Choosing the right difficulty

The difficulty of a situation puzzle does not depend on the theme, on how long the premise is, or on how grim it gets. It depends on one thing only: how many independent discoveries are needed to reconstruct what happened.

Counting the discoveries

Take a story and break the answer into its steps. Every step the group has to find on its own, and that does not follow automatically from another one, is a discovery.

A story with a single discovery burns out in two or three questions: someone lands the intuition and the round is over. One with three or four keeps a table busy for a long time, because each piece found opens the search for the next.

The four levels in this archive

• Level 1 — one discovery. Good for opening the evening, or for showing the mechanism to someone who has never played.
• Level 2 — two discoveries. This is the core of the archive and the most balanced format for a mixed group.
• Level 3 — three discoveries. Needs a group that is already warmed up and an attentive narrator.
• Level 4 — four or more. Few of them, long, for anyone who wants a real fight.

Building an evening

Do not open at the top level. A group that has never played needs one or two easy stories to work out what kind of question gets traction — a skill you pick up in ten minutes, but you do have to pick it up.

After that, alternate. Three hard stories in a row wear a table down; an easy one in between gets it moving again.

Group size

With many people the questions come faster and stories fall sooner: with eight players it pays to go up a level. With two or three, a level 3 story can run for a long while.

Difficulty is not the same as quality

A hard story is not a better story. Level 4 gets its length from the number of discoveries, not from being obscure — if a puzzle only resists because the premise hides something a reasonable question would have surfaced, that is a flaw, not a difficulty.