Dave's Puzzles

Online Games & Tools

Games
Wrangle (daily wordgame, guess the word in 7 tries)
Coverwords (daily wordgame, find 9 winding words in an 8×8 grid)
Omino (daily wordgame, optimize multi-letter tile placement in a 7×7 grid)
Fandango (daily wordgame, swap and move letters among 4 words to reach a target)
Rackit (daily wordgame, manage rack to set up long words before losing key letters)
Big Square (daily wordgame, slide letters to form and remove words wordsearch style)
Alacrity (strategic anagram game with optional timer)
Perimeter (2-player abstract area-control game, vs computer or human)
ScoreSpace (Public forum for posting daily scores)
Tools
LetterLab (feature-rich wordplay finder)
Statue Park Solver (solve and construct)
Sudoku Ominisolver (solve and construct)
Acrostic Assistant (construction helper)
Acrostic Formatter (input data, export result)
German Sausage Assistant (construction helper)
Rebus Assistant (construction helper)
Dropquote Assistant (solving helper)
Sliding Block Solver (solve and construct)
Countdown Timer (simple push-button timer)

Cryptic Crosswords

Added Attractions
Letter Theory
Colorado Cryptic (2008 NPL Convention)
Ghost Net (2008 Ghost Patrol application)
Fifty-Fifty (for a friend's 50th birthday)
Multifaceted Baltimore (one of the official cryptics of the 2009 NPL Convention)
Watery Weekend Workout (2011 NPL Convention cryptic competition, 20-clue limit)
Plainly In The Maine (2014 NPL Convention)
Mixed Doubles (in Cryptic All-Stars 2)
Can You Dig It? (2016 NPL Convention)
Sandwiches (in Cryptic All-Stars 4)
Mirror Ball (in Cryptic All-Stars 4, with Roger Wolff)

Puzzle Hunts I've Written or Co-Written

DASH 3 (2011 multi-city walkaround hunt)
A Matter Of Con Science (Saturday night event at 2013 NPL Convention, co-written with Mark Halpin and Darren Rigby)
Ya Buncha Yoyos (2016 Palindrome practice hunt)
Damn This Traffic Jam (2017 Palindrome practice hunt)
Space Oddity (2018 Palindrome practice hunt)
The Menagerie (Online bonus for Enigmas playing card deck)
Grace And Edgar's Wedding (standalone online puzzle hunt accompanying the second season of The Afterparty on Apple TV)

Variety Puzzles

Variety Freeform Puzzles
Triptychs
Out Of Sorts
Impostors
Common Bonds
Tic Tac Clues
First Things First
A Definitive Puzzle
Arctic Chars
Rules (Iron Puzzler 2011)
Closed Face Sandwiches (Iron Puzzler 2011)
Cryptopsychology (original, harder version of a puzzle hunt puzzle)
Riverbank Puzzles (online puzzles for The Enigmatist)
Get It Together (bonus for the Enigma jigsaw)
Forest For The Trees (armchair road rallye)
Waterspheres (alternative, more challenging version of a Puzzles For Democracy puzzle) (hints here, if needed)
Pub Quiz Handouts
Pix Mix (anagrams of famous people)
Full Contact Geography (neighboring countries)
Award Winking Films (trivia and wordplay)
Do You Hear What I Hear? (ID songs in scenes)
Top Of The Starch (anagrams of #1 songs)
Bar Trivia (Identify what's been redacted)
German Sausage Trivia (trivia and wordplay)
Both Sides Now (first and last names of usually mononymous folks)
Song Consonantcies (more song wordplay)
News On Film (ID the film from the headline)
Ready, Set, Go (answer the trivia, find the sets, find the missing members)
Break Me Up Before You Logo (rearranged logos)
Short Wordplay-Based Puzzles
A page of NPL Flats and other short puzzles
Variety Crosswords
Multicross (Games Magazine, Dec 2008)
Bidirectional Multicross
Tetracross (Will Shortz's Wordplay, Dec 2014)
Christmas Threes (2017 holiday greetings)

