Mind Candy is a media and entertainment company that specialises in puzzles - from Su Doku style logic puzzles at one extreme, to global, cross-media, treasure hunts, at the other. Our particular focus at the moment is on the rapidly expanding fields of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and Cross Media Entertainment (XME). We are keen to work with brands and media companies that understand the value of these genres and wish to weave them into their products and advertising.

Our first major project is a story/game/puzzle hybrid called Perplex City that is 'played' simultaneously by thousands of people around the world.

I met a couple of the Mind Candy guys at GDC, and was very impressed. They have a "PerplexCity" set of card packs which is selling in stores across the U.S. and UK. Buy a pack, and in each one are several cards, each with a different puzzle or code. On the back of many of the cards, is a piece of a larger city map. First person to figure out the puzzles, and the map, and the map's clues to find their way to a real-life buried treasure, wins $200,000 USD.

Treasure aside, I was just fascinated by the puzzles. They ran the range from simple optical illusion trivia questions, to visual IQ stuff, to even some types of computer ciphers (like one card had a 20-line spaghetti-code BASIC program that you needed to figure out to see what message was spelled out by the print statements). Another card had heat-sensitive ink, so if it was warmed up by a hand or by sunlight, certain letters spelled out a message.

I expect we will be hearing more about PerplexCity in the near future. Lots o' fun.

Elonka :)

Mind Candy - PerplexCity