Emily has been enjoying Games Magazine since she was nine years old. At the age of 24, she attained the privilege of writing for them. Over thirty years later, she’s still a subscriber.
Her original and increasingly lavish logic puzzles appeared in the following issues (Emily’s favorites in bold):
1994 December “Senior Year” (This was Emily’s first and is very much in the format of classic logic puzzles. Getting this accepted inspired her to get more personal and more creative in subsequent puzzles.)
1995 June “Places, Everybody” (This was inspired by her experience making a seating chart for a friend’s wedding. It was so challenging that her editor at first thought it was unsolvable, but she showed him that it is.)
1996 February “Love Matches”
1996 October “Street Treats” and “Surprise!” (Street Treats uses a neighborhood map. Emily loves incorporating visual elements and not relying exclusively on text.)
1997 August “Missing in Egypt” (Emily’s first multi-page puzzle, illustrated by her own photos.)
1998 October “Endless Love” (Another multi-pager, affectionately satirizing romance novels.)
1999 February “Family Reunions”
1999 May “Fashion Sense” (A multi-pager set at a beauty pageant, including double sided cards to cut out.)
1999 August “A Day at the Beach”
1999 September “The Villa Magnifica” (Emily’s favorite, a multi-pager incorporating an elaborate house layout; this was inspired by a visit to the Winchester Mystery House and the complexity of how their many simultaneous tours were organized. This issue also contains hexagonal battleships puzzles made by her husband, Gavin Stark.)
1999 October “Costume Party”
1999 November “Stolen Rubies” (a one pager, again using a house layout. Short but hard.)
1999 December “Christmas Shopping”
2000 April “Three Sisters” (Another multi-pager, set at a summer theatre.)
2000 May “Prom Salon”
2000 October “Ghost Hunter” (Emily’s longest—seven full-color pages!)
2000 November “Mating Season” (A game, not a puzzle; includes cards to cut out.)
2000 December “Christmas Eve”
2001 May “Monster Quest”
2001 October “Road Trip”
She also wrote an article called “It Runs in the Family” for the August 2010 issue of Games, about her father’s game design career and her own puzzle designs.
Emily’s Logic Rules:
A great logic puzzle should give your reader a part in the story.
Set the reader a driving task: figure out who stole the jewels, or where the diary is hidden, or how the itinerary can possibly get them there and back in time, or how to seat the family at the wedding reception without igniting old feuds!
The crux of a logic puzzle is that you know some things (the clues) but not everything (the answer). The best puzzles have a reason for this. Newspaper clippings, letters, diaries and other paperwork are legitimately full of assumptions, abbreviations, nicknames, and biases. (Emily’s Places, Everybody in the June 1995 Games was based on her real-life experience creating a wedding seating chart from lists written by two different people, who referred to the same relatives by different names–ie, “Aunt Jane” was also “Mrs. John Thompson.”) You can also use a literally obscured view of physical action or the partial overhearing of passing conversation or sounds (footsteps, doors opening and shutting). Witness reports from different locations and based on different priorities can be fun character sketches.
Ferreting out all the data from the text of the puzzle is part of the game–don’t rob your reader of the hunt!
First, the reader has to figure out how to solve the puzzle. Step two is plugging in the data until they generate the solution. Extend step one by using elements that can’t be expressed in a typical logic grid, such as visuals or maps. You can also extend it by making the final objective clear (identify the pseudonymous author!) but leaving the means to be discovered (an embedded clue reveals that the pseudonymous author must be left-handed, and figuring out the handedness of the various characters becomes the specific but unstated task of the puzzle).
