Larry Hosken is throwing a Lumber Party, a primarily digital puzzle hunt, which is set to begin this Sunday, 1:30 p.m. EDT, on the Octothorpean Order’s website.

The event is aimed at more experienced puzzle hunters, and is expected to take about 90 minutes to complete. Teams will have to register through the Octothorpean website to play, which is free. Groups will need to be logged into the website and on the Lumber Party page at the starting time. It may payoff to take a peek at the Order’s secret twitter feed during the hunt, but you didn’t read that here…

Hosken, the driving force behind Lumber Party and the yet-to-be-released The Order of the Octothorpe puzzle hunt, talked with Puzzle Pile about his history, puzzle crafting methods, and the details of his upcoming projects.

Puzzle Pile: Tell me a little about yourself. What has the life of Larry Hosken been like?

Hosken: I’m a San Francisco computer nerd. My day job is writing about computer programming, helping programmers to understand each other, clarifying what they’re doing. Puzzles make for a pleasant break from clarifying.

Puzzle Pile: An interview wouldn’t be anything without a look at your résumé, what do you have listed under the “puzzles” section? How would people in the puzzle community know?

Hosken: The SF Bay Area has a lot of puzzle hunts. In one of these games, teams of puzzlers solve puzzles that send them around a neighborhood (or maybe even driving from town to town). I started playing these around 2005, and took notes.

The team focus is nice since it meant I could learn about running these events by working with folks I already knew :-) I usually play on Team Mystic Fish; the team captain, Alexandra Dixon, runs puzzle events, both professional and by-nerds-for-nerds.

Most recently, some folks at work put together a puzzle hunt in honor of our summer interns.

Puzzle Pile: When were you first introduced to puzzles, and what was that experience like?

Hosken: When I was growing up back in the 1980s, my dad subscribed to a paper magazine called Scientific American. It had a feature called Mathematical Games, a regular recreational math article by a smart guy named Martin Gardner. I got into those. Later on, someone got me a subscription to Games Magazine.

Puzzle Pile: How did you come to discover the puzzle hunt scene?

Hosken: I found a website describing a game I’d missed. It sounded pretty amazing; I knew that I wanted to play. I couldn’t figure out how to sign up for future games, though.

Years passed; social networks appeared up on the web. I joined one called Orkut when it was still small enough to explore by just clicking around. I clicked around and thus found a community that talked about these games. I posted a pathetic plea there, begging some team to take me in. Alexandra Dixon let me onto Mystic Fish.

Puzzle Pile: You’ve gone on to crafting several puzzle hunts, which encapsulate puzzles of many varieties and amounts. What is it that creates this drive to make these experiences? Why do you feel that just making a single puzzle, like a Crossword or Masyu, is not enough? Why go on to construct these intricately interwoven events?

Hosken: Most of these puzzle hunts are collaborative efforts. If you tell five puzzle constructors, “The theme is citrus fruit: go!” you will end up with six different puzzles. That’s good for me since I’m a mediocre puzzle constructor: If you ask me for a crossword, I press the button on the Crossword Compiler computer program, knock wood, and hope for good fill. But if I write three widely varying puzzles and discard the two that folks don’t like, I can get a good puzzle.

Puzzle Pile: Can you tell me what in the world is an Octothorpean, and what is it doing on the internet?

Hosken: It’s an online puzzle hunt that introduces new puzzle hunters to the tricks they’ll encounter in hunts. Nobody’s born knowing how to recognize Morse code, but it turns out that’s an important skill. Uhm, important in some contexts.

You recall that I found out about puzzle hunts by reading about a game that I’d missed. Since then, I’ve had a chance to share this sadness-of-missing-out when friends ask me what I did this weekend: I tell them I played in some event that they missed. They’re interested, want to try a puzzle hunt, ask when the next one is… and the answer is something months away. You can see their spark of interest fizzle when they hear about that wait. I wanted to do something for them.

Years ago, I had the idea of putting a puzzle hunt online instead of running it as a one-time event. The 2-Tone Game is a San Francisco puzzle hunt that you can play today. The web site gives you puzzles, checks your answers, and dispenses hints.

