, or yourself, what does the puzzle start to demand? Impossible figures, rewinding, time loops, self-cooperation, light and shadow.7 articles →
3. Chapitre 9Playing With the Rules ThemselvesMeta-puzzles, subtractive design, one-screen levels, programming. Building depth without adding rules — or by making the rules themselves move. Baba Is You and Stephen's Sausage Roll bracket the chapter.8 articles →

Partie 4

Difficulty — Designing the Learning Curve and Failure

'Hard' is not a single quantity. Teaching order, how hints appear, whether Undo exists, how dead ends are shown, and the yardsticks for measuring difficulty — we turn each knob a designer actually holds.

1. Chapitre 10Learning Curves and Teaching OrderIntroduce, deepen, integrate. The order of levels is a textbook's chapter order — the sequence itself teaches. Baba's vertical wall and the measurable effect of Mario 1-1.8 articles →
2. Chapitre 11Hints, Undo, Dead EndsHow failure is handled defines a game's character. How to show and hide hints, whether to permit or punish trial, how to make dead ends legible, where the overworld lets a stuck player go.10 articles →
3. Chapitre 12Measuring DifficultyCount of numbers used, solving-loop count, human time-to-solve, AI learning speed. Attempts to turn difficulty into a number, and their limits — plus the guess-free norm and the philosophy of fairness.10 articles →

Partie 5

Observation — Deduction and Story

Some puzzles have nothing to move. Looking, reading, remembering, writing down. The grammar shared by The Witness, Obra Dinn and Lorelei, and what is gained and lost when story enters the puzzle.

1. Chapitre 13Making Observation PlayDesigning puzzles that advance with the head alone. Where the deduction's memory lives (the in-game notebook), the border between walking and deducing, decipherment, solving by ear.9 articles →
2. Chapitre 14Story and PuzzleWhat separates puzzles with a story from those without? When a riddle expresses a specific idea, when two people solve together, when the world itself becomes the mystery.9 articles →

Partie 6

Generation — Levels by Hand, Levels by Machine

Build levels by hand, or have a machine generate them? Generation must deliver not just 'solvable' but 'interesting', and the two part ways in different places. Solvers, verifiers, evolutionary search, LLMs.

1. Chapitre 15Generating LevelsHand-built versus procedural, how to ideate levels, how to make 'solvable randomness'. WFC with reinforcement learning, and genetic algorithms steering toward 'just right' difficulty.10 articles →
2. Chapitre 16Generating Rules, Measuring With SolversGenerate rules, not levels. Writing pencil-puzzle rules as equations, having machines solve 500 PuzzleScript games, letting AI invent new Minesweeper rules. The verifier becomes the curriculum.10 articles →

Partie 7

Sound — Music That Supports Thinking

Puzzle music is a peculiar genre: it must never become wallpaper however long it plays. Writing no music, letting the stamp take over, assembling as you solve — sound as design.

1. Chapitre 17Sound That Never Becomes WallpaperEight contrasting solutions. COCOON's sustain, The Witness's silence, Outer Wilds's music as tool, Papers, Please's start-of-day cue, FRACT's music that grows as you solve, Baba's loop that never scolds.10 articles →

Partie 8

Designers — The Philosophies Behind the Work

Read the people, not the works. Designers use the same words — difficulty, subtraction, discovery — to mean different things. Two chapters for laying those differences side by side.

1. Chapitre 18Those Who Doubt the RulesDoubting convention down to its reasons, making non-explanation the work, insisting it is discovery rather than invention. Designers who stand on the side of the rules.9 articles →
2. Chapitre 19Those of Subtraction and TouchThe mechanism of adding no mechanism, years of depth packed into one swipe, making the answer belong to the solver. Designers who stand on the side of the player.11 articles →

Partie 9

Shipping — Make It, Then Deliver It

The work does not end when the design does. The market map, jams and grants, the daily format as distribution channel, and how to read the negative reviews that arrive after release.

1. Chapitre 20Market and DeliveryThe Steam puzzle market as seen from 130 reviews, the New Voices grant, the Thinky Puzzle Game Jam, the ecosystem of free daily puzzles — including the stance of starting only after deciding it won't sell.11 articles →
2. Chapitre 21Rereading the Negative ReviewsThe negative Steam reviews of acclaimed games mix real design flaws with voices from outside the intended audience. Five counter-reviews as practice in telling them apart.7 articles →

Reference companion

If the curriculum is for reading in order, the lexicon is for looking things up. Sokoban-likes, rule rewriting, deduction, routing — every mechanic a chapter names can be checked in the lexicon for its definition, lineage and design pitfalls.