Mystery Puzzle Games and their Origin From….Poe? (Or, what was the first Mystery Puzzle Game?)

 Mystery Puzzle Games and their Origin From….Poe?

 (Or, what was the first Mystery Puzzle Game?)

Note: This article was originally published on ESCAPETHEROOMers and is a combination and expansion of some of the article originally posted at Voynich. Please visit for many amazing articles and reviews! https://www.escapetheroomers.com/articles-perspectives

Mystery Puzzle Games (MPG) is one of several terms used to describe an explosively growing hobby full of armchair detectives, ghost hunters, treasure seekers, and solvers of puzzles and mysteries…a hobby the traces its origins back to Edgar Allan Poe with roots leading back further into ancient cryptography, Detective Fiction, and the history of puzzles.  There are other viable terms and names, but for consistency, Mystery Puzzle Game is the terminology these articles will use.

Defining this hobby can be as simple as knowing it when you see it, and as difficult as slicing through multiple overlapping Venn diagrams.  There is disagreement as to where the lines are, which circles create the Venn diagrams,  and what actually belongs in this hobby, along with many “cousin” lines and offshoots (escape rooms, puzzle boxes, etc.).

Many hobbies are defined by those within it, whereas this hobby has been created through multiple means, times, and methods without even the forethought of being a part of a larger, specific hobby.  For example, some just wanted to create a more immersive murder mystery story, others wanted to add storylines or themes to puzzles, whereas others wanted to create immersive worlds and experiences.  Some have created books, some have added physical props to books, others have created subscription boxes with paperwork and artifacts, while others have moved to digital platforms...so, with all of this variety, how do we define this hobby?

One of the best ways to describe the genre is to provide examples of the largest players in the field, and work outward from there: 

• Hunt a Killer

• Deadbolt Mystery Society

• Murder Mystery in a Box

• Mysterious Package Company

From there, there are many newcomers in the market, a small sample of which are:

• The Curious Correspondance Club

• The Scarlet Envelope

• The Boundless Library

• The Society of Curiosities

Another type is puzzle books, from companies such as:

• Escapages

• Escape Book

• Montague Island Mysteries

And these are just some of the 100s of samples that are known.

So, what defines this hobby and separates it from similar hobbies?  One way is to investigate what it is not, although that line can often be fuzzy (the Venn diagram of this hobby overlaps several other hobbies, not surprisingly).

What it is not:

• Escape rooms (although they are a close cousin and often progenitor of this hobby)

• In person

• Virtual

• ARGs (Augmented Reality Games) (another cousin)

• WhoDunnit? Detective stories...a really close sibling that crosses the line at times

• Board games (with some exceptions)

• Card games (with some exceptions)

Confusing, isn't it?

So, what are the key elements of a Mystery Puzzle Game (MPG)? The three concentric circles of the Venn diagram are in the name itself

1. Mystery

2. Puzzle

3. Game

It is a game, first and foremost.  It is a "game" in the fact that the reader or player needs to absorb information and act upon it -- versus a passive reading of a novel, for example.

It contains a mystery to solve.  This is the primary action the player must complete.  It can be as simple as guessing the killer from evidence provided, to uncovering layers of mystery and meaning through hidden clues and across multiple products.

It is a puzzle.  The mystery is not just presented, but must actively be solved, whether through deductive reasoning, decoding ciphers, researching real-world locations for clues, or drawing a map and folding a piece of paper, for example.

So, putting this together, this definition of the hobby is a game where a player solves a mystery through puzzles.  There are many exceptions to the rule, but it helps to frame this as the center line for this and future articles.

Now, how did this all begin and what does Edgar Allan Poe have to do with anything?  He didn’t create games, never sent boxes to players at home to solve, and definitely had no concept of this genre even existing, so what makes him the keystone?

First, to help keep everything in perspective, is the basic timeline of the earliest era of this hobby, coined here as “The Progenitor Age,” since many of these works are not fully realized Mystery Puzzle Games, but are the evolutionary steps towards them.

• 1843:  The Gold Bug (Cipher in a story)

• 1881: The Cryptogram, book 2 of Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon by Jules Verne (descendant of The Gold Bug)

• 1907: Jun 30: 1st Detective Puzzle published in New York Tribune*

• 1926: The Haverfordian publishes The Shadow of the Goat, a short story by John Dickson Carr in their college publication that allows the reader a chance to solve the mystery before the answer was published in the following month.

