two

actually the number two IRL

Thanks for playing, everyone. I'll see you around.


This post is a choose-your-own adventure. Open the details tags to read about each specified thing:

ABDEC

ABDEC is another puzzle book from the same designer as LOK, and similar in a lot of ways: it's also a set of puzzles which require figuring out the rules yourself, with a theme about the language of a mysterious species of small creatures, and with some extra hidden secrets. I'd describe ABDEC as the more extreme version of LOK. LOK eases you into the rule-finding part of its puzzles by telling you a bunch of stuff to start, but ABDEC just sets out two basic princples (the rules are always consistent, every puzzle has a unique solution), says "Place all assigned shapes into the grid", and then literally everything else is up to you! It's definitely harder, and I'm not sure I enjoy it more than LOK; the unique solutions thing is a clever way of confirming rules, but also led to me doing a lot of paranoid "let me make sure I can't solve this another way" checking of puzzles I had already done. Still fun though! Highly recommended if you're experienced with puzzles and/or completed LOK and want more of the rule-finding stuff. And not just because I'm entirely stuck on puzzle 38 and might want hints.

Also I want to highlight the theme: the book is presented as a fictional textbook for the writing system of the "Abb" creatures, and justifes not disclosing some of the rules by being a digital scan of the last surviving copy of the book which was tragically damaged in a fire, complete with partially-burned pages. And where LOK has expansion puzzles with extra rules past the end of the book, ABDEC's bonus puzzles are drawn on graph paper and slipped in without comment before the back cover, like the notes of some scholar who forgot to take them out before scanning the book. I love it.

Printing: Booklet format works even better for ABDEC because it's not quite so many pages. Printing in colour is by no means necessary but it does make it look a bit nicer. Tearing the pages along the printed burn marks is optional, and I really hope they do that for the apparently planned physical edition.

Rat Bat attack pack

It's exactly what it looks like, it's paper models of a rat and a bat you cut out and fold up. I've currently got the rat done and it's sitting on my desk looking at me. It's cool. Not much more to say really!

Printing: There's almost enough bleed included on the back side for it to line up on the printer I used (which has terrible alignment between the front and pack of the page), but there's no reason to expect perfection out of such a thing.

Scaredy Cat Dungeon

Actually printed this one off a while ago but it's a free (or $2.10 USD if you want it in colour) print & play game so it can go in here. Not a solo game though, and it turns out it's somewhat difficult to convince people to play a game that consists of greyscale slips of printer paper you're keeping in a ziplock bag, so I haven't tested it much. It's a light press-your-luck game with emphasis on the luck, but there's still a bit of strategy to it and it does lead to some very funny moments where somebody else drawing the wrong card also ruins everything for you.

Printing: Cutting out and then gluing together all of the cards did seem to take a very long time, and it's hard to keep the card backs indistinguishable (as they need to be) because of how the print & play sheets are designed. If you have card sleeves it'd probably be fine though!


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