Puzzle Telling - A Game About Piecing History Together

Puzzle Telling is a multiplayer game designed for a minimum of 2 players to delve into the history of New York’s Dutch roots. The game combines collaborative puzzle-solving, role-playing, and storytelling with a unique double-sided puzzle. Players explore themes of erasure, distortion, and reconstruction of the stories that have shaped Dutch narratives in New York’s history, engaging in three phases of guided gameplay. The puzzle undergoes a transformation based on the infinite chocolate bar paradox, symbolizing the dynamic shifts in perspectives and the revelation of hidden aspects of history. This puzzle is an experimentation and an iterative expression process of ways to help people play with uncovering history in their own way. The goal is to open a segway for conversations, evaluation and learning, not to gamify colonisation.

Gameplay Stages

In Stage 1, the storyteller takes players through the events depicted on the ceramic puzzle, offering prompts, context, and historical insights. Stage 2 sees the puzzle undergo a transformation based on the infinite chocolate bar paradox, symbolizing the dynamic shifts in perspectives and the revelation of hidden aspects of history. Players must place the missing piece in context, while the storyteller prompts them to understand and appreciate the various perspectives and events that shaped this crucial period. Finally, in Stage 3, players flip the puzzle pieces and are prompted to engage in open-ended activities and dialogue about the historical perspectives.