Perplex City

An artifact called the Reseda Cube (pronounced /Reh-kay-duh/) is stolen from the Perplex City Academy and makes its way to Earth. A Cube Retrieval Team (CRT) is formed to search for the Cube. Because the citizens of Perplex City are unable to travel to Earth, the Master of the Perplex City Academy, Sente Kiteway, asks the citizens of Earth for help in finding the Cube and offers to share leads or clues that he or the CRT may get.

Clues to the location of the Cube are periodically left by the person who stole it, known only as Combed Thunderclap. It is discovered that an organization called the Third Power and a Cube-worshipping cult called the Reconstructionists are also looking for the Cube. While the people of Earth are left to search for the Cube on Earth, various citizens of Perplex City, particularly Kurt McAllister and Sente’s two daughters, Scarlett and Violet, attempt to find additional clues in Perplex City and to discover the identity of Combed Thunderclap. The latter three discover the lab in which the Cube was made. They find that the Cube was built by Sente and can be used as a weapon and a teleporter. The Cube is finally found by the people of Earth in Northamptonshire, England;[2][3] they also determine that it was Violet who stole the Cube and hid it on Earth,[4] in an effort to keep it out of the hands of the Third Power.

Mind Candy sold a series of collectible puzzle cards in foil packs. Each pack contained six random cards from a total of 256 possible cards. Cards were divided into sets and subsets of varying rarity and difficulty.

Unlike collectible card games such as Magic: The Gathering or Pokémon, the cards are not designed for competitive player-versus-player "combat." Instead, each card depicts a different puzzle, with the rarer cards also featuring more complex riddles. Cards were marked with unique identifiers, which could then be entered onto the Perplex City website, earning points and a place on a leaderboard. Many cards contained hidden features, such as ultraviolet or heat-sensitive inks, and they covered a broad range of themes from pop-culture trivia to cryptography and logic brainteasers.[2]

Each card was a member of a four-card set. If all four cards were solved by a player, they received double points for each card in the set.

The puzzle cards are intended as an introduction to the characters and story of Perplex City itself and the deeper mysteries of the Cube theft. Clues found on the cards direct players to various websites, blogs, emails, phone calls, and SMS messages originating from Perplex City. These often feature puzzles of their own, whose solutions lead to further puzzles. Frequently, these puzzles require players to co-operate in reaching various goals.

Perplex City has been running since late 2004, much longer than the traditional ARG. Its longevity has allowed for a number of events that simply would not be possible within the traditional two-month lifespan of an ARG. Some examples of this include:

• Players wrote a book to enable a character to become a "published author" and gain access to relevant archives.[10]
• A full-length CD of cryptic techno music was released by a Perplexian musician.[11]
• A banner plane flew across Manchester with a keyword that enabled access to a new area of the game.
• Sixty players attended an in-game event in search of clues, only for one of their own to be revealed as a mole and escape in a black helicopter.[12]
• 220 people participated in the first Perplex City Academy Games in London, a high-tech scavenger hunt across the capital.[13] A month later, a similar event was held in New York.[14]

In late 2006, Mind Candy released Perplex City: The Board Game. Players solve anagrams, logic problems, visual puzzles, and trivia questions to collect a set of colored stones.[15] Players can also challenge one another for their collected stones. To win, the last stone must be collected by challenging another player.

The rules insert maintains an in-universe approach to Perplex City, giving background about its puzzle-loving citizens and a fictional history of the board game.

The Mind Candy cards were first released in select outlets around the world, but are increasingly readily available from retailers both on- and offline. On September 7, 2006, Mind Candy announced that GameStop was to begin carrying Perplex City cards in 700 stores in the United States.[16] As of September 26, 2006, some 682,425 cards have been marked as solved on the Perplex City leaderboard, with 45,215 players registered.[10]

Mind Candy received a round of venture capital worth $3 million from Index Ventures, an investor in Skype and other technology companies.[17]

In June 2007 Mind Candy announced that it would be putting season 2 of its ARG on hold indefinitely. Mind Candy's focus later moved to the Moshi Monsters franchise and the Perplex City project was abandoned.

A reviewer from the online second volume of the gaming magazine Pyramid stated that "The object of the game is, well . . . that depends. The whole game is incremental. At its simplest, the idea is to solve the poser on a card. If you want to become 200,000 very real dollars richer (apparently they can do bank transfers across the dimensional gulf), you need to suck as much information as you can out of as many sources as you can, including the cards, some scattered websites, and even real people (or their cell phones), to unlock where on Earth the Cube has been hidden."[18]

• Pyramid - Season 2[19]

• Alternate reality game
• Masquerade (book)
• Eric Harshbarger, Perplex City puzzle designer
• Andrea Phillips, Perplex City writer & designer
• Naomi Alderman, Perplex City writer

• User-run catalog of all available puzzle cards
• Wiki Project