Unsolvable riddles and horrible rhymes, gadzooks! This is a thread for puzzle books

Of the illustrated kind. Some with real life prizes if you solved them. Did you own any? Solve any?

Masquerade is apparently the first and one of the most famous - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerade_(book)

I owned The Tasks of Tantalon, by Steve Jackson of Fighting Fantasy fame, part of the Fighting Fantasy universe and spectacularly illustrated by Stephen Lavis. Very good puzzles, nearly all solvable, only a couple suffering from the ambiguity or lack of clarity seemingly inevitable to all of these things. Unfortunately that did make solving the whole thing rather hard. No prizes on offer.

https://a.media-amazon.com/images/I/919rCjvnhgL._SL1500_.jpg

I later - much later - discovered there was a whole series of these ‘Fantasy Questbooks’ and ordered them all, disappointment ensued - sub-par illustrations and puzzles throughout.
https://fightingfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Fantasy_Questbook

We also had The Ultimate Alphabet by Mike Wilks, 26 photo realist paintings each containing hundreds of objects starting with the relevant letter of the alphabet. Find all 7,777 words and you could win £10,000!

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81EyePZZz1L._SL1500_.jpg

Never did any but I was well aware of Masquerade at the tail end of the 70s, it was everywhere. What I find extraordinary about that book is that two men solved the puzzle, went to the location and dug there, but scooped up the hare in the dug earth and missed it. The guy who actually "found" the hare went there later on a tip-off & claimed the prize.

Kind of amazing to think there are still undiscovered prizes out there. On the Trail of the Golden Owl was only solved last year, 31 years after publication. This extremely obscure computer game was never solved and there's probably a cheap bauble buried somewhere: https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=alkemstone

The masquerade wiki is wild, so many twists. I do own it, I came upon a copy in a charity shop and got it just as an art object

I love this sort of thing, last year I solved this: https://unbound.com/blogs/author-updates/the-researcher-s-first-murder-competition

It is very hard & took four of us a few months (we were 2nd!) but incredibly satisfying in how it all fits together, I highly recommend

We started Stumped by MB Griggs, which is also after the style of cains jawbone but entirely Australian-themed. It’s nowhere near as involved as the finnemore — the WhatsApp was p quiet as ppl have other stuff going on so I basically solved most of it myself over a couple of weekends & just need to do a bit of spadework to get the page order down — but still very fun & impressive considering she seems to have basically self-published it after doing CJ, looking for other things like it & seeing that there weren’t any

I'd never heard of any of this, fascinating. I always wanted to create a book that was part FF but part colouring book/puzzles rather than just wholly decision making.

Not quite like the above, but I remember as a child loving those Black Hand Gang books
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Black-Hand-Gang-JURGEN/dp/3473520667

Not illustrated, but I do now have a copy of Cain's Jawbone. Not had the right headspace to actually get started on trying to solve it, but one day I shall try (and almost certainly fail).

Oh sorry wins, I didn't notice that you already mentioned it, oops.

Oh I missed the illustrated part! TRFM is both, but yeah original CJ and stumped are narrative/word puzzles only

No worries! I have heard of Cain's Jawbone, I just found a cheap ebook and took a look - oof. Probably easier with a hard copy, but still! Maybe I'll give it a solid effort one day.

This thread was prompted by a mention in another thread of Christopher Manson's Maze, which I hadn't heard of before. There's a site all about it, including a full interactive version, here: http://www.intotheabyss.net/

(Just to clarify my initial post, the other fantasy questbooks aren't by steve jackson or stephen lavis and aren't fighting fantasy related)

My boyfriend bought me a copy and as part of the present he photocopied all the pages so when we get around to it we can move them about and scribble notes etc without ruining the paperback. A very thoughtful move.

I have never tried to solve cains jawbone but I did read it a few years ago; at that point I was basically assuming it was impossible so I just approached it as a cool experimental novel, sort of high modernist golden age detective story. Now that I’ve had experience solving the follow-up I am tempted to give it a real go but suspect I’d still find it impenetrable. The modern day versions obv assume the reader has access to search engines & will use them early and often

“I'd never heard of any of this, fascinating.”

