Designing a cooperative experience

For my last year or so of puzzle-making, I’ve been carefully designing this set of puzzles to be a great activity to do with friends or family. I’ve made sure to include a variety of different puzzle types, with various levels of difficulty and skills required.

To ensure players interact with each other, I included a few connections between puzzles, and a few times where a single puzzle requires several different sets of skills.

To reduce frustration, most puzzles have a hint or two somewhere, or can be solved even if there's a piece of trivia you don't know or a clue you're stumped on. For instance, the riddles can be solved via (difficult) anagramming if necessary, and the "linked" puzzle and crosswords can be solved even if you only know about half the clues. Plus you only have to solve nine puzzles -- the tenth answer will be whichever number is left.

I hope these puzzles are as fun for you to solve as they were for me to make! Let me know how your puzzling goes, and I can use the feedback when designing another puzzle set in the future!