This meant that when someone asked “How can I try one of these puzzle hunt thingies?” I could tell them to play the 2-Tone Game right then, no waiting. But alas, these folks were new to puzzle hunts, and 2-Tone’s puzzles were aimed at experienced puzzle hunters. It assumed players could, e.g., recognize Morse code if they saw some vaguely dot-and-dash-like scribbles. Most new folks gave up early on.

I was still glad I’d put 2-Tone online. Puzzlers from other places can play the next time they’re in San Francisco instead of just hearing about that game they missed.

And I got mail from out-of-towners who were playing the game. It turned out that one of the “San Francisco” puzzles could be solved by someone in Des Moines using Google Street View. These out-of-towners wanted to know about online places where they could see the data they needed for the other puzzles. So I gathered up Game Control’s scouting photos and put them online. Out-of-towners started finishing the game. For some of these out-of-town teams, this was their first event; their cities didn’t have puzzle hunts. There’s DASH, the multi-city puzzle hunt… but DASH is, alas not everywhere yet.

More background than you can stand, some notes about trying to spread word of 2-Tone amongst folks who weren’t already puzzle hunt enthusiasts, written a few months after 2-Tone went live.

Octothorpean grew out of that. It’s an online puzzle hunt with puzzles that introduce codes and puzzle-types before expecting teams to know them. It doesn’t assume that a team will recognize Morse code. (Though by the time that team finishes the hunt, they will recognize Morse.) It doesn’t assume that teams are in any place in particular. (Although there are some puzzles in a couple of cities, with more cities on the way, so teams that want to finish all the puzzles will have to travel or recruit their North Carolina cousins.) And since it’s online, if someone hears about it a couple of years from now, they should still be able to play.

Puzzle Pile: It seems like you’re setting up the Octothorpean puzzle hunt to act like modern video games’ introductory levels. These add little bits of gameplay mechanics as the players progress, helping them learn how to play the game without a formal introduction or rules explanation. Is this what you’re going for, and if so, why use this method versus the traditional hint-based system?

Hosken: Yep. If you tell someone to read a rules for fun, they’ll just look at you funny. For a couple of years, I worked with instructional designers, folks who think a lot about how people learn. Flat-out giving people hints can keep them moving, but they won’t necessarily remember what they’ve learned so well. If you let them “earn” knowledge by solving, they’re more likely to value that knowledge–they worked for it! They’re more likely to remember it; they’re likely to remember it better.

Puzzle Pile: Lumber Party takes place July 21, how does it tie-in with the Octothorpean puzzle hunt?

Hosken: Lumber Party is a set of puzzles from Octothorpean that fit together well as a group. In the context of Octothorpean, this is a set of the advanced puzzles that teams will unlock after they’ve learned about the typical codes and crosswordese. I’m opening up early as a little “sneak preview.”

Puzzle Pile: Where does the title Lumber Party come from?

Hosken: You wood like to trick me into revealing the theme, but I’m not falling for it.

Puzzle Pile: What can puzzle hunters expect from Lumber Party? What kind of puzzles do you have jammed into the website for teams to tackle?

Hosken: It’s eight puzzles plus a meta. There’s a variety of puzzles. One is a familiar-looking word puzzle. One introduces a less-common code in the usual Octothorpean way: with a bad poem. One is pretty silly, which is nice if you like silly things. One has the grind-y research aspect of some MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle. Folks can solve the puzzles that seem fun, skip the puzzles that seem like they’re fun-to-other-people, solve the meta with what they have, and enjoy themselves.

Puzzle Pile: Does Lumer Party’s “sneak preview” indicate the we’ll be seeing Octothorpean’s release soon? Do you have a release date in mind?

Hosken: Prrrobably in a few months. I don’t have a release date in mind, more of a checklist of things to do. For many months, that list grew and grew, but it’s been shrinking lately.

Puzzle Pile: Everyone is no doubt wondering, so I have to ask… is there a clue in this interview?

Hosken: I forget.

Puzzle Pile: Thanks for taking time to talk, do you have any final thought for our readers?

Hosken: And thank you, sir. Final thought? Have fun playing Lumber Party, folks. I hope you all come in first place.