Exploring Riddles
Recently I’ve been enjoying diving into the riddle format. As with any new puzzle format it’s difficult at first but it becomes more approachable with experience. I initially wanted to make riddles so I could publish TikToks of my cat Gertrude speaking the riddles as if she was a sphinx which has made the process of making them even more enjoyable knowing that the final product is so fun.
As with any new puzzle format, my first forays into it weren’t great. I picked a random object (in this case a mushroom) and sought to describe it without giving anything away in terms of its physical form. I concentrated on the idea of a mycorrhizal network where mushrooms will wrap around tree roots to share minerals and connect with other mushrooms and yet there are many different species. The problem with these first two lines is that it’s far too abstract, it’s not indicating anything specific. The second two lines aren’t enough to narrow this down. Though mushrooms might be a part of natural decomposition, connecting that to the fourth line as a source of food would be a stretch.
“I am One,
I am Many.
I follow death,
And bring life in plenty.”
What appealed to me with this one was it’s relative shortness as a riddle and that it had a lyrical quality to it. I find that if a riddle can rhyme in some way, it sticks with the person trying to solve it.
For the second riddle I concentrated on the historical significance and longevity of the object in question. Each line is quite long so it doesn’t have that lyrical quality and has little rhyming structure. But I think where it excels in comparison to the first riddle is in being more descriptive whilst applying light touches of metaphor.
“I host gatherings for two sides of the same coin,
Though that is half the number I used to.
Of guests for an evening I have thirty plus two,
And the tiles for their dance double.”
So the object in question is chess. Where I alluded to its historical nature in the second line is where chess came from the game chaturaji as a four player varient. The last two lines are quite explicit in describing the set up of chess but the hope was that the first line in mentioning it as a gathering would serve as a slight misdirection to the player.
Where parts of this riddle fall down is in how the player might not be able to distinguish it as chess if they don’t catch the historical reference to chaturaji. With that, the possible universality of the riddle is compromised because it requires specialist knowledge.
With that last point comes a good lesson in difficulty when it comes to creating riddles. You can’t control the approach that people will take to words as, more than any other puzzle format, they are open to interpretation. There are no constraints or rules which hold people back from giving an answer. It is in the prose itself where the designer must learn to shape a player’s understanding of what the answer should be.
