It’s the turn of Bluefish Games founders Anna and Ace Ellett to step into the spotlight this week. As a huge fan of their games, it was a great honour to catch up with them both to discuss all things Bluefish. We touch on their escape room obsession, the origins of Hincksville and their experiences with crowdfunding. They also share some hints about future projects and talk about their favourite play-at-home games. Enjoy!
Let’s start with introductions, who are Anna and Ace?
Hello! We are an escape room enthusiast duo who played a few hundred escape rooms together and then thought that it would probably be a good idea to get married and start an at-home escape game company, which were the best decisions. We’re having a blast!
Can you tell me about Bluefish Games and how it came about?
“Team Bluefish” is our escape room team name. This came about by being very wrong about a puzzle while playing an escape room, which resulted in the game master telling us, “Don’t throw the fish in the tube.” It was a plastic fish and it thankfully sailed right out of the tube, so no harm done. We kept the name when we launched our first Kickstarter and it stuck.
The Curious Elevator of Mr. Hincks was your debut game. I’d love to hear about the inception of Hincksville. Where did the idea come from and were there any particular inspirations?
Ace had the idea for an elevator made by an eccentric inventor named Stephen P. Hincks. As we fleshed out that idea, Hincksville came to life with all sorts of businesses and organizations that Mr. Hincks loves to be a part of. We see him as a Willy Wonka style character, but instead of staying in the chocolate factory, he’s constantly running all over town. He’s filling in at The Sprout Stand, volunteering at being an amateur detective, and helping out with any robot uprisings—you know, the usual. So he’s actually more of a Kirk from Gilmore Girls with the inventive spirit of a Willy Wonka.
The game was successfully funded on Kickstarter in 2019. How did you find the process of crowdfunding?
It was madness. We launched a pretty small campaign and were able to ship in the timeframe we were hoping to, but only thanks to amazing friends and family who helped us with a pizza party game packing day. We are so thankful for the backers of that campaign. Though we had previously designed a just-for-fun escape room in the garage and had been prototyping games and taking them to conventions, we had never released an actual product and there were many unforeseen hurdles. This was pre-Covid so we very thankfully didn’t run into those kinds of issues.
The Hincks Gazette, a continuation of the newspaper featured in The Curious Elevator, launched in 2020 as a monthly subscription. It’s such a great concept! How did you approach creating each issue?
Both volumes of the Gazette have a mini-story arc that appears in a few of the main articles. We would plan out this arc before designing the entire volume. For the puzzles, we had a continuously growing list of puzzle ideas that we would pick and choose from depending on what fits best with a given issue. Sometimes we would come up with a puzzle idea and it just wouldn’t work in the next issue, so we would add that to a backlog list.
I noticed a few familiar names popping up throughout Volume One, Lauren Bello (The Morrison Game Factory) being one of them. Are these significant?
The names that you’ve noticed in the paper are the amazing weekly secret puzzle solvers! During the two years of the Gazette’s original run, we released a puzzle every Friday on our website and the first solver would have the name they submitted in the next issue of the Gazette. Because there are many amazingly fast puzzle solvers in the community, it wasn’t unusual for us to have repeat winners. This actually worked out to be so fun for us because we were able to then write them into the Gazette as recurring characters and businesses. It would also sometimes be a really big challenge for us if say, someone submitted their name as “The Druidic Chanting That Emits From Arby’s.” Just as a hypothetical example, of course. For the most part, when designing an issue, we would just leave placeholder spaces for “Secret Puzzle Winner Name Here,” but occasionally we had to get pretty creative. So, you can blame some of Hinckville’s quirkiness on the amazingly wild puzzling community.
Did you find the constraint of having one double-sided sheet to fill per month more challenging or liberating?
So challenging! But a great kind of challenge. With The Elevator, each floor involves a puzzle that uses components from the box