List of Puzzle Elements

A puzzle element is an essential building block or characteristic of a puzzle. This list is intended to be an early first draft of an ongoing community project to catalogue and organize puzzle elements into a hierarchical and useful taxonomy, and should eventually catalog every page that is a member of Category:Puzzle Elements.

Contributors are strongly encouraged to make edits to this page and to start discussion topics in the accompanying Talk page. The following is a list of suggested editing conventions:

• <code>[[Name]]</code> for each proposed Puzzle Elements (these can link to blank pages while this taxonomy is evolving)
• italics for new additions
• strikethough for deletions
• Supported, Neutral, and Opposed suggestions - Used as discussion prompts for things like name suggestions or Talk section discussions).

Presentation Elements

Presentation Elements refers to the surface form of a puzzle (how it is presented to the solver). These elements should all be characteristics that a lay-person or non-puzzler can identify and describe, without hunt experience or puzzling knowledge. Because they are surface level characteristics, structure elements should never require any spoiler warnings.

• Accessibility - Accessibility Friendly & Content Warning tags
• Media type - Elements that deviate from a "pen-and-paper" medium, or printable / static web page:
  • Audio - Audio file or collection of such files
  • Video - Video clip or collection of such clips
  • Physical Puzzle - Physical object that requires manipulation or examination
  • Interaction - Interaction event that requires physical and live presence. Could be subdivided further into Event, Runaround, Scavenger Hunt, etc
  • Interactive - Game applet, interactive fiction, mods or levels for external video games, ClueKeeper app, augmented reality, etc. Could be subdivided further particularly for Interactive Fiction
  • Tie-In Puzzle - Puzzle appears somewhere in the real world, likely deliberately synchronised so as to be released concurrent with the puzzle (i.e. published newspaper crossword, live podcast, art installation, etc)
  • Code - Executable code that requires compilation or interpretation [Better name?]
  • File Archives - Downloadable archives (.ZIP, etc) [Better name?]
  • Others - Spreadsheet?
• Presentation - Top level, and most immediately apparent appearance of the puzzle
  • Image Heavy - Puzzle consisting largely of images
  • Text Heavy - Choose Your Own Adventure, Walkthrough, Checklist, Script, Diary
  • Minimalist - Puzzles where extremely little information is apparent
  • Clue Centric - Image clues, Numbered clues, Unnumbered clues
  • Grid - May include Circular Grid, Spiral Grid, Hexagonal Grid
• Instructions - Nature of instruction provided with the puzzle
  • Explicit Instructions - Instructions are provided explicitly as part of the puzzle
  • Example Instructions - Examples are provided as part of the puzzle, but deduction of rules is intended to be a part of the puzzle
  • Flavortext - Flavortext is provided, which may provide some cryptic allusions to the nature of the puzzle
  • Asked And Answered - Special category of puzzle where a narrative element is posed within the puzzle and answer provides a resolution to that question
• Completion - Submission mechanism that deviates from a regular answer checker
  • Sub-answer Checking - Mechanism for submitting answers to sub-puzzles for intermediate confirmation
  • Task Completion - Completion of puzzle is contingent on finalizing a particular task

Content Elements

Content Elements refers to techniques that are encountered during the solving of a puzzle. Due to their size, these have been separated into three Subgroups:

Puzzle Type

Puzzle Type is the main categorization of a puzzle and the categorization that is most likely to help solvers find other similar puzzles

• Word Puzzles
  • Acrostic
  • Crossword - See Crossword variants for major variants including: Cryptic Crossword, Diagramless Crossword, Fill-In, but also would include Marching Bands, Rows Garden and Some Assembly Required as common puzzle hunt occurrences.
  • Word Ladder
  • Rearrangement - All word play variants that involve unscrambling letters or words. Would include Dropquote, Trigram Hell, Interwoven Strings
  • Word Search - Includes regular word searches as well as Boggle-Style Wordsearch (subsection on main page)
  • Cryptogram - Substitution ciphers, specifically, with subpage Cryptolist.
  • Flats
  • Printer's Devilry
  • Rebus

