The Stack

Toward the end of any puzzle collection of this sort comes a point where the multitudinous bounty ends, and all you’re left with is a small number of puzzles you’re stuck on. The Fool and His Money makes an admirable go of extending puzzles through unlocking new layers, so that you can have the pleasure of solving a puzzle and still have just as many puzzles left as you started with, if not more. But even so, after I finally started slotting things into place for the climactic metapuzzle, I spent the bulk of today stuck on just two puzzles, both anagrams.

The big problem with that climactic metapuzzle is that it requires not common words, but surnames. It all ties into the game’s big theme of names and people who have lost them. The prince took away people’s names to make them more controllable; by restoring people’s names, the Fool is restoring their identities and even, in the case of the people that the Prince turned into abstract shapes, bringing them back to life. Meanwhile, the Prince’s seven minions know exactly who they are: the Fool confronts each of them by stating their name, and each replies with a brief description of its meaning and derivation, indicating that it is a being with self-knowledge and therefore power. Of course, the figures of the Tarot, such as the Hermit and the Magician, don’t have names, being archetypes rather then individuals. This may be why the Prince’s magics were able to corrupt and reverse them (such as turning the High Priestess from “the one who knows” to “the one who acts”, setting the events of The Fool’s Errand into motion — a detail I suspect was put in because Cliff Johnson knows more about the meanings of Tarot cards now than he did in 1987). There’s even some suggestion that the Prince himself is in some way a corrupted version of the Fool — they tend to mirror each other’s postures a lot, and there are at least two places in the endgame where the Prince outright replaces the Fool in a picture. But this game is too enigmatic to go for an straight-out Fight Club ending, and besides, by the end of the story, the Fool has been given a name, which should render him immune. (It’s Thomas.)

At any rate, making names rather than words is thematic, but it’s also troublesome. I’d been very pleased with the game’s choice of words in its word puzzles: even when a puzzle required very long words, it consistently chose common ones. I came to trust that the solution would always be a word I know, and that goes a long way toward keeping me going when I’m stuck. But with names, all bets are off. Just looking at the names in the main puzzle list, I see ones that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in my life, like Voorst and Thwaite. Now, the puzzles that produce the names for the final puzzle are varied, and some of them just give you entire names without any trouble, but some of them require unscrambling of some sort, either as an anagram or by arranging some words you got from other puzzles in a grille in the correct order. And in both variants, I sometimes resorted to exhaustive permutation, with some help from reasoning backward from the anticipated solution to the metapuzzle. In the end, it turned out there was exactly one name that was completely unfamiliar to me.

I find it admirable that this wasn’t the last puzzle. The final puzzle involved going back to the main list, where a link labeled “Finale” had been available from the very beginning, leading to page that basically just reminded you that your task was not yet complete. The metapuzzle unlocks it the rest of the way, adding some more text and a puzzle, and, in accordance with good game design principles, it’s a pretty easy puzzle. It’s a type the player is familiar with by that point, pressing buttons in sequence to build up a sentence, but with a new twist, that the buttons can be pressed multiple times with different effects. But it’s pretty obvious from context what the sentence is going to be, and getting the sequence falls to exactly the same techniques as the earlier puzzles. If I recall correctly, the original Fool’s Errand had a similar post-metapuzzle moment, but had the Fool solve the simple final puzzle in a cutscene instead of letting the player do it. It’s more satisfying to do it yourself.

All in all, I’m pleased with this game, but also glad to be finished with it.

By now, I’ve finished all of the main-sequence puzzles, which is more than I managed back in 2012. As the last few in the list got marked as solved, I started thinking that I was almost done with the game, but this turned out not to be the case. I knew there would be a metapuzzle involving arranging tiles to form a map with the final wave of puzzles on it, because that’s how The Fool’s Errand ended, and the map itself had been accessible, if incomplete, throughout the game. But the map is a great deal more involved this time around, less a finale and more a final act. I still have a way to go.

So let’s take a close look at what I’ve just been through. Ignoring the sneaky “Seventh House” stuff, there are 70 puzzles in the main list, in four groups associated with the Tarot suits. Each is indicated by a name — not a name that describes the puzzle, but a person’s name, like “Ursula” or “Crichton”, which seems to be linked to people forgetting their names in the story. When two names start with the same initial, the associated puzzles are the same type.

Five of the puzzles are card games, using Tarot deck variations with some extra cards referencing the story. There was one puzzle like this in Errand, but it was one of the more satisfying things in the game, so I’m pleased to see it expanded into a genre. The basic idea in all of them is that you and an opponent take turns swapping cards between your hand and a common pool, trying to make combos that score points. But the rules beyond that, and what the combos are, are things you have to figure out by observation.

Nine are tile-based picture-assembly puzzles of various sorts. Four are memorization puzzles where you trace a specific path through the irregular panes of a stained glass window. Three involve arranging tiles with numeric values to create specific sums. One is the perennial sort where you have to create a specific configuration of a group of things by pressing buttons, each of which cycles a different subset of the things through different states. One particularly difficult one is a rule-guessing game reminiscent of Petals Around the Rose: given six coins with various faces, you have to figure out how to tell which two to flip over to reveal the same symbol. The rule here doesn’t make physical sense, but it’s completely consistent and predictable once you know how to do it.

The remaining 47 puzzles are all about making words and sentences in various ways.

