Chip Theory Games is a Minnesota based game design and publishing company that specializes in fantastic and immersive role-playing games, with a focus on high-quality components and compelling storytelling. They have a series of games called Too Many Bones, as part of which they have consistently incorporated surreptitious, clever, and highly engaging puzzles that build upon the lore of the world. While working on my own puzzle games for The Enigma Emporium, I had the pleasure of being introduced to the folks at Chip Theory by my business partner Logan.

In addition to the Splice & Dice Puzzle that Logan and I designed together in late 2019, we also began work on a puzzle filled deck of cards within the world of Too Many Bones. Then came all of the events of 2020, and their rippling worldwide impact. The original release plan and overall concept for the puzzle deck underwent significant changes, and in 2021 I was again brought on for puzzle purposes, this time to fully rework the original concept of the deck to better suit the new release plan and lore, as well as to incorporate some additional assorted elements.

Much of the initial design work that Logan and I had completed years before ended up being redone from the ground up, and I created an entirely new overarching structure, alongside adding and incorporating numerous more clues, codes, and puzzle progressions. Deliverables produced for this project include half a dozen spreadsheets breaking down the 50+ puzzles and progressions, along with their solutions, overarching structure, specific solve instructions, etc. In addition to the spreadsheets, I created 100+ concept sketches and renders to clearly convey different needed design elements, alongside supporting documents pertaining to necessary story elements, lore, and other details.

The deck was incorporated as part of a larger project - an absolutely gorgeous pop-up gameplay expansion & lore book for Too Many Bones called The Automaton of Shale. I was asked to make sure that the deck would offer an intense challenge (with the expectation that the TMB community would work together to solve it) while also building upon and expanding the lore of the world.

The overall progression of the deck is made up of 50+ puzzles of varying difficulty and complexity, broken up into four distinct sub-progressions (one per suit) which each tell a different portion of the story. The Automaton of Shale ends with a cloaked figure subtlely gifting the players adventuring party a strangely tattered, battered, and marked up deck of cards - and thus the puzzle deck begins.

Over the course of solving through the four suits, players interact with four separate and distinct progressions within the puzzles and the story:
-- Unlocking numerous nested layers of a strange chest
-- Repairing the curious machine found within the strange chest
-- Discovering how to utilize the curious machine, and uncovering the identity of the cloaked figure
-- Deducing the location of said mysterious stranger

At the very end of the progression, players are granted the opportunity to purchase this newly introduced mysterious stranger - a gearloc by the name of Riffle - as an actual playable character for Too Many Bones.

At that point, particularly clever players may also note that there are yet more curiosities to be uncovered for those with an eye for detail. One of the most difficult (but also delightful) elements of this design project was incorporating an additional (incredibly discreet) parallel puzzle path that only the keenest solvers would discover. This secondary secret progression is largely hidden in plain sight, but will only hold relevance if the player has completed the first path, and then loops back to continue down the second. If a player successfully solves the secondary path, they receive an additional reward - jokers to accompany Riffle's deck!