• Logic Puzzles
  • Grid Constraint - This puzzle type has a HUGE collection of subtypes (see Cross+A, James Marshall's, or Angela and Otto Janko's puzzle summaries) and care ought to be taken to curate a manageable list from this set. Common sub-categorisations may be Akari, Battleship, Crossnumber, Corral, Fillomino, Hashi wo Kakero, Heyawake, Hitori, Kakuro, LITS, Masyu, Nonogram, Nurikabe, Numberlink, Shikaku, Slitherlink, Sudoku, Yajilin
  • Deduction - Regular logic deduction like the Zebra Puzzle, but also may include game state reconstructions, murder mystery deductions and games like Mafia and Werewolf, induction problems, etc
  • Optimization - Puzzles where a situation is presented with multiple possible solutions, but the best or shortest solution need to be identified.
• Spatial Puzzles
  • Maze
  • Jigsaw Puzzle - All puzzles with reconstruction elements (i.e. jigsaws, tangrams, etc). May include subcategories for Tiling, 3D Jigsaw, Burr, etc)
  • Sliding Puzzle - Games like Sam Loyd's sliding puzzle, Rush Hour, the Century puzzle, etc
• Other Puzzles
  • Metapuzzle - Special puzzle type that relies on other puzzle answers. May include Shell Meta and Pure meta as subcategories
  • Instructional - Includes Conundrum as incredible convoluted instructional puzzles
  • Rebus - (Note: are Rebus puzzles Word Puzzles? Or unique enough in structure to justify being separated?)
  • Trivia - Half characterized by presentation (Questions with specific answers) and half by content (Questions about various subjects)

Solve Path Elements

Solve Path Elements attempt to categorise the process and intermediate stages through which the puzzle's solve path proceeds. These have been separated into two types:

"Atomic" Solve Path Elements - individual elements whose scope is that of an individual step

• Identification - Identification of provided elements as an initial step. Can include Image Identification, Audio Identification and Video Identification (though this may be redundant given the Media and Presentation elements)
• Pairing - Sets of clues that specifically pair up. Alternate ways of categorising this could be Connecting Sides (left and right hand sets of clues that explicitly pair), Before And After (words form sets based on specific transformations), Partitioned Clues (partitions into distinct sets, no necessarily pairs) or Chains (answers form a connected chain).
• Transformations - Puzzle elements undergo some form of transformation. Again, there is a large number of potential transformations that may occur (see NPL's List of flat) and it may be prudent not to categorise further, but some common subcategories may include Beheadment, Transdeletion, Transaddition, Anagram, Padlock (or Sandwiched Term), Reversal, Caesar Shift, Consonancy, Transplants, etc)
• Reordering - Some element is embedded into the puzzle elements that allows for a reordering prior to extraction (i.e. Alphabetical particularly with 26 unique letters, chronological, consecutively numerical, physical locations, etc)

"Holistic" Solve Path Elements - Higher-level elements whose scope is more about overall nature of the solve path itself (Better name? "Sequence"?)

• The Waterfall Effect - Solve path involves one sub puzzle provides information required to solve the next,...
• Red Herring - Solve path includes deliberate (either clued as such, or unclued) red herrings
• Recursion - Solve path involves multiple repetitions of itself until a final answer is obtainable
• Retrograde - Solve path involves reversal of a particular process, with the answer being related to its original state
• Missing Information - Puzzle for which (part of) the solve path is not feasible without first combining some additional piece of information

Extraction Elements

Extraction Elements refers to the techniques that are common to hunt puzzles which allow the "extraction" of a final answer from a puzzles that are not necessarily designed to result in a word or phrase

• Decryption Extraction
  • Alphabet Mapping - Unsure of the difference to "Alphanumeric" below <-- (We've had at least one case of A-Z or A-Whatever being based on a non-26-member list, instead mapping to, say, a 4x6 grid of colours like in The Scottish Display. Might be worth it to make some new name for this whole-cloth.)
  • Alphanumeric - A1Z26 or similar mappings, including other lists with at most 26 elements with canonical ordering
  • Binary - 5-bit alphanumerical code, or 7 to 8-bit ASCII code
  • Braille - see W:Braille
  • Dancing Men - see W:The Adventure of the Dancing Men or here
  • Morse Code - see W:Morse code
  • Pigpen - see W:Pigpen cipher
  • Flag Semaphore - see W:Flag semaphore
  • American Sign Language - see W:Sign language
• Visual Extraction
  • Bitmap - Pixel art letterform or pictorial representations
  • Coloring / Shading Spaces - May have a fair degree of overlap with Bitmap
  • Connect-The-Dots - see W:Connect the dots
  • Obscuring - Silhouettes, shadows, perspective shifts
  • Overlaying - Transparencies, OR & XOR additions
• Letter and String Extraction
  • Special Letters - Use of double letters, or strings of matching length with exactly 1 letter in common, or letters appearing in special substring patterns
  • Marked Elements - Colored or enumerated letters, Marked or overstuffed grid spaces, Marked entries, etc
  • Indexing - Nth letters are extracted from component answers, where the value of N is either supplied, or somehow derived
  • Positional Extraction - Appearance of answer within an ordered arrangement of answers. May include Initialization, Terminalization, Centralization, Diagonalization
• Unclued Information - Answer is related to an item that is identifiable missing from the puzzle's otherwise completed set
• Instructional Extraction - Instructions are provided (either explicitly, or via an intermediate answer phrase) that directs the extraction of the final answer. This may includes Extraction by Reward where the answer is provided as a "reward" upon the completion of a task and "Other Way" Message, and instructional extraction that indicates an incorrect solve path.

