Meet Your Maker: Alex Rosenthal (TED-Ed) // Interview

Alex Rosenthal is the Editorial Director of TED-Ed Animations and co-creator of Pandora’s Legacy. I’m incredibly grateful to him for taking the time to chat about the launch of TED-Ed’s debut tabletop puzzle game, Pandora’s Legacy. We dig into the inspiration behind the game, collaborating with Rita Orlov and Senne Trip and scope for the future instalments. He also shares some great recommendations for puzzle games and creators, along with revealing his top-secret alternate job title…

(Meet Your Maker is an interview series featuring creators of puzzle and mystery games and experiences from across the globe. We aim to shine a spotlight on both established creators and those who are just setting out on their journey. Stay tuned for more interviews coming soon.)

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Can you please start by talking about TED-Ed and what your role as Editorial Director of TED-Ed Animations entails?

Absolutely – TED-Ed is TED’s (as in TED Talks) education initiative. We create free, high-quality educational resources for teachers and learners of all ages around the world. The best known are our animated videos which cover every subject under the sun and have been watched more than 5.5 billion times. Those videos are a collaboration between subject matter experts, our team of producers, and animation studios based worldwide. My brilliant team and I oversee the editorial part of that process, which begins with determining what our content is going to be and ends when we have a locked script. At this point, our production team takes over. In between there is a lot of research, collaboration, writing, and rewriting. We produce around 100 videos each year, so we’re juggling many projects simultaneously!

Your job title doesn’t scream ‘narrative puzzle game designer’! Is this quite an unusual project to get involved in, or do you have a lot of freedom to explore different forms of educational content?

I’ve long held a second role at TED which has gone by many informal names over the years, but my favorite is “TED Puzzle Wizard.” It started with me running small puzzles and puzzle hunts for TED staff and gradually expanded into puzzle activations for various TED communities. A few years ago TED and Marriott partnered to create TED-themed escape rooms in hotels in three cities across the world. I conceived and co-designed these with my friend Andrew Evans, a magician. Puzzles are also one of the main things I do when I’m not at work, and this led to my TED Talk about the MIT Mystery Hunt and puzzle design.

But perhaps the biggest antecedent to this project is the TED-Ed riddle series, which consists of logic and mathematical puzzles set up inside a character-based animated story. That series took off as soon as we started publishing it (it’s accumulated more than 400 million views), and ever since we’ve wanted to build on the appetite and joy for solving puzzles into something bigger.

Pandora’s Legacy is a love letter to the audience of our riddle and mythology series (another of our hits). While it isn’t coming completely out of the blue, I’m lucky to work on a team and with leadership that values innovation and is willing to invest time, energy, and money into big swings.

TED Games is a relatively new offshoot of TED – what can you share about this area and how Pandora’s Legacy fits into it?

TED Games – which as you might expect from the name is our new games and puzzles initiative – is a natural extension of what TED stands for. Ideas are core to TED, and games are so good at illustrating, articulating, and reinforcing ideas. More than that, a great game, like The Witness, is able to get its core idea to form in your own mind as you play rather than having to tell you what it’s about. So TED Games is all about smart games that build skills – reasoning, critical thinking, communication, etc – and have the beating heart of an idea. I lead this initiative and have designed some of our early games, but the plan is to expand it into something much bigger. Thus far we have two free daily-play games available at TED.com/games – The Purring Test and Letter Brew — and a mobile app that’s free to Netflix subscribers called Tumblewords, which is basically like playing Boggle on the face of a Rubik’s Cube.

Pandora’s Legacy has one foot in TED-Ed, given how it draws from our content areas, and the other in TED Games. And yes, it is TED’s first physical game, and as such we’ve been learning a ton!

What was the inspiration behind Pandora’s Legacy?

The core mechanics of Pandora’s Legacy have been percolating in my brain for many years. One of the biggest points of inspiration was a 2021 MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle by Anderson Wang, Lillian McKinley and Mitchell Lee called The Greatest Jigsaw. This reframed jigsaws in my mind as much more than the images printed on them (I’m being vague to avoid spoilers). After that, I started to think about jigsaws and jigsaw pieces as physical objects and thought about interesting ways to play with them. The Magic Puzzles were another great illustration of this and pushing the form. I think we’re in something of a jigsaw renaissance in which a lot of artists are pushing the bounds and finding new, interesting things to do with the form. Simone Giertz’s jigsaw that’s almost exclusively edge pieces is another example of this.

The first breakthrough was when I thought about printing numbers on the back of every piece (which seems profoundly simple written out…and I’m far from the first person to think of printing on both sides of a jigsaw). Funnily enough, that idea came from a set of four 12-piece jigsaw puzzles we got for my then 2-year-old daughter. The puzzles were all of different animals and came in a wooden box with small partitions, and to make it easy to sort the pieces for the four puzzles when they inevitably got mixed up, each piece had one of four shapes on the back. I thought “if they can do that, why not a different word on the back of every piece?” So that was my original idea, thinking that those words could be answers to puzzles that direct you to specific pieces. Eventually, I realized I could do a lot more if those elements were an input, rather than an output. In other words, if you put those words (or numbers, as they eventually became) into a website, every piece could be a rabbit hole into…anything. A poem, an image, a description of an event, etc.

