Game Design Blog

  • 49 Treasure Hunt Clues and Ideas

    Treasure hunt

    Treasure hunts and scavenger hunts, are fun activities for kids of all ages. They are ideal for a birthday, Christmas, Halloween, or just to pass a rainy afternoon.

    The challenge is creating enough fun treasure hunt clues for kids and making them easy enough to solve without being too easy. We’ve therefore put together this list of 49 free treasure hunt ideas and riddles for both younger and older children.

    How to create a scavenger hunt How to create a treasure hunt Clue ideas...

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  • 13 Ideas for Murder Mystery Riddles

    skeleton

    If you’re creating a murder mystery then clues as to whodunit are an integral part of it. These can be interwoven into the plot and can either be solved as a group, or individually, depending on how you set up the game. Good riddles help keep the game flowing and normally the only reward necessary for solving them is the satisfaction that you're a step closer to finding out whodunit, however you can also give some other rewards:

    Play money, if that’s part of the game. A two minute...

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  • Cryptic Crossword Answers

    Return to the guide on solving cryptic crosswords.

     

    Anagram Crossword Answers

    In the anagram crossword puzzles I've coloured the components of the clue below, so you can see how each component fits into the overall clue:

    Green = Anagram Indicator
    Blue = The anagram itself
    Purple = The clue

    Across

    1.        ...

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  • How to create your own Murder Mystery Party

    Writing a murder mystery

    Murder mystery parties are great fun and good team building activities with the added tension that your team mate might just be the murderer.

    There are some good murder mystery boxed games out there, however they won't be adapted to your own group of friends or family, so if you're planning on hosting a murder mystery party one solution is to create your own murder mystery game!

    This can seem like a daunting task and if you're not used to creating games, then I'd recommend...

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  • How to write or design game rules

    When you buy a game and open the box, it's exciting to flick through all the cards and admire the board and playing pieces. If you're like me, you will appreciate the details in the artwork and just soak up the whole ambience that any board game, card game or party game has.

    When you get to the rules, you may find that your enthusiasm takes a dip.

    Players want to play the game right out of the box and find it frustrating having to wade through rules which are surprisingly often...

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    The emotionally charged party game - on Kickstarter
  • Personality Test - Which Geek Are You?

    Which geek are you personality quiz

    Find out which famous geek you are with our new personality test.

    Start the test and see if you're:

    Willow Rosenberg from Buffy the Vampire Slayer You are Richard Hendriks from Silicon Valley Felicity Smoak from Arrow Sherlock Holmes from well errr ... Sherlock Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory

     

     

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  • Game design needs more than a good idea

    Mankind has enjoyed games for thousands of years, from the earliest ones featuring stones or bones being thrown onto a “board” drawn in the sand, through to the modern video and board games, some of which, such as chess, have also been around for many hundreds of years. But what is it that makes some games a resounding success, whilst others just don’t make it?

    Essential features for successful games

    Whatever the genre – video games or board games, there are a number of...

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    Video game illustration
  • How to Solve Cryptic Crosswords

    Anagrams An anagram clue is comprised of 3 parts: A clue to the answer  An anagram indicator The anagram itself For example: Drawn-out, rambling and rude (8) Here the anagram is drawn-out, the anagram indicator is rambling and the clue is rude.  The answer is untoward. Fail to log red letter? (6) The anagram is log red, the indicator is fail to and the clue is letter This clue ends with ? which means that there's something in the clue that's a trick question. The answer is lodger, a...

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