Same here, this is really cool!!

Have we done Pimania yet? Also a cruel lie but I think that's the point, if it's winnable too many people will win

had and still own the ultimate alphabet!

Likewise! I love it - one of the only things from my childhood I’ve saved to share with my daughter when she’s old enough

I had a phase in the early 2000s where I looked up all the solutions to these I could find. I figured I would never own the books, which were mostly out of print, so why not? And now I have access to all of them on book soulseek. There was a message board devoted to armchair hunts back then, but I think it's been locked and is dead or dying.

I prefer the ones that are possible to solve solo. The bee book by Kit Williams is a favorite: not that hard, but it still has "a-ha!" moments. The worst ones to me are the ones that require too much real-world information -- usually geography.

intotheabyss has every Maze page but it's all low-res images unchanged from the 90s. Get a better copy if you want to try it.

Had never heard of Cain's Jawbone, & didn't really know anything about John Finnemore, presumably because I never ever listen to Radio 4 comedy. But he's a Listener crossword setter? Does anyone here do The Listener? Was obsessed about 20 years ago but haven't touched one for about a decade - they were frightening time sinks for me.

(If you haven't run into it, it's now published in The Times (another more minor reason I don't do it now) and is on its face a cryptic crossword but generally with a vicious puzzling structure built into it, to the point where it belongs here as much as the cryptic thread)

I have been obsessed with Usbourne Puzzle Adventures since I was a small child, especially the first three, "Escape From Blood Castle" "Murder On The Midnight Plane" and "Curse Of The Lost Idol" - there are a few other fairly good ones later in the series, but these three are the gold standard. The puzzles aren't even that good tbh, just love the world they create.

i remember them digging up a garden in Tewkesbury because there's a picture of the abbey in Masquerade (because he was local). he also designed the wishing clock in cheltenham arcade.

The bee book by Kit Williams is a favorite: not that hard, but it still has "a-ha!" moments.

interesting. the solution - and the means of getting to it - in masquerade seems impossible.

didn't know about those usborne books!

xp yeah vmic but I do the listener every week, as a social thing down the pub or on my own if I can’t make it to that (I hasten to add I don’t have a times sub either but I have other means of getting it)

They’re fun yeah, using a barred grid instead of black squares gives them the freedom to get creative with the extra wrinkles. This is the one from the other week, just to give ppl a sense of the level of fuckery you can get:

https://i.imgur.com/cKlzycG.jpg

That’s one where we didn’t really get anywhere in the pub but I went back to it sober & managed to complete it; sometimes even after multiple passes I just have to admit defeat. The only ones I never even attempt are the numerical ones.

I remember one years ago titled William Tell, which turned out to be a pretty macabre title since the gimmick was that once you completed the grid you had to use Burroughs’ cut-up technique to reassemble it and then highlight the name Vollmer in the new grid. It’s p rare you need scissors & tape to solve it, that’s a fairly extreme example

Oh man. What does "entered cyclically" mean? And then "enter the answer jumbled", no thanks! I *almost* finished the guardian's easter prize where most of the answers had extra unclued letter pairs and weren't numbered (i.e. you had to work out where they fitted in the grid). But this seems next level.

“Entered cyclically” means that if the first letter is in row three you would enter the answer in 3-4-5-6-1-2 or 3-2-1-6-5-4 depending on the direction the entry is going (which you don’t know initially). My heart did sink a bit reading the preamble lol

It’s not pictured there but along with the “radial” clues there are 5 “ring” clues that are entered clockwise and give you letters to help, so it’s not impossible. Challenging tho! The ppl who put these together are on a whole other level (I know they have software and stuff but still)

My Listener prime was doing it with a friend (who now sets the Observer Everyman and I believe remains a Listener solver) and I have happy memories of ritually shouting 'fuck you' and 'what does that even mean' after reading each line of the rubric.

Ha yes my strategy is to only understand enough of the preamble to start solving clues, and ignore the rest till the endgame

haha the two of us solving this bastard is an especially happy memory that he brings up here.

xp yes, it's that 'hazily get the rubric then get something, anything to start with and start putting it together'.

I miss it, but it wasn't good for me.