• 1928: Feb 28: Cipher Stories Puzzle Book (Puzzles and stories with ciphers Consisting of twenty-five original short stories, dealing with life, love, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; each story containing at least two vital cipher puzzles

• 1928: Nov The Baffle Book published (Wren, McKay)

• 1929: Oct: The 2nd Baffle Book published (Wren, McKay)

• 1930: Oct: The 3rd Baffle Book published (Wren, McKay)

• 1932: Minute Mysteries is published (Ripley)

• 1933: The Mystery Puzzle Book is published. (Wren, McKay)

• 1935: Photocrimes published in Britain in Weekly Illustrated

• 1936: Crimefile No. 1: The File on Blothio Blane

• 1936: Sep 20: The first Photocrimes in the US is published in The Des Moines Register

• 1936: Nov 30: Photocrimes book is published.

• 1936: The Marceau Case (dossier novel)

• 1936: X. Jones of Scotland Yard (dossier novel)

• 1937: Crimefile No. 2: File on Rufus Ray

• 1937: File on Robert Prentice

• 1937: Photocrimes

• 1937: Crimefile No. 3: File on Fenton and Farr

• 1938: Crimefile No. 4: File on Claudia Cragge

• 1938: The Malinsay Massacre

• 1939: Herewith the Clues

• 1940s: Photocrimes in Des Moines Register using photocrimes from David Nowinson (creator of "You Solve the Crime") and Harold Ripley (Creator of Minute Mysteries)  

In future articles these works will be discussed in more detail, but for now, how did Poe become the first data point?

The three concentric circles leading into this hobby, again, are: Mysteries, Puzzles, and Games.

Mysteries (Detectives, Locked Room)

Mysteries have been around for a long time.  Most mystery puzzle games dig into this history, often focused on detective-style work.  Edgar Allan Poe is the creator of the fiction detective series with Dupin.  Dupin would lead directly to Holmes, which would lead into Agatha Christie, Henri Bencolin, and dozens of others.  Detective Fiction exploded in the 1930s leading to hundreds of books, magazines, and a craze around people trying to figure out how crimes were done as they read the stories.

Edgar Allan Poe also created the locked room mystery (A mysterious case of a death in a locked room with no apparent way for the victim to have been murdered). with Murders in the Rue Morgue.  The locked room mystery is also a progenitor of computer escape-the-room style games, which would lead to True Dungeon at Gencon in 2003 followed by the modern Escape Room hobby--topics for a future article.

Puzzle (cryptography, Solve-it-Yourself)

Cryptography has been around for a very long time and has an integral place in history.  However, it was not popularized until Edgar Allan Poe championed it in his works and articles that he published. This lead to his 1843 work The Gold Bug which centers around a cipher that is presented in the story in a way in which the reader could have solved it themselves before reading the very detailed solution in the story (it was not presented as a game, as per se, but it was presented in a way to educate and teach the reader about cryptography).  (Note: if you read this story there are depictions of characters that do not conform to modern sensibilities around race).  While The Gold Bug isn’t technically a Solve-it-Yourself book, the cipher portion is a step towards that genre that would become a foundation of this hobby.

The Gold Bug (1843) is a direct ancestor to Jules Verne’s The Cryptogram, book 2 of Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon.  Then by 1907 the first Detective Puzzle was published in the New York Tribune.  These were visual puzzles for kids to solve with prompts explaining the setup and clews (as they were called).  These are fairly simple and straightforward for adults, but provide a fun example of detective-themed puzzles and shows the influence that detective fiction would continue to have on the game hobby. 

Game 

Games have been around since ancient times and the history of games that is most related to this hobby begins in 1913 with the publication of the first “Word-Cross” in the New York World which led to an explosion of adults in the 1920 working out crosswords (and a few other similar puzzles) at home as a hobby, while there kids would focus on Detective Puzzles and other similar simplified-for-children puzzles.

So now, by the late 1920s, all of the seeds have been planted and have been starting to grow...ready to explode in the 1930s in the first wave of Mystery Puzzle Games!  The final culmination of these paths leading from ancient times, through Edgar Allan Poe, and the idea of publishing puzzles that could be solved at home (i.g. the Crossword Puzzle) would be in 1926...

In 1926, The Haverfordian published The Shadow of the Goat, a short story by John Dickson Carr in their college publication that allowed the reader a chance to solve the mystery before the answer was published in the following month.  It was an “impossible crime,” one that on the surface, like a locked-door murder, was impossible.  This story took the Detective Crime Fiction created by Poe and continued by many, but added the twist of a game element!  Instead of a reader trying to solve it as they went along with the story, this story had a purposeful break where the reader is asked to try to solve it before the answer was provided in the following issue!  This would seem to be the very first intentional Mystery Puzzle Game (albeit in an infancy), with a story, clues, and a puzzle (in this case, a Whodunnit?).  

In our next article, we will investigate the 1930s and the very first wave of Mystery Puzzle Games and their kin in the Progenitor Age!