Digital Alphabet Blocks

A performance game by Stephen Ng

The game involved hardware and software, consisting of six 8-inch wooden cubes with an LED letter displayed on one side, plus a video game component displayed on a projector. Rearrange the cubes to make words and score points. The screen shows your current set of letters so the audience can follow along. Periodically, a letter falls from above to replace one of your existing letters. Groups played in teams of four--three people to manipulate the cubes, and a spotter to help make words and anticipate new letters.

All the code is available on GitHub. The video game part is playable on a computer; contact the designer for more details.

Animal Planet

A whole-room game by Stephen Ng.

Animals remake classic TV shows so they are centered around animals, not humans. Can you figure out the titles of the new shows?

In each round, there are three phases. Guess the title sooner for more points.

1. Just the information printed on the sheet – 4 points.
2. After the audio hint – 2 points.
3. After the visual hint – 1 point.

Handout (PDF), and the audio and visual Hints (Google Slides).

Alternatively, if the audio doesn't work for you in the Slides or you need something that will work offline, you can download this 170MB Zip file containing all of the individual audio files and image files.

Star Trek: Opposite Episode

A paper-and-pencil puzzle by Stephen Ng.

Kirk and Spock are here and they have sent a message to The Enterprise, and it is your job to decode it. The message is long, so we've broken it up across multiple tables.

Each table gets a different version of the puzzle (largely but not entirely the same clues and answers). The final answers from the eight table chain together to form a message.

Download the zip file which contains the following:

• "Equinox instructions.pdf" - instructions to be read aloud by the presenter
• "TABLE [number] - Answer Sheet.pdf" - this is the sheet where you write down the answers.
• "TABLE [number] - Clue Sheet.pdf" - this is the sheet that has the clues.
• "TABLE [number] - Letter Sheet.pdf" - this file should be printed on transparency film and then cut out.