A collection of projects by Jim Hays
For our second child’s second birthday, we are celebrating with a dinosaur-themed party, so I wrote a dinosaur puzzle. The objective is to identify the dinosaur names (some are real, some fictional, some are modern avian dinosaurs, and one is dino-adjacent) from the emoji. I’ve previously made Emoji puzzles for fruit , bugs , and bees .
MIT Mystery Hunt 2026
Boda Borg Columbus - 2025
For those not familiar, the Alphabet Game is a classic road trip game, played by children before the invention of the iPad. In it, participants try to find consecutive letters of the alphabet, working all the way from A to Z as quickly as possible. Sounds simple, but there is lot’s of room for house rules and variations.
Here are some useful links for doing Quality Assurance work
For our older child’s fourth birthday, he asked for a theme of “A Rainbow of Funny Animals”, inspired by the magnetic mix-and-match animal toy shown above. I made this puzzle to go with the theme, branching off of my typical guess-the-thing-from-the-emoji genre of party puzzle.
For our second child’s first birthday, we celebrated with a bee-themed party! Among other things, this included a bee puzzle. The objective is to identify the bee-related phrase from the emoji, which is my latest contribution to the guess-the-thing-from-the-emoji genre of puzzle. I’ve previously made ones for fruit and bugs .
Life-size Tapple
MIT Mystery Hunt Disclaimer The reflections below are my own. I do not speak on behalf of TTBNL or any other team.
For our child’s second birthday, we celebrated with a bug-themed party! Among other things, this included a bug puzzle. The objective is to identify the bug from the emoji, which is my second contribution (after fruit ) to the guess-the-thing-from-the-emoji genre of puzzle. Other entries in the genre include movies, children’s books, tv shows, Halloween candy, bands, and many more.
Boda Borg Columbus - 2022
Lately I’ve been enjoying replaying through an iOS game that came out in 2015 called Super Sharp . With a lot of lateral thinking, patience, and luck, I’ve been optimizing the levels to solve them with as few cuts as possible.
For our child’s first birthday, we celebrated with a fruit-themed party! Among other things, this included a fruit puzzle. The objective is to identify the fruit from the emoji, which is my own contribution to the guess-the-thing-from-the-emoji genre of puzzle. (Other entries in the genre include movies, children’s books, tv shows, Halloween candy, bands, and many more)
I was the author of the most recent Puzzled Pint set for July 2022 .
Since Baba is You has a level editor , it seemed too good an opportunity to pass up making a version of Wordle in Baba is You . Unfortunately it’s a bit laggy. Maybe someone else can find a different implementation that is more efficient, or dynamic (the answer to this puzzle is static).
As a follow-up to Wheredle , I’ve also created Whodle . It uses the same rule set as Wordle but instead of guessing a five-letter word you guess a five-letter name.
With the Wordle craze in full bloom, I’ve decided to add my own contribution, Wheredle . It’s effectively the same as Wordle still guessing a five-letter word using the same answer list and dictionary, except you also have to guess where the word appears in a series of ten blanks. I also give one extra guess (7 instead of 6).
Boda Borg Columbus - 2021
I’ve been playing around with Baba is You ’s level editor , and decided to do a quarter-scale remake of Super Mario Bros World 1-1 .
Apropos of nothing, here is a puzzle I wrote:
I made a Squid Game infographic showing the progress of the players across the Glass Stepping Stones throughout the episode.
I’ve been playing around with Baba is You ’s level editor , and made a level set inspired by the show Squid Game .
What are all the keywords for the new Google Calendar Android app that will generate those beautiful images in the agenda view?
With the pandemic, it’s nice to have some ways to connect with friends and family online. Here are some free multiplayer online games you can check out:
As a New Years Eve tradition, both last year and again this year, I have put on “Boda Borg Columbus” to serve as a “year-in-review” game, based on our fun experience at Boda Borg Boston .
As a house, we each carved our own pumpkin this year. I went all in on this Breath of the Wild meme about Magda, fierce protector of the flower garden, being the “scariest” character of all.