MIT Mystery Hunt

MIT Mystery Hunt 2008 (home page)
Mystery Rallye
Advisory Boards
Write-Offs
Frontal Lobotomy (with Jeffrey Harris)
War Game (with Mark Halpin)
Six Easy Pieces
Frame Of Reference
Metapuzzles using additional information from other sources:
Witness Group and Meta (Symbols of Tibetan Buddhism)
Dossier 6 Meta (Where's Waldo)
Endgame Means Logic Puzzle (logic)
MIT Mystery Hunt 2010 (home page) — Editor
Confirmed Machine 925 (with art by Mark Halpin)
Bits And Pieces
Side By Side By Side (with Mark Halpin)
Tangled Web
Almost Loaded
Casting Spells
4 = 2
Arts And Letters
Box Sets
String Maze
Don't Let Me Down (with Mark Halpin)
Metapuzzles using additional information from other sources:
1903 Meta — Edison's Phonograph
1804 Meta — Pyramids Of The Aztecs
1845 Event — The Alphabet Tower
1804 Supplementary Information
1845 Supplementary Information
MIT Mystery Hunt 2016 (home page)
Travelogue
Something For Everyone (with Mark Halpin)
Zodiac Quest
Staggered Starts
Triptychs
Lesser Works
Missed Connections (with Rachael Groynom and Joe DeVincentis)
Metapuzzles using additional information from other sources:
Dog Show Meta-Meta (end of Round 1)
Ysera Meta
MIT Mystery Hunt 2022 (home page) — Editor-In-Chief and Meta Captain
The Neverending Story (with Mark Halpin)
Oxford Children's Dictionary
A Wizard Of Earthsea (with Mark Halpin)
Love's Labor's Crossed
Whose Turn Is It Anyway?
How To Spell With Gears And Arrows
Heartford Plot Device Puzzle (6 answers)
Howtoona Plot Device Puzzle (6 answers)
Metapuzzles using additional info from other sources:
The Investigation (Act 1 meta)
Herschel Hayden (Act 2 meta, with Mark Halpin)
Heartford (Act 3 meta, with Mark Halpin)
Battery Pack (Act 3 final meta, with Eric Berlin, Foggy Brume, and Mark Halpin)
Completing Your Story (endgame meta, with Mark Halpin)

Selected Projects

ongoing One of several regular writers and hosts for O'Brien's Irish Pub Quiz, the longest-running pub quiz in the L.A. area
2026 Constructor (with David Kwong and Chris Chelko) of a team-building game for Cognition for about 400 attendees
2026 Puzzle Designer & Producer for the Netflix podcast The Puzzle Room
2026 Launched a free, online version of my 2-player abstract strategy game Perimeter, playable against the computer or in pass-and-play mode by two humans
2026 Launched a suite of free daily online games and puzzle resources
2025 Ported our 2023 word-game app Big Square to a free daily online game
2024 Constructor (with David Kwong) of a 4-puzzle set for Neil Patrick Harris's Wondercade newsletter, revealing an important message about the publication
2023 Puzzle Consultant (with David Kwong) for the second season of the Apple TV series The Afterparty, including an online puzzle hunt
2023 Co-founder of Quickthorn Games and chief gameplay designer of the company's word-puzzle app Big Square
2023 Co-writer (with Eric Berlin and Mark Halpin) of the puzzle hunt featured during Bee Week leading up to the Scripps National Spelling Bee
2023 Contributor of puzzles to the 51-puzzle fundraiser Puzzles For Democracy, a collection of puzzles from about 30 puzzle authors
2022 Puzzle Designer (with David Kwong) for Rapyd's Hack the Galaxy competition involving more than 50 puzzle-hunt style puzzles
2022 Puzzle Consultant (with David Kwong) for the Apple TV series The Afterparty
2021 Puzzle Designer (with David Kwong) for the Ghostbusters: Afterlife ScARe video game
2021 Puzzle Consultant, including original puzzle design, for Ghostbusters: Afterlife
2021 Puzzle Consultant for Los Angeles run of David Kwong's The Enigmatist, with a pre-show puzzle room
2021 Designer (with David Kwong) of an Instagram puzzle experience for Google Arts & Culture
2021 Puzzle Designer for The Door You Never Saw Before, through the Geffen Stayhouse
2021 Consultant on the CW series Kung Fu
2021 Contributor of puzzles used on the second season of Mental Samurai
2020 Puzzle Designer for David Kwong's online puzzle show Inside The Box, through the Geffen Stayhouse (September 2020 – March 2021)
2020 Contributor of food-themed crosswords to Hungry Games
2020 Puzzle Designer for Enigmas Deck and online puzzle hunt (here is the July 1, 2020 Kickstarter that raised more than $100K)
2020 Co-constructor (with David Kwong) of an engagement party puzzle hunt at the New York Historical Society
2020 Puzzle Consultant on the Enigma jigsaw puzzle
2019 Consulting Producer, Puzzles for David Kwong's The Enigmatist, including this puzzle set and a pre-show puzzle room
2016–18 Consultant (with David Kwong) on hidden codes for two seasons of the NBC series Blindspot
2016 Designer of the collaborative simulation game The Ultimate Bowl for Professor Elissa Grossman's Gaming The System business course at USC
2013–18 Designer and presenter of warm-up games at Crosswords LA (2018 was the final year of the event)
2012 Member of the design team for the weekend-long game Doctor When (including this audio logic puzzle where four snippets of disembodied conversations from a decades-past holiday party encode an important location)
2005– Designer of several unpublished board games, including the strategic word game Plexis in which players move their own army of letters on a board, pushing other players' letters and competing to form words in the limited scoring slots, as well as more than a dozen group games played at the National Puzzlers' League annual convention
1995 Wrote a portion of the national, atlas-based road rally The St. Valentine's Day Massacre