Flavor Elements

Flavor Elements elements refer to either the topic (the subject matter of a puzzle) or the theme (the presentation of a puzzle) but either way provides identification of elements that may attract solvers with special interests, knowledge, or areas of expertise.

This listing is a deliberately selective list, extracted from the much more exhaustive listing in the original Google Doc link here. The intention is for a more "bottom-up" approach that can be expanded up to the desired level of detail.

• Arts - Could be combined to make "Arts & Literature"
  • Dance - All styles
  • Theater - Live theater (Musicals, Shakespeare). For screen theater, see Movies under Media
  • Visual Art & Design - Color & Color theory including palettes. Heraldry could be separate, but RGB manipulation is found under Content\Intermediate steps
• Culture - Cultural trends not easily classified in other topical areas (hairstyles, fashions, etc) can go here
  • Puzzle Culture - Puzzles that reference previous, or other hunts
  • MIT Culture - All things MIT specific (Course catalog, floor plans, etc)
• Food & Drink - Cooking, Recipes, Mixology, etc
• Geography
  • Human Geography - Locations, Countries / Cities, etc. Currency is a likely sub category of this
  • Physical Geography - Mountains, Climate, Weather, etc
  • Cartography - Map specific concepts (real or fictional)
• Media
  • Movies - Sub categorisations are possible here but are yet to be finalised (genres like Sci-Fi, studios like Disney/Marvel, and other things like Academy Awards, etc)
  • TV Shows - Sub categorisations are possible here but are yet to be finalised (genres like Reality & Game Shows & Anime, specific shows like The Simpsons, etc)
  • Music - Sub categorisations are possible here but are yet to be finalised (genres like Pop, K-Pop or Classical, elements like Sheet Music or Lyrics, etc). However music extraction elements like Solfege and Music Identification are categorised under Content Elements
  • Internet - Webcomics, Youtube series, etc. Memes may be another useful sub-categorisation with overlap to Culture category above
• History
  • Mythology - Fictional deities and belief systems. Some overlap with Astrology
  • Ancient History - Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Roman, Dark Ages, etc. For Heiroglyphs or Cuneiform, see Linguistics
  • Modern History - World explorers, Military figures, Battles, War
  • Political History - Presidents and political figures
• Linguistics
  • Language - Sub categorisations by language is possible (i.e. French, Japanese) as is Slang (Australian / British colloquialisms, Cockney), etc
  • Fictional language - Klingon, Quenya, Conlangs like puflantu, etc
  • Typography - Fonts, etc
  • Word constructs such as homophones, palindromes, pangrams, rhymes, false friends are categorised under Content elements
• Literature - Could be combined to make "Arts & Literature"
  • Sub categorisations are possible here but are yet to be finalised (genres like Poetry, authors, or series like Harry Potter)
  • Literature Awards
• Religion
  • Astrology is a potential sub categorisation here, potentially split into Western Zodiac and Eastern Zodiac
• Science & Technology
  • Astronomy - Constellations, celestial bodies
  • Chemistry - Periodic table of elements, molecules, etc
  • Biology - Medical, Botany, Zoology
  • Mathematics - Recreational mathematics, Large numbers
  • Physics - Electronics,
  • Technology - Coding exercises, algorithms, hacking
  • Geology - Shares a lot with Physical Geography and may not need it's own categorisation
• Sports & Recreation
  • Specific sports and hobbies are possible here but are yet to be finalised (Football, Baseball, Olympic Games, etc)
  • Board Games - Specific board games are possible here but are yet to be finalised (Chess, Monopoly, etc)
  • Card Games - Specific card games are possible here but are yet to be finalised (Poker, Bridge, Magic: The Gathering, etc)
  • Video games - Specific video games are possible here but are yet to be finalised (Minecraft, Retro Gaming, etc
  • Needlecraft - Knitting, crocheting, stitching, etc
  • Papercraft - Origami, etc