Puzzle Showcase

Collage of puzzle artifacts and clue snippets

A selection of my puzzle designs—ranging from bite-sized enigmas to multi-stage experiences. Some items may be excerpted, redacted, or private depending on client and copyright constraints.

If you'd like something in this style for your event or community, see Commissions.

Puzzleart

I have been exploring puzzles as an artistic medium, seeking to create works where the aesthetic surface and the puzzle structure meaningfully interact and elevate each other.

Letters Community Puzzle

with Vinnie Hager 2022 Difficulty: approachable digital artwork

There’s a word somehow hidden in this whimsy.

My first experience with creating puzzleart, in collaboration with artist Vinnie Hager for an event in his Letters NFT community.

This piece serves as an excellent introduction to puzzling—and I often use it in teaching puzzle-solving—because the highly constrained structure of the image and its elements tends to produce a surprisingly linear progression from initial bewilderment to clear intuition for how the pieces have to fit together.

45 squared: Pride

45 squared 2025 Difficulty: accessible digital artwork

Encodes a short, inclusive message for Pride Month.

Unlike some puzzles in the 45 squared series, this one can be solved just from looking at the image itself—but you have to read it in exactly the right way.

The Magna Carta

2025 Difficulty: fairly hard digital artwork

In addition to encoding the full Magna Carta itself, the text of Rudyard Kipling's "The Reeds of Runnymede" has been encrypted into the image using Patrick Amadon's sVeil system; those who figure out how to unlock it may find one additional message.

45 squared: Veterans Day

45 squared 2025 Difficulty: medium digital artwork

Honors US service members with eight overlaid cipher patterns representing the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps, National Guard, Navy, Space Force, and USO in their respective colors. Once decoded, they combine in formation for the flag.

45 squared: Rosh Hashanah 5786

45 squared TK Difficulty: expert digital artwork

Believe it or not, this abstract festive image somehow plays the sound of the Shofar.

The hidden element here even blows *my* mind—I am still surprised that it was possible to construct this puzzle mechanism while leaving the SVG source code completely "vanilla" under the hood. There's a big payoff/thrill to solving, but it's quite a challenge!

Conundrums

From 2020–2021, I wrote a puzzle column for Bloomberg Opinion called Kominers's Conundrums. We had a couple thousand solvers—most of them first-time puzzle solvers—across the Bloomberg Terminal, website, and Twitter. Here are a few of the standouts:

This Puzzle Honors a Game-Show Legend

Bloomberg Opinion 2020 Difficulty: accessible online

A puzzling tribute to Trebek—with a hidden 'Double Jeopardy' round.

~~This~~What is one of the best-designed and most successful puzzles I've ever created?

This extremely accessible game show Conundrum had more than 222 solvers in a single weekend—the vast majority of whom had never solved a puzzle of this style before—and it was even briefly the top trending item on entertainment Twitter(!).

The Bloomberg version is paywalled at this point, but the full puzzle is publicly available in a Twitter thread; I strongly recommend taking a look and giving it a try.

A ‘Hungry Caterpillar’ Puzzle You Can Solve With Your Kids

with Lara Williams Bloomberg Opinion 2021 Difficulty: easy online

A "picturesque puzzle" based on Eric Carle's celebrated children's book

The 'hungry caterpillar' motif worked particularly well for a visual puzzle; this one is also quite accessible, and I heard from a number of people who said they had literally solved it with their kids.

Full puzzle is available in this Twitter thread.

The Olympics of Brainteasers Is Here

Bloomberg Opinion 2021 Difficulty: {easy, easy, medium-hard; hard} online

A puzzle triptych themed around the 2021 Summer Olympics, with challenges based on archery, diving, and—new to the Olympics that year—sport climbing. "Medalists" who solved all three could put the answers together for an award-podium metapuzzle.

Three very different types of puzzles, two of them (archery and climbing) quite accessible, and serving in part as a confidence-builder en route to the more subtle third (diving). And then a medalpuzzle that's quite constrained, yet surprisingly tractable and satisfying.

Full puzzle is available in this Twitter thread.

Can You Escape This Column?

Bloomberg Opinion 2021 Difficulty: approachable online, but paywalled

We turned a Bloomberg column into a literal escape room. Yes, you read that right.

This puzzle breaks the fourth wall by turning formatting and other unnoticed features of the column-reading experience into puzzle clues. (Unfortunately this means one actually has to work with the official web version to solve; there was no way to translate the full mechanic into twitter or other external venues.)

Brand Puzzles

The Wilds Puzzle

2025 Difficulty: medium online

A puzzle set in the world of NFT brand The Wilds.

This puzzle has an unusual feature called a "negative degree of freedom," meaning that the puzzle structure is more constrained than it should be possible to achieve (detailed explanation in this Twitter thread [warning: contains answer spoilers!]).

Installations

m0dest masquerade

with m0dest 2025 Difficulty: varies online, but concluded

Cryptoartist m0dest and I teamed up to hide a series of layered puzzles inside (and outside) Sam Spratt's Masquerade.

a16z crypto website puzzle

with a16z crypto 2023 Difficulty: medium-hard inactive

I designed a series of interlocking puzzles that were hidden across the 2023-2025 incarnation of the a16z crypto website. Solvers received a commemorative NFT.