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Cryptic Crosswords

Added Attractions
Letter Theory
Colorado Cryptic (2008 NPL Convention)
Ghost Net (2008 Ghost Patrol application)
Fifty-Fifty (for a friend's 50th birthday)
Multifaceted Baltimore (one of the official cryptics

of the 2009 NPL Convention)
Watery Weekend Workout (2011 NPL Convention

cryptic competition, 20-clue limit)
Plainly In The Maine (2014 NPL Convention)
Mixed Doubles (in Cryptic All-Stars 2)

Can You Dig It? (2016 NPL Convention)

Sandwiches (in Cryptic All-Stars 4)

Mirror Ball (in Cryptic All-Stars 4, with Roger Wolff)
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Some Puzzle Hunts I've Written

or Co-Written

DASH 3
(2011 multi-city walkaround hunt)
A Matter Of Con Science
(Saturday night event at 2013 NPL Convention,
co-written with Mark Halpin and Darren Rigby)
Ya Buncha Yoyos
(2016 Palindrome practice hunt)
Damn This Traffic Jam
(2017 Palindrome practice hunt)
Space Oddity
(2018 Palindrome practice hunt)

The Menagerie

(Online bonus for Enigmas playing card deck)

Grace And Edgar's Wedding (standalone online

puzzle hunt accompanying the second season of

The Afterparty on AppleTV+)

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Variety Freeform Puzzles

Triptychs
Out Of Sorts
Impostors
Common Bonds
Tic Tac Clues
First Things First
A Definitive Puzzle
Rules (Iron Puzzler 2011)
Closed Face Sandwiches (Iron Puzzler 2011)

Cryptopsychology (original, harder version

of a puzzle hunt puzzle)

Riverbank Puzzles (online puzzles for The Enigmatist)

Get It Together (bonus for the Enigma jigsaw)
Forest For The Trees (armchair road rallye)

Waterspheres (alternative, more challenging

version of a Puzzles For Democracy puzzle)

(hints here, if needed)
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Pub Quiz Handouts

Pix Mix (anagrams of famous people)
Award Winking Films (trivia and wordplay)

Do You Hear What I Hear? (ID songs in scenes)

News On Film (ID the film from the headline)

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Short Wordplay-Based Puzzles

A page of NPL Flats and other short puzzles
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Variety Crosswords

Multicross (Games Magazine, Dec 2008)
Bidirectional Multicross
Tetracross (Will Shortz's Wordplay, Dec 2014)
Christmas Threes (2017 holiday greetings)

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Puzzle Programs

Big Square (daily wordgame in a 6x6 grid)

Statue Park Solver (also helps construct)

Acrostic Assistant (construction helper)

Acrostic Formatter (input data, export result)

Dropquote Assistant (solving helper)

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 (home page)

Mystery Rallye
Advisory Boards
Write-Offs
Frontal Lobotomy (with Jeffrey Harris)
War Game (with Mark Halpin)
Six Easy Pieces
Frame Of Reference

The following metapuzzles depended upon additional information available from other sources during the Hunt:

Witness Group and Meta (Symbols of Tibetan Buddhism)
Dossier 6 Meta (Where's Waldo)
Endgame Means Logic Puzzle (logic)
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MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 (home page)
(Editor)

Confirmed Machine 925 (with art by Mark Halpin)
Bits And Pieces
Side By Side By Side (with Mark Halpin)
Tangled Web
Almost Loaded
Casting Spells
4 = 2
Arts And Letters
Box Sets
String Maze
Don't Let Me Down (with Mark Halpin)

The following metapuzzles depended upon additional information available from other sources during the Hunt:

1903 Meta -- Edison's Phonograph
1804 Meta -- Pyramids Of The Aztecs
1845 Event -- The Alphabet Tower
1804 Supplementary Information
1845 Supplementary Information

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MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 (home page)

Travelogue
Something For Everyone (with Mark Halpin)
Zodiac Quest
Staggered Starts
Triptychs
Lesser Works

Missed Connections (with Rachael Groynom and Joe DeVincentis)

The following metapuzzles depended upon additional information available from other sources during the Hunt:

