Exemplars

Profiles of real works, each read as a consistent stat block and cross-linked to the mechanisms it shows off. Where the species accounts describe a technique in the abstract, an exemplar shows it doing its job in a shipped game or experience. Follow a profile’s links to reach the articles it illustrates; follow an article’s Referenced by register to find the works that demonstrate it.

Tabletop

  • Apocalypse World: moves and the fiction-mechanic loop, playbooks, and the MC as a designed role.
  • Baron Munchausen: a GM-less game of competitive tall tales, where players wager coins to interrupt and challenge each other’s lies.
  • Blades in the Dark: position-and-effect resolution, progress clocks, the flashback, and faction clocks as a world-engine.
  • Blood on the Clocktower: social deduction without player elimination, run by a Storyteller who cannot play.
  • Call of Cthulhu: the Sanity mechanic and investigative cluing, with horror encoded in the rules.
  • De Profundis: a Lovecraftian roleplaying game played by writing in-character letters, where the correspondence is the game.
  • Dungeons & Dragons, 5th Edition: the d20 core and bounded accuracy, an accessible on-ramp, and the DM’s wide authority.
  • Exit: The Game: a boxed escape game you write on and destroy, self-checked by a decoder dial.
  • Fiasco: GM-less play where a dice-built web of relationships and needs drives ordinary people to ruin across two acts.
  • Ironsworn: the oracle as a solo resolution engine and progress tracks, in a game built to run with or without a GM.
  • Magic: the Gathering: deck construction as a metagame, the colour pie, and the living, rotating format that founded the TCG.
  • Microscope & Kingdom: GM-less story games that build a non-linear history and a community’s decisions out of structured turns.
  • Pandemic: fully cooperative play and asymmetric specialist roles, against an escalating outbreak that pushes back.
  • Paranoia: adversarial-by-design play, a licensed-deceiver GM, and betrayal held inside a consent contract.
  • The Quiet Year: a GM-less community drawn onto a shared map, prompted by a deck of cards across four seasons.
  • Ten Candles: tragic horror played by literal candlelight, where ten extinguished candles are the clock and every character is doomed.
  • Thousand Year Old Vampire: solo journaling driven by prompts, where the diary is the game and memory is forced to decay.
  • Unlock!: a card-based boxed escape game with a companion app as judge, timer, and hint desk.

Puzzle hunts

  • Cicada 3301: an anonymous, multi-layered cryptographic puzzle trail that ran across the internet and the physical world.
  • DASH & the Galactic Puzzle Hunt: the MIT hunt opened up, run simultaneously across many cities and, online, free to the world.
  • The MIT Mystery Hunt: the founding puzzle hunt, where unmarked puzzles feed meta-puzzles and the winning team writes the next year’s hunt.

Live games

  • The Crystal Maze: zoned timed challenges and theatrical hosting, paced across a long session.
  • Hunt A Killer: a murder mystery serialised as monthly boxes of physical evidence to assemble.
  • Jubensha: the Chinese script-murder venue form, where players take scripted roles in a hosted mystery.
  • Megagames: live games of tens to hundreds of players in nested teams, run by a Control team over a single day.
  • The Murder Mystery Party: the hosted dinner-party whodunnit, with a secret role and goal handed to every guest.
  • The Mysterious Package Company: a story delivered as real artefacts in the post, with no visible game layer.
  • Notable Escape Rooms: the live escape-room form, read through several landmark venues.
  • Sleep No More & Punchdrunk: free-roaming immersive theatre, the mask contract, and the repeating loop as a multiple-visit engine.

Digital games

Single-player video games that sit outside the guide’s four craft-traditions but illustrate its mechanisms cleanly, especially in puzzle design.

  • Baba Is You: a puzzle game whose rules are tiles you rearrange, teaching its own grammar without a word.
  • Blue Prince: a roguelike of drafted rooms over a fixed mystery, where the only thing that persists between runs is what you understand.
  • The Witness: an island of line-drawing panels that teach themselves in silence, until the world itself becomes the puzzle.