How does a puzzle designer find new projects?
Or: A chain of coincidences – from further education to a game show
I’m often asked where, as a puzzle designer, I get my commissions and projects from. Sometimes the answer is as simple as ‘canvassing for business’, but there are also stories of surprising twists and unexpected connections that ultimately lead to new projects. I’d like to share one such story here, which shows how a visit to a trade fair and a comment under a Facebook post led, years later, to an exciting commission to help design a political game show.
Many years ago, during one of my regular visits to the Internation Toy Fair, I stopped by the Haus des Spiels in Nuremberg. It is a unique institution dedicated to preserving and cultivating the cultural heritage of play. Back then, working there was a dream of mine, and so I followed the house's activities and events for several years. At that time, I did not yet know that my career would lead me into self-employment.
In 2019, I came across a Facebook post (this story really does go back a while) about a project presentation at the Haus des Spiels. It showed the first results of a research project that trained an AI using board game instructions. Unfortunately, my enthusiastic inquiry at the time only got me the answer that the project would initially be used for internal purposes only. The EMPAMOS project, which aims to use AI to extract the motivating elements of games, was soon forgotten again.
At the beginning of 2021, after some time as a part-time puzzle author, I decided to become fully self-employed. As a strong believer in lifelong learning, it was a given for me to take part in further training on a regular basis.
A year later, at the start of 2022, I came across the KUBUZZ program, which offers free seminars and workshops for artists and creatives. So at the end of January, I found myself sitting in a marketing seminar right at the kickoff. The seminar leader was thrilled about my niche business and told me about a special training course in Nuremberg that had grown out of a research group working on board game instructions and AI.Even though the Facebook post I mentioned was already three years in the past, the information sounded familiar to me, and after doing some research, I decided to sign up for the EMPAMOS training course.
In the summer of 2022, I traveled to Nuremberg regularly to attend the training. I learned a great deal about the method developed by the research program, the game mechanics analyzed, and the motivating factors that make a good game.
A few months after I finished the training, the initiator and lead professor of the project contacted me by email. He told me about an association in Berlin, Das Progressive Zentrum, which works to strengthen democratic processes and was looking for an escape room expert. Shortly afterward, I had a phone call with the project manager, who told me about a planned congress meant to make democratic processes more understandable, visible, and tangible. For this purpose, they were planning a kind of large live escape room event for the congress participants. During that very first call, I remarked that her description sounded more like an interactive game show than an escape room event to me. By then it was July 2022.
After that, from my point of view, nothing happened on the matter for 12 months. Self-employment kept me fully occupied, and since not every phone call can lead to a commission, I did not give the game show at the political congress much more thought. Then, in July 2023, exactly one year later, an email arrived confirming that the project was actually going to happen and that I could be part of it as the originator of the idea and game expert.
You can see the result of this extraordinary project here:
One important insight that this absurd story has confirmed for me once again: you never know who might need support with puzzle and game mechanics, and you can never tell which direction the next project will come from. Sometimes the phone rings because someone discovered this website and was looking for exactly this. But much more often, I spoke with someone at some point, and much later that person remembers me and my puzzles in a completely different context. That is why it is important to give chance a helping hand with a love of networking, extraordinary events, and constant curiosity!