Dog Show Meta-Meta (end of Round 1)
Ysera Meta
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MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 (home page)
(Editor-In-Chief and Meta Captain)

The Neverending Story (with Mark Halpin)
Oxford Children's Dictionary
A Wizard Of Earthsea (with Mark Halpin)
Love's Labor's Crossed
Whose Turn Is It Anyway?
How To Spell With Gears And Arrows
Heartford Plot Device Puzzle (6 answers)
Howtoona Plot Device Puzzle (6 answers)

The following metapuzzles depended upon additional information available from other sources during the Hunt:

The Investigation (Act 1 meta)
Herschel Hayden (Act 2 meta) (with Mark Halpin)
Heartford (Act 3 meta) (with Mark Halpin)
Battery Pack (Act 3 final meta) (with Eric Berlin, Foggy Brume, and Mark Halpin)
Completing Your Story (endgame meta) (with Mark Halpin)

SELECTED PROJECTS

(2018-present) One of several regular writers and hosts for O'Brien's Irish Pub Quiz, the longest-running pub quiz in the L.A. area

(2025) Ported our 2023 word-game app Big Square to a daily online game.

(2024) Constructor (with David Kwong) of a 4-puzzle set for Neil Patrick Harris' Wondercade newsletter, revealing an important message about the publication

(2023) Puzzle Consultant (with David Kwong) for the second season of the AppleTV+ series The Afterparty, including an online puzzle hunt

(2023) Co-founder of Quickthorn Games and chief game-play designer of the company's word-puzzle app Big Square

(2023) Co-writer (with Eric Berlin and Mark Halpin) of the puzzle hunt featured during Bee Week leading up to the Scripps National Spelling Bee

(2023) Contributor of puzzles to the 51-puzzle fundraiser Puzzles For Democracy, a collection of puzzles from about 30 puzzle authors

(2022) Puzzle Designer (with David Kwong) for Rapyd's Hack the Galaxy competition involving more than 50 puzzle-hunt style puzzles

(2022) Puzzle Consultant (with David Kwong) for the Apple TV+ series The Afterparty

(2021) Puzzle Designer (with David Kwong) for the Ghostbusters: Afterlife ScARe video game

(2021) Puzzle Consultant, including original puzzle design, for Ghostbusters: Afterlife

(2021) Puzzle Consultant for Los Angeles run of David Kwong's The Enigmatist, with a pre-show puzzle room

(2021) Designer (with David Kwong) of an Instagram puzzle experience for Google Arts & Culture

(2021) Puzzle Designer for The Door You Never Saw Before, through the Geffen Stayhouse

(2021) Consultant on the CW series Kung Fu

(2021) Contributor of puzzles used on second season of Mental Samurai

(2020) Puzzle Designer for David Kwong's online puzzle show Inside The Box, through the Geffen Stayhouse (September 2020 - March 2021)

(2020) Contributor of food-themed crosswords to Hungry Games

(2020) Puzzle Designer for Enigmas Deck and online puzzle hunt (here is the July 1, 2020 Kickstarter that raised more than $100K)

(2020) Co-constructor (with David Kwong) of an engagement party puzzle hunt at the New York Historical Society

(2020) Puzzle Consultant on the Enigma jigsaw puzzle

(2019) Consulting Producer, Puzzles for David Kwong's The Enigmatist, including this puzzle set and a pre-show puzzle room

(2016-18) Consultant (uncredited) in collaboration with David Kwong on hidden codes for two seasons of the NBC series Blindspot

(2016) Designer of the collaborative simulation game The Ultimate Bowl for Professor Elissa Grossman's Gaming The System business course at USC

(2013-18) Designer and presenter of warm-up games at Crosswords LA (2018 was the final year of the event)

(2012) Member of the design team for the weekend-long game Doctor When (including this audio logic puzzle where four snippets of disembodied conversations from a decades-past holiday party encode an important location)

(2005-present) Designer of several unpublished board games, including the strategic word game Plexis in which players move their own army of letters on a board, pushing other players' letters and competing to form words in the limited scoring slots, as well as more than a dozen group games played on the official program or after hours at the National Puzzlers' League annual convention

(1995) Wrote a portion of the national, atlas-based road rally The St. Valentine's Day Massacre