A Compendium of Meta-Puzzles (Pedja Banovic) // Review

A Compendium of Meta-Puzzles is an innovative and challenging puzzle book by Pedja Banovic. This exciting collection of meta-puzzles spans a range of puzzle types suitable for all levels of experience. Each solution points you towards the next puzzle, but you’ll have to work out where to begin!

What you need: A pencil and an eraser. A ruler (optional).

First impressions

When several people you respect recommend a puzzle book, it’s time to sit up and listen. I’d heard whispers about A Compendium of Meta-Puzzles, but with a growing pile of puzzle books to play, held off. When Eric from Escape Mail mentioned it during his interview, I decided I had to grab a copy.

In a world where the appetite for puzzle books only grows, it’s refreshing to find something new. This book is distinct and fresh, with scope for future instalments. It might not have the huge marketing behind it that Murdle does, but it deserves a lot more hype!

Presentation

The book features a simple yet effective cover design by Victor Mingovits. It hints at what’s inside, without giving too much away. I love that it’s spiral-bound, especially because it’s quite a large book. The ability to fold it in half without bending the spine helps tackle some more fiddly puzzles. It also preserves the general condition of the book.

Beyond the bright blue cover, the contents are entirely black-and-white. This gives it a neat-looking aesthetic while making it accessible to colour-blind players. If you’d like to inject some colour, there is ample opportunity to switch out a standard pencil for coloured ones.

Gameplay

Getting started

A useful reference guide at the start will assist you along the way. Everything you require is contained within the book, so you won’t need to go online for information. It’s a big part of why I love it! You just need a pencil and an eraser, then you can play it anywhere.

Each chapter comprises a two-page spread with the chapter title and a short story summary that sets the scene. For example, in Chapter 1 you are a private investigator tasked with identifying a target. The description of this person has been encoded, so you’ll need to solve the puzzles to unlock it. You can work through the chapters in any order, but I broadly worked through them in order.

One of the biggest joys of this book is that it doesn’t hand you the starting point for each chapter. You’ll need to work out where to begin. Once you tug at the right string, it will gradually unravel a hidden path between the puzzles. Ultimately, once you’ve solved the mini-puzzles, you’ll get the solution for the final puzzle. This takes the form of a word, number or phrase.

Puzzles

A Compendium of Meta-Puzzles advertises on the cover that it features ’20+ extravaganzas to untangle’, which is technically true. I actually think this does the book a disservice, as it contains many more than 20 puzzles overall. Each chapter has five or more, with the final one on each page revealing the overall solution.

The puzzles in this book are fantastic. Finding the starting point for the chapter is a good first challenge! Solving each puzzle and unlocking the information needed to crack the next is also very satisfying. The book is full of ah-ha moments, some of which only came after I stepped away for a while. You can expect logic puzzles, ciphers, crosswords, dot-to-dots, word puzzles and many more. Each has its own unique twists, so you are never being served just a standard puzzle type. I found that on the whole, there wasn’t any repetition of puzzles, although some were a little similar in places.

Before you play

One of the chapters features an unfortunate printing error. The error can be found on page 13 in a puzzle that features vertical and horizontal arrows. The horizontal arrows are correctly printed, but the vertical arrows should be flipped. The author is aware of this and has confirmed that this issue will be fixed in the next print run. Hopefully highlighting this before you play means you don’t have to turn to the solutions page!

Difficulty & Hints

This book will pose a considerable challenge for some, but I do feel it is accessible to all. Some will rely on hints more than others, but generally it just takes a bit of time an patience. The chapters aren’t ordered by level of difficulty, partly because of how subjective they are. They can also be played in any order, so if you get particularly stuck you can move on for now.

Hints can be found in the back of the book, however, I really didn’t need to use them too much. Each puzzle has a hint reference number, so you simply find this in the list and read the text. The hints I did use pretty much just told me I needed to solve another puzzle first. This was still helpful information, as it isn’t always clear.

Step-by-step solutions are also available for each chapter. These break down how to progress through each puzzle and reach the final solution. There isn’t a way to see a solution for one puzzle, without risking seeing the solution for others. Thankfully the only time I needed to use the solution page was for the arrow printing error, as mentioned above. Just be careful if you need to use those pages!

Verdict