12 Days of Puzzles

In 2021, I made a simple advent calendar for my friends, each day featuring craft chocolate, tea, a die and a drawing. For 2022, I imagined a more complex and interactive advent: what if I made recipients earn their prizes? The result was enlisting a software engineer to help me design a 12 day advent calendar, each day featuring a puzzle to be solved, with an accompanying hints website. Every puzzle's answer would guide the user to open a specific envelope.

Tech

Designer
Publisher
Photoshop
Procreate
HTML/CSS

A Closer Look

There were 3 core elements:

the puzzles themselves

the advent envelopes and their contents

a hints website

Below are the envelopes, each with a custom sticker, and the lyrics to a well-known holiday song. For contents, we chose tea sachets from Mem Tea (located in Davis Square in Somerville, MA) and Art of Tea, chocolates from Venchi (dark chocolate truffles), Raaka (micro bars, waffle bars), Domori (hazelnut truffles), and Chuao (mini bars), and dice from DnDdice.com. We chose to support small businesses and ethically-sourced products!

Advent calendar prizes — Advent envelope contents: tea sachets, dice, ethical chocolate (Raaka please sponsor me)

Here are the puzzles! A collection of ones I designed: some entirely by hand with paper and paint, others using Affinity Designer/Adobe Illustrator or Procreate. Every single element of this project was drawn or illustrated by myself or Brian to avoid citation/copyright issues.

Each puzzle had to use unique mechanics, and the answer should refer to a holiday song.

Puzzle sampler — A few of the puzzles: origami star, maze, snowflake, and traditional puzzle

A quick scrollthrough of the hint site: minimalist to a fault as we wanted users to enjoy a fast and smooth experience (it is possible users were already frustrated by the time they hit our site). Modeled after PostCurious' highly effective hints system.

Puzzle site overview — The hints site: we kept this as minimal as possible to reduce technical issues

Day 3 of the advent calendar. We lost 1/5 of a package of printer paper iterating through versions of this puzzle.

Swan origami — A folding puzzle: will the final form reveal an answer?

Day 1, drawn in Procreate and edited in Affinity Publisher:

Maze puzzle — A classic maze: this was our playtesters' top pick!

Day 8: prototyped by hand and finalized in Affinity Designer (the equivalent to Adobe Illustrator).

Snowflake puzzle — 2 pieces of paper somehow combine to make an answer...

Day 4, drawn in Affinity Designer.

Day 4 puzzle — We enjoyed the frustrating simplicity of this puzzle

Day 2, a classic logic puzzle. We quickly learned these require a LOT of playtesting.

Reindeer puzzle — You really can't go wrong with a classic logic puzzle

I ended this project with a healthy respect for full-time puzzlemakers out there (Rita Orlov at PostCurious was my inspiration). In addition to ideating, iterating and playtesting each puzzle, the amount of logistical and overhead is enormous. Every label, sticker, and envelope had to be designed and printed. Every single image on the hints site had to be created and reviewed to make sure we didn't hand out hints too quickly. Then packing the envelopes and boxes, writing the intro letter, triple-checking every box had every piece. A few puzzles were made by hand (we only made 14 copies of the project). Seriously- kudos to the people who do this professionally, it's a lot of work!

Administrative work — 65% of this project was "admin" work: designing labels, creating images for the hints site, writing hints, etc

Special thanks to Brian for implementing the hints site and contributing two major puzzles. Thank you so much to the lovely people who provided kind feedback on this project. We will see how we feel about 2023!