That reframed jigsaws into a vehicle for a much bigger adventure/narrative/experience. At one point I was brainstorming about the idea with my colleague Dan Kwartler and I proposed that the numbers on some pieces could tell you to unlock a physical object that you use to solve a puzzle. He said, “Like in a legacy board game,” and that was when the whole thing crystallized and clarified into the core gameplay loop of assembling pieces, solving puzzles, unlocking new sections of the jigsaw (and other cool things), and repeating. We wanted this to be a special experience for long-time TED-Ed fans, so Greek Mythology was a natural space to play in.

How did the collaboration with Rita Orlov/PostCurious and Senne Trip come about?

When I approached Rita Orlov I had a different story in mind that’s probably going to be a sequel (if our campaign is successful enough to warrant a second chapter!). Rita and I used to be neighbors in Brooklyn; we had a weekly board game night with our friend Noam, and my wife and I play-tested early versions of PostCurious games going back to The Tale of Ord. I’ve admired Rita’s skill and artistry for years and have always been looking for something we could work together on. So as soon as I knew I wanted this game to involve physical puzzle objects, I reached out to her, and we started brainstorming further and coming up with many of the ideas that are in the game.

We knew from the start that we wanted the visuals to be both gorgeous and fun. Rita introduced me to Senne Trip’s work, which she knew through a brilliant murder mystery game — The Rottumereye Tragedy—  that Senne and her art collective Knetterijs created. I instantly fell in love with Senne’s work; she is a genius with light and color, which is perfect for a jigsaw.

I consider myself profoundly lucky to be working with these two artists; this has been one of those magical whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts collaborations where each person’s work elevates the other’s.

How much time did you spend researching Greek Mythology?

My entire life to date has been researching Greek Mythology, haha. I loved mythology as a child…and still do as an adult. That being said, all three of us did a deep dive into various versions of Pandora’s story at the start of the project. By lucky chance, Rita already had a trip planned to Greece in the middle of our development process, and she came back with many photos that influenced various aspects of the design. Senne also did a ton of deep dives into mythology to populate the visual landscape of the game with references to dozens and dozens of characters and stories.

What does the day-to-day consist of for a project like this? Do you work together in person or is there a lot of remote working?

Rita lives in California, I live in Michigan, and Senne lives in the Netherlands, so we have yet to all occupy the same space at the same time! We held approximately weekly video calls for about a year in which we’d share elements we were working on, problem-solve together, brainstorm, and more. Between those meetings, we shared drafts, notes, questions, and ideas on Notion.

Rita led on puzzles involving physical objects and pretty much everything involving manufacturing, I took the lead on non-physical puzzles, story, and the digital component, and Senne of course on all things illustrated. But at this point, it’s a little foolhardy to try to disentangle the contributions, because almost everything has been influenced and improved by everyone. With exceptions; I’m not a super visual thinker so I can’t claim much (if any) credit for Senne’s stunning illustrations or Rita’s brilliant objects. But there are so many layers to this game – narrative, design, puzzle—that bear all of our fingerprints. And that’s what the perfect process looks like for me; the final result is so much stronger for it. It’s the kind of joyful collaboration you spend a lifetime chasing and that I’ve only otherwise experienced in theater.

Senne’s artwork really brings the game to life – did you have any set ideas about how you wanted it to look?

I had an extremely rough, undetailed, terrible sketch or two of how the overall image could break into sections and what the main architectural focal points of those sections might be. Senne made that world come to life through a series of sketches which Rita and I responded to. She then added detail in a series of passes, and eventually, color. Rita and I also did quite a bit of defining constraints on the basis of embedded puzzle elements, and Senne was the genius who made it all work cohesively and beautifully.

One of the main design constraints that I introduced was wanting all visual puzzle elements to be diegetic – meaning naturally motivated within the world of the game, rather than superimposed or artificially introduced (ie “there’s no reason for there to be a number on this rock”). Senne made that happen masterfully. And again, Senne improved on so many puzzle elements through brainstorms and by introducing visual elements that clarified and improved on them.

Some of the most fun collective brainstorming was coming up with different mischief the imps that Pandora released could be up to.

Did all of the puzzle content need to be completed before the final jigsaw design was signed off? I imagine everything is very interconnected.

Many aspects of the design overlapped, but Rita and I didn’t want to subject Senne to giant late-stage revisions. So our first round of testing took place on a giant black-and-white draft version of the illustration which I cut into sections to simulate the jigsaw assembly process, and on which I wrote 1200 numbers. That was a real pain on my testers’ eyes (and my hands!), but did what we needed it to. After that round, we knew many elements we could treat as final, and Senne was able to focus on those while we iterated on the ones that needed work.