Mostly this means unscrambling letters. For example, there’s a set of puzzles that give you 4×4 grids of letters, which you have to rearrange so that every row and column is a word. Another type gives you a stack of bands of letters, which you shift left and right to form words in a highlighted central column. An interesting special case: Any puzzle that produces seven-letter words will feed them into a later puzzle, which you therefore can’t solve until you’ve completed the earlier ones. This is the game’s first real hint of metapuzzlery.

There’s some redundancy: there’s a set of cryptograms, but there’s also a set of puzzles where you select letters out of a list to make multiple copies of the letter appear in an expanding sequence that sprouts punctuation as you go, and after you’ve tried this a few times, you realize that it’s just a cryptogram in disguise, with a less convenient interface.

I mentioned a puzzle where you press buttons to cycle objects through different states. Well, there’s three others where you do the same thing, except the objects are letters in a word. This is a bigger change in the nature of the puzzle than it sounds like, because it’s not clear what the target word is. Interestingly, this means solving the puzzle effectively has two phases, figuring out what word you can make from the given letters and figuring out how to use the available buttons to produce it, even though there’s no separation of phases in its implementation.

Another notable type: the letter auctions. You have a bunch of letters, and there’s a bunch of potential buyers trying to turn four-letter sets into five-letter words. Your challenge is to optimize your earnings by auctioning your letters in the right order. Satisfy a customer too early, and they won’t be around to pump up the bidding on later letters. Now, this seemed to me at first to be essentially a math problem. By observation, I could learn each bidder’s maximum bid and derive the maximum value of each letter and so forth. But the behavior of the bidders is complicated and perhaps unpredictable — I’m sure I’ve sometimes seen people bidding on letters they couldn’t actually use. Ultimately, the key was to not try to figure it out that way. All that really matters is that all the words in the optimal solution fit a theme, and that by hitting “Undo” whenever someone makes a wrong word, you can backtrack your way to the solution. I’m pretty sure that the word auctions were among the puzzles I didn’t manage to solve last time, and I can’t say I like them much.

One peculiar thing about the words you make: Since the setting is based on Tarot, it’s all sort of vaguely pre-industrial. This is a land of kings and queens, swords and wands, hermits and heirophants. And this puts limits on the game’s vocabulary. So if one of those 4×4 word grids can make the word “cola”, for example, you know that it’s not going to be part of the solution. But those grids keep track of how many words you have — the cash offer for the grid increases with each word — and thus you can see that “cola” is counted as a word even so.

If I had to describe the feel of The Fool and His Money in one word, I’d choose “enigmatic”. You might think that’s a given for a puzzle game, but I’m not even talking about the content of the puzzles so much as everything else about and around them.

The basic format of the game is this: From a menu, you can access a series of pages. Each page contains a fragment of story, just a few sentences long, accompanied by an illustration, with all characters shown in silhouette, like shadow puppets — something inherited from The Fool’s Errand, where it was to some extent a reaction to the graphical limitations of the original Macintosh, but the effect is attractive and creates a sense of mystery from the get-go. Each illustration contains a puzzle, usually a word puzzle of some sort, but there are exceptions. Seventeen pages are available to start with; the rest are locked, and unlock in fixed sequence as you solve puzzles. In addition, solving a puzzle extends the story fragment on that page to fill in more of the story, and in many cases alters the illustration, adding words or jumbled letters of unclear significance. Presumably these are part of a metapuzzle to be solved after you complete all the pages, which means that at the moment they’re revealed, they’re a puzzle that’s out of your reach, a message that you can’t even begin to decipher yet. Enigmatic.

Even ignoring the puzzles, the story itself is something of a mystery. The original Fool’s Errand had a fairly simple good-vs-evil plot, with the High Priestess from the Tarot as the bad guy, seizing the power of the Book of Thoth to place curses on the land, and with various other Tarot cards, notably including the Sun, helping the Fool against her. TFaHM starts out with the Sun apparently betraying the Fool while the High Priestess suddenly turns helpful, and it proceeds by generally casting doubt on everyone’s motives and revealing things that were said in the first game to be lies. You soon wind up with no idea what’s really going on. And this effect is enhanced by the fact that you’re missing important chunks of the story.

See, the puzzles vary a lot in difficulty. So I’m not solving them in linear sequence. I’ll hit a difficult puzzle, maybe solve it partway, and then break off to solve other, easier puzzles. And since the story is revealed by solving puzzles, this means there are gaps in the story I’ve seen, some of them quite significant for understanding the plot.

And that’s before we even get into the secret pages.

They’re not really all that secret. Just… non-obvious. The puzzle menu is in the form of a large building with the names of the pages on its walls, between and around a set of stained glass windows. In my initial pass at the game, I didn’t go back to this menu much: until I had sampled all the unlocked pages and had to start backtracking, it was simpler to just keep using the “next page” button. So it took me a while to notice that the windows were changing color, indicating that they were unlocking too. They link to a sequence of pages whose relationship to the rest of the story is still unclear to me: in them, the Fool repeatedly sneaks into “the Seventh House”, whatever that is, and eavesdrops on a machiavellian Prince plotting all the calamities you observe elsewhere. And that’s just the start of a fairly large set of puzzles that aren’t in the main list, but do seem to be an essential part of understanding the later parts of the story.