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Ivan Koswara (chaotic_iak)
Last year, I gave the talk "Mathematics for Puzzles", giving various examples about mathematical concepts that appear in puzzles -- logic puzzles, puzzle games, and more. There are so many examples that there's enough material for a second installment. The talk will be accessible to the general audience, so don't worry about advanced mathematics or anything like that. You can expect things such as: topology, graph theory, and more.
Ludipe
Most puzzle games aspire to be something elegant, coherent, and concise. You only add the strictly necessary. Graphics must be extremely clean, even abstract. There can be a tiny touch of narrative, something that contextualizes the mechanics, but without taking the spotlight.
These creative principles are incredibly common in the puzzle community, and they have led to many amazing games. But that doesn't mean it's the only way to make a game. I'd argue there's value in pushing against these principles. I want to see more puzzle games that are weird, messy, and over the top. Just like Nicolas Cage.
Dan Wiseman, The Detective Society
Dan is a co-founder of award-winning 'The Detective Society', a board games company based in London, UK. In this micro-talk, hear about how their digital hybrid games company was launched from a single puzzle sold in their local pub. Dan will dive into the mechanics of their first game, and how it did some innovative stuff, weaving between tabletop and digital worlds.
dietzribi
Breaking down the design of my upcoming game "UvsU: You vs You", where you play against your past self, and how to make time based puzzles that emphasize thinky solutions over precision and reflexes.
Greg Filpus (Aspeon)
Recent popular games like Animal Well and Tunic have featured metapuzzles: puzzles that bring together information or resources across more than just a single puzzle. Outside of the video game world, metapuzzles often show up at the end of puzzlehunts, and the puzzlehunt community has developed its own terminology and design principles around them. I’ll discuss how puzzlehunt designers create metapuzzles and how these ideas can be applied to thinky games.
Daniel King, The Boston Globe
Originally conceived as a way to lighten the news, the “newspaper game” has become a multimillion-dollar pillar of modern media organizations. But what exactly is a “newspaper game,” and what can its past tell us about its future? Join The Boston Globe’s director of games in exploring this fascinating and transformative corner of the puzzle ecosystem.
Matt MacLean, Generic Lake Monster
While not all thinky games are exactly the same, those with a grid-based topography, turn-based timing, and limited randomness are some of the easiest games to make user-friendly for players with motor control concerns, but have you also thought about features that help those with cognitive challenges like dyslexia, difficulty focusing, or screaming kids that make it hard to concentrate?
This talk will cover ways to make your thinky game accessible with stories from developmental stumbles and shipped successes.
Alastair Aitchison, Playful Technology
Every game has constraints: the rules that define the play space, permit certain actions, or determine victory conditions. In many puzzle games, those constraints _are_ the game itself. This talk explores puzzles as constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs), where the creator defines a set of rules and solvers find assignments that satisfy them.
While CSPs are often demonstrated with grid-based logic puzzles such as sudoku, I’ll show how the same principles can model a much broader range of language, logic, and spatial puzzles, drawing on recent videogames including Lingo, Blue Prince, and Is This Seat Taken? I'll also demonstrate how constraint-modelling tools support puzzle creation, ensuring solvability, uniqueness, and rapid exploration of new puzzle types.
Andrew Plotkin
What does it mean to take a puzzle to the next level? In Hadean Lands (parser IF, 2014) I designed a game where every solved puzzle "collapses" to become a single move in a larger puzzle. And larger still, and so on... Other games have taken a similar tack, notably Baba Is You.
What does it mean for a game to "scale up" in this way? Is it different from the familiar concept of the metapuzzle? (Spoiler: yes.) What kinds of puzzles are amenable to this scaling idea? And why is it so awesome, anyway?
Cerise Talis
This talk describes various silly reasons to abandon a puzzle game idea.
Many a puzzle is scrapped for lack of structure by which to become a game. These "systems that could never be games" map poorly onto thinky (and in particular, sokoban) expectations. By dissecting our baggage as game designers and players, we can approach a richer understanding of what games are possible to make.
Topics of discussion include: wordless games and the necessity of word-ful puzzle games, undo stack management, solution extractions, and the "no musical bird" problem.
Sylvia Aguiñaga, Ánimo Games
This talk explores how Star Stuff made “thinky” approachable without compromising depth. We iterated heavily on puzzle design while also shaping the world around it - through art, characters, animation, and rewards - to guide players toward curiosity rather than intimidation. I’ll share candid lessons from a small team learning how to balance tough puzzle design with warmth and charm, offering developers practical tools for approachability and giving players a new appreciation for how world building shapes challenge and joy.
Dom Camus
A short discussion of the issue of space in grid-based puzzle games, primarily from a game design perspective. Why might you care about space, in what ways does it change a design and how can understanding it help you to make better games?
Nick Chen, PlayMath.org
Puzzle games aren’t just entertainment. They’re training for the most essential human ability: novel problem solving. Every great puzzle teaches players to face unfamiliar systems, notice patterns, test hypotheses, and adapt when the world changes. These are exactly the skills that define intelligence itself. This talk connects insights from indie “thinky” game design with research from learning science and the work of the PlayMath.org.
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