Our family has tradition of decorating the table for Thanksiving with fall leaves. We go on walks earlier in the year to collect them when they are falling, then dry them between textbook pages.
Following up on BotW painting-recreations and BotW memes , I’ve now recreated some famous movie scenes!
Following up on BotW painting-recreations , I also decided to go in for some meme-creation!
I’ve been enjoying playing the Switch game Breath of the Wild. As a large, open world game, there are lots of possible things to do and to explore. This has led to a number of interesting ways to play the game such as this vegan run . Having played through the majority of the intended quests, I set out to make some of my own. Here are some of the results of my attempt to recreate famous paintings…
An outdoor Social Distancing activity some of my housemates and I have been enjoying recently has been to go on photo scavenger hunts around the neighborhood. For each one we’ve tried something a little different. My favorite so far is probably the Color Wheel Scavenger Hunt.
Interplanetary - A Scale Model of the Solar System
Each Spring for the past few years, a group of fairy doors has mysteriously appeared in one of our local parks in the same location. Based on the construction materials the fairies use, it looks like the fairies are perhaps recieving some help from an art class at a local elementary school.
When beginning Saga’s Start , a version of Genesis 1 using only words starting with S , I settled on S as it seemed like one of the easiest letters to do, and something I could accomplish using the tools I had on hand, rather than needing to create awesome new tooling as Doug Summers-Stay did for ALPHA (A TRANSLATION OF GENESIS 1) . Afterwards, I was wondering if it would be possible to do a…
1 1 So started saga: Supreme sentience shaped skies, secular sphere.
I’ve planted a new letterbox in Columbus! The clues are posted on AtlasQuest .
Boda Borg
Hanabi is a cooperative firework-themed board game in which players collectively try to build five piles of cards representing five different colors of fireworks. Each pile has to be all the same color, and has to start from 1 and work up to 5 . The twist is that each player holds their cards facing away from them so that every other player knows what they have, except the player holding those…
If half of all cars on the road drive 60 miles per hours, and the other half drive 70, then then each driver will encounter one of two scenarios:
A short story in which Admiral Tian Jerjerrod tackles the impossible task of building the second Death Star, written by Alexander Wales , read by Jim Hays.
What if a planet evolved distinct intelligent species with sensors designed for detecting non-overlapping portions of the electromagnetic spectrum as visible light? Perhaps this would occur on a planet in a multi-star system where the stars are in different portions of their lifecycle and emit different colors of light, such as the Epsilon Indi star system .
I have a bit part playing the lead juror in Chapter 13: A Vast and Terrifying Enemy: part 2 of the audio production of The Metropolitan Man , produced by Eneasz Brodski. The story is originally written by Alexander Wales, and can be found on fanfiction.net . This rationalist fiction wonders what might be going through the mind of Lex Luthor in the Metropolis Universe. This would be interesting on…
I’m not the first person to interpret the Lord of the Rings with an emphasis on the post-apocalyptic nature. However, I have not seen the story imagined as as taking place within our own future, Planet of the Apes -style. It’s plausible to construct a frame-story for the Lord of the Rings where the seemingly-magical/fantastic elements have scientific/sociological/technological explanations. Let’s…
A short story documenting a Lonely Photographer, written by Sam Hughes , read by Jim Hays
A short story about a super-intelligent AI and imminent danger for humanity, written by Sam Hughes , read by Jim Hays
We got to spend some time down at the beach yesterday, and built this sandcastle. We’re definitely amatuers (the experts can make some really beautiful pieces ), but we certainly had fun making it!
First there was xkcd ’s Up Goer Five picture joke using only the ten Hundred words people say the most. Then came the Thing Explainer book. Eventually there was a computer word checker . My own take on using the computer word checker is farther down:
In English, the expression goes “It’s all Greek to me!” , but in Greek the expression is basically “It’s all Turkish to me!”
This is a display of rotationally symmetric ambigrams I’ve designed for various occasions. I’ve repeatedly been surprised at ambigrammable word combinations that seemed unlikely or impossible at first blush.