I am just getting around to catching up on old episodes of your show after being sick for a close to a month.

Perhaps it was the influence of playing Infiltration for the first time this weekend, but I immediately thought of using your puzzle mechanic in a Ubongo style opposed game where you are a hacking team trying to break into a corporate or governement computer system. You could work as teams where one team is the coporation trying to keep the hackers out and the other is the team of hackers trying to break in. The puzzles, each completed at the same time, represent the defenses against the hackers versus the hacker’s attacks.

Perhaps options in the game allow you to make your own puzzle easier by adding more pieces from a pool making it easier to fill in the puzzle or adding more squares to the board to open up the play space or removing “dead” spots that you normally aren’t allowed to play on. Other options allow you to make the other team’s puzzles more difficult by adding dead spots, removing pieces, adding more complex pieces, or adding more “dead” spots.

I don’t have all the details, but I think this and Ubongo, if you have never heard of it, are great examples of a puzzle mechanic that (could) work in both an abstract, in the case of Ubongo, and thematic, an opposed hacker game, sense.

Great show, guys. Keep it up.

Jim Jones
Co-host, Great Big Table Podcast