Did that playtesting lead to any significant changes to the game?

Playtesting resulted in lots of small changes and lots of added signposting. I subscribe to the school of thought that it’s better to make a hard puzzle easier than an easy puzzle harder, and testing in that context is an exercise of adding breadcrumbs to help solvers reach an aha without beating them over the head and deadening its impact. So a lot of our puzzles became more approachable, and we cut some down a bit where they were dragging. The biggest changes involved breaking some puzzles into multiple stages to provide players with intermediate confirmations.

There is a lot of infrastructure in place for jigsaw puzzles, but this game includes one with oddly shaped puzzle pieces and other physical components. From a manufacturing point of view, how difficult is it to produce a game like this?

So being new to making a physical game, I don’t have a good frame of reference. But my estimate is…extremely complex, at least by board game standards. Many elements have to interact with each other with a low tolerance for deviation. A good deal of which serve multiple purposes. I don’t think I could have navigated this without Rita, who did the lion’s share of the work on this front. In addition to being a brilliant artist and puzzle designer, she’s also extremely talented at managing physical production. We’ve been lucky to be working with a factory with extensive capabilities that has somehow rolled with almost everything we’ve thrown at them. There have been many rounds of reviewing samples and making adjustments to make sure everything works seamlessly. But that is probably to be expected.

Pandora’s Legacy has just launched on Kickstarter. Who is this game for?

I have a core belief that there are many many people (millions perhaps?) who would love and benefit from puzzle hunt/aha-based puzzles and have yet to be exposed to the full range of what they can offer. In many cases, they’re doing adjacent puzzle activities like crosswords and jigsaws, and just need a nudge in this direction to set the snowball tumbling. A large part of the reason I chose to build this experience in and around a jigsaw puzzle is because there’s a broad basis of familiarity with them, and the density of information provides a strong foundation for a deeper experience. We also made the game simultaneously challenging and beginner-friendly by choosing to not have there be time pressure, plus building an extensive hint system that starts with gentle nudges in the right direction. Our playtesting confirmed that both experts and novices are having a fantastic time with it.

So I see Pandora’s Legacy as having a pretty broad audience that includes jigsaw lovers, escape room enthusiasts (or anyone who has done one escape room and thought it was cool), puzzle hunt solvers, mythology buffs, and followers of TED-Ed’s riddle series. Anyone who enjoys the layers of video games like Animal Well or Blue Prince. Lovers of stunning illustrations and masterfully crafted objects.

What made you decide to fund it through Kickstarter?

Kickstarter is a great place to launch something new and different; we have a whole video and campaign page to give people a sense of what this thing is. And in that physical games are a new direction for TED, Kickstarter gives us the opportunity to build a community from the ground up with whom we have a direct line, and who can help us shape what comes next.

Are there any incentives for backers that support the campaign?

Backers will be able to purchase the core game, two additional jigsaws set in the world of the game (illustrations by Senne), add their name to the game and get an exclusive limited-run art print of Senne’s illustration of Pandora opening the box. It’ll also be the least expensive way to buy Pandora’s Legacy; if it does wind up in retail, it’ll certainly be more expensive.

Do you have more ideas for future games in a similar style?

Oh yes! We have so many ideas that didn’t make the cut for this game that I’m dying to put into a sequel. I have this planned as an initial trilogy and then would like to branch into further themes and visual spaces from there. Some of the core mechanics will persist, but there will be a lot of variation as well. I have some ambitious ideas that may be outside reasonable budgets, so I won’t say them for now, but I’m pretty excited about what’s possible. We’re really just scratching the surface with this first game.

Thanks so much for doing this interview. Before we finish, would you mind sharing some of your favourite puzzle games/puzzle game creators?

I’m going to give you a somewhat random list from a variety of media!

• Everything Rita Orlov/PostCurious makes (goes without saying).
• I’m currently obsessed with Blue Prince, along with everyone else.
• Return of the Obra Dinn and The Outer Wilds are the two games where I wish I could erase my memory and play them again.
• Galactic puzzle hunts – I love the innovation Galactic Trendsetters brings to every puzzle hunt they run.
• Solve our Shirts was a big design influence on this game, and I wear their pirate shirt all the time.
• I haven’t played all of their rooms, but I’m a big fan of Palace Games in San Francisco.
• Todd Etter has designed some of my favorite Mystery Hunt Puzzles.

Thank you!

A massive thank you to Alex for taking the time to answer these questions. I personally found his responses really insightful and have added some of his puzzle game recommendations to my wish list. I concur that Blue Prince is a must-play! 😉

To grab yourself a copy of Pandora’s Legacy, click the Kickstarter link below – the campaign is running until 29 May 2025. If the current performance of the campaign is anything to go by, it won’t be long before work starts on the next project!

Still on the fence? Seriously? Check out my spoiler-free review of the game for more details, including some photos and thoughts on gameplay.

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