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I mentioned new projects this year, and here’s a little one – a utility for tracking puzzles and games I release into the wild. I’ve dropped games and puzzle books off to Little Free Libraries before, and now I’ve added a fun way to learn a little more about where these games wind up.

I recently blindly purchased a puzzle game called Cantaloop (Chapter 1: Breaking into Prison). I’ve played a dozen different styles of escape room home games at this point, but even at this point, Cantaloop was quite different than any of the others both in aesthetic and puzzle design. Fans of old point & click computer games will love all the unique elements Cantaloop brings to the table. It’s essentially Monkey Island committed to paper.

We’re living in exciting times now. In the last two months, we’ve gotten THREE new cerebral survival game shows – four if you go back to January when Bloody Game 3 wrapped up. If you’ve ever had any interest in trying out a brainier game show, there’s never been a better time to start watching.

I stumbled across The Devil’s Plan on Netflx via the thumbnail depicting someone solving a tangram puzzle. That was enough for me to give it a shot, and boy did it surpass my expectations. The Korean game show has definitively captured my #1 spot in all of reality / game show history.

This weekend was a delightful adventure the likes of which I haven’t had in a while. I often forget how much there is to do around Madison and the Wisconsin Dells, and after this weekend, I’m not sure I ever had a full understanding of it in the first place. Somehow, we explored a few new places yet left with even more unexplored landmarks we want to return to.

I’m going to make a bold claim- You’ve Been Played, by Adrian Hon, is the best nonfiction book I’ve read in years. The last book I got this much value from was Thinking Fast and Slow, the seminal work of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. I don’t make that comparison lightly.

I’m currently smack dab in the middle of my busiest stretch of travel in quite some time, and between travel, work, and outside commitments, this may be the busiest I’ve been in my life. Not even factoring in trying to start a business and repair a barn.

Most of the puzzle hunts I’ve done recently are for bragging rights only, so it’s cool to finally be diving into one with a $10,000 prize. Enter the Passphrase is an active puzzle hunt that will wrap up on June 4th with the huge prize going to the first solver.