I have been mulling over how to re-introduce everyone to Perplex City, a game about which I blogged briefly before. 
I stumbled upon a “quickstart guide” which has more specific information than even I was going to provide.
Essentially, Perplex City is a sort of puzzle game where you collect puzzle cards (no, not virtual cards but actual hold-in-your-hand cards) and solve the puzzles contained thereon. Each puzzle is generally self-contained, but several require you to visit some web site of another to get the information required to solve the puzzle.
When you have solved the puzzle, you scratch off the silver area at the top of the card, revealing a 12-digit code. Entering this code into the Perplex City web site, you can attempt to answer the puzzle. If correct, you will be awarded points. You gain a set number of points for a single card, and if you solve all of the puzzles in a group of four cards (every group of four cards is assigned a different name, like “maze”, “circles”, or “ivy”) then you get additional points for solving the whole group. Red cards are the easiest to solve, followed by orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, black, and silver.
The silver cards seem very difficult and offer the most points. The rarity of the card is directly related to its color, so red cards are quite common in the random pack assortments, whereas silver cards are quite scarce.
On top of all of that, there is a grand prize for finding an artifact called “The Receda Cube” of $200,000.
To win the prize, you must find the Cube, which has been stolen from the alternate reality of Perplex City and hidden somewhere on Earth. There are many clues strewn throughout the game, on the cards and within the things to which they refer.
A starter set of Perplex City comes in a large box with a card binder, a tour guide of the city, a kind of introductory magazine, a Leitmark pin, an audio CD, and a few packs of Perplex City cards. The audio CD has a bunch of nice ambient tracks on it, and a “hidden track” with a kind of ransom note from the people who stole the Cube.
I was hoping that there were more people out there in the US that were playing who would like to trade via mail. I’ve got a lot of duplicate cards that I would love to trade for cards I don’t have, rather than buying new cards. I do have a bunch of blue and purple cards, a couple of blacks, and a silver for trade, in addition to a bazillion red and orange cards. If you want to trade, please check out my inventory.
I’ve been making good progress solving the cards, and even solved a silver card without much help. I’ve been avoiding the Perplex City forums, which seem to have the answers to all of the puzzles which is outright cheating. I mean, it’s one thing to use the web to research an answer, and another to look for the exact answer to a specific card. I guess if you get really stuck it might be useful, but I’ve not reached that point yet.
If you’re interested in the game, perhaps I can lure you in to try a couple of free puzzles. First, you need to create an account on the Perplex City website. After you have an account, you can use these two links to see a card and then solve it. You will not need the usual scratch-off code for these two:
- boingboing
- gamedaily (You might need a bigger image of the card.)
You can earn 26 preplex points by solving both of these cards. That will place you ahead of more than half of all registered players! In addition, you will have solved two cards that aren’t officially available in packs yet.
There are four waves of Perplex City cards. The first two are currently available, with a third coming soon, and the fourth coming later this year. I’m very anxious to see the new wave of puzzles, and get potentially closer to solving the mystery of the Cube.
By the way, if you know the answer to the card shown above (click the thumbnail for a bigger image), that would be swell. British crossword clues are a bit too foreign for me to wrap my head around.
