ThinkyCon 2026 Streams Two Days of Puzzle Design Talks

The standout ThinkyCon 2026 item is Matthew Stein's "The Brilliance of Japanese Puzzle Culture: Multisolvability, Metapuzzles, and Meaningful Failure," on the conference's second day. Stein, who writes about escape rooms for Room Escape Artist, spent three months in Japan playing games that exist only in Japanese, guided by designers met at the Nazotoki Market. The vocabulary that came back is the subject: ō-nazo, a Japanese "final puzzle" that works as a metapuzzle over everything before it, and multisolvability, puzzles that "can be solved multiple times to different answers." It is a design tradition built around SCRAP, the Real Escape Game company that opened its first game in 2007, and much of it never reaches English. Stein called it research "near and dear" in the announcement.

ThinkyCon is the free online conference of Thinky Games, a site devoted to puzzle and deduction games. Two days of talks stream on YouTube, with discussion on Discord.

Day one includes Arvi Teikari, the Baba Is You designer who works as Hempuli, on variations on a theme; Evan Todd of Helvetica Scenario asking "Is Tetris a Metroidbrainia"; and Nathaly Kalantar of Replay Masters EU on rebuilding an escape room mystery as a digital game. Day two has Tyler Robertson's "We have game engines at home!," Gwen C. Katz of Nightwell Games on difficulty in narrative puzzles, Kylie Southwell of the University of Sydney on cognitive accessibility, and closes on Blookerstein's "Stop making 'perfect games' and start making art!!" A ThinkyCon game jam built on the talks follows on itch.io from Oct. 29 to Nov. 9.