[I need to scan the pages in later because photos will not do]

I came into a stash of old Usborne Puzzle Books recently (I’ve probably mentioned this before) and I’ve been looking at them from a design/concept point of view, and while they’re still as fun as they’ve always been, they’re not particularly well-designed in terms of their page layouts, nor are the puzzles clearly illustrated in some cases (clearly meaning there are occasions where the ambiguity of a line or shape makes everything unnecessarily difficult to solve).

This informs the kind of puzzle book (?) I might possibly produce. What I liked about some of the puzzle books was the fact that one inevitably has to refer to previous pages to figure out puzzles on later pages, making the story more cohesive and challenging.

I personally wouldn’t use as many puns in the formation of characters and situations, though.

Takeaways from skimming the puzzle books:

• ‘How did s/he get in?’ puzzles: architectural drawings, clues in façade of building and in random objects lying around the area (i.e. keys, lockpicks, blades, mousetraps)
• Codebreaking: Codes are often formed by substituting letters and numbers. Variations on this include Roman numerals. More complex codes have a starting letter pinpointed at the beginning of a series of symbols – the starting letter represents A and the other letters run on from the original cipher, allowing for 26 variations (at least) within one series of symbols.
• Spot the difference: Could be tedious to draw but might look beautiful.
• Identify the correct path/item based on textual clues: This depends entirely on the clarity of the art. If you can’t tell what a particular object is, you can’t place it in relation to the rest of the text.
• Piece together what happened based on one image: [Escape From Blood Castle has a very good example of this]