Tomorrow marks the start of Perplex City Season 2.  The Perplex City web site has already undergone some changes in preparation.  The new site is really nice and it’s definitely become a great site for puzzle lovers.  The most notable difference is that there’s now a large collection of puzzles that can be solved online without having to buy cards.  The plan is to allow site members to create puzzles to add to the collection, but that has yet to be implemented.

As of tomorrow, Season 2 puzzle cards will be available.  There will be 256 cards again, this time in three waves.  There will also be a couple puzzles written by me (though none in wave 1), so keep an eye out.

The alternate reality portion of the game is being called Perplex City Stories now, and that should be back in April.  Presumably with another big prize to be won.

On February 4th, the Receda Cube was found by Andy Darley.  The cube was found in Wakerly Great Wood in Northamptonshire, UK.  Andy Darley will collect $200,000 for his prize.  This marks the end of Perplex City Season 1.  See coverage here from the Perplex City website and BBC World News.

Don’t worry, there will be more to come on Perplex City in the near future.

Mind Candy has released the final clue for Perplex City Season 1 and the Receda Cube could be found at any moment. The final live event for Vanishing Point will be taking place in less than an hour, and someone will soon be taking a trip to space (assuming they don’t have to pay taxes.) And a mysterious site calles ilovebees.com has just become reactive.

Firebox .com has announced the release of a new board game from Mind Candy Design based on the popular ARG Perplex City. The board game, which is played independently of the ARG (so they say), involves solving puzzles and collecting glass stones. It sounds to me a lot like Trivial Pursuit with a wide range of puzzles to solve. And that sounds pretty good.

The press release said that the game is being sold through Firebox.com, but I couldn’t easily find it on the site. If anyone can provide a link to where you can actually buy the game, let me know.

Perplex City is a collectible card, alternate reality, puzzle game that I’ve mentioned here before.  To play the game, you buy packs of cards each of which has a puzzle on it.  Boingboing is reporting a collaboration of Perplex City players to solve one particularly difficult puzzle.  They’re not looking for collaboration between the best puzzle minds, however; they’re looking for collaboration between the computers of the best puzzle minds.  The puzzle contains RC5 encrypted text that would take a single computer years to crack.  They’ve set up a little distributed computing experiment to get the job done faster.  And apparently, they’re also offering prizes.

I blogged a while back about the alternative reality puzzle game Perplex City. Since alternative reality games can seem daunting to the uninitiated, I’m posting a link to this Perplex City Quick Start Guide that I came across though the blog Jarkolicious. Perplex City seems to have fairly low barriers for entry. And, of course, you can always just solve the puzzles and not get tied up in the alternate reality.

I’ve been reading up about the puzzle game called Perplex City, which was blogged about on boingboing (here and here) and Shiny Shiny.
At its heart, the game involves solving puzzles but, in execution, it draws from the following genres:

1. Collectible card games - of which Magic is the best example. To play Perplex City, you buy packs of 6 cards that have puzzles on them. Each card has an individual puzzle and the cards can be combined to form other puzzles. Some of the cards are harder to find than others and, presumably, you will have to collect all of the cards to win.
2. Alternate reality games - like the ones used in the marketing for the movie A.I. or the game Halo 2. These games involve clues that are hidden in the real world. Characters that you can contact and that will contact you back. And fictitious web sites that look like they’re set up by real people.
3. A treasure hunt - with an object hidden in the real world that you have to find.

The winner gets $200,000, which will certainly be incentive for many to play. Of course, you’re likely to sink a lot of time and money into the game in order to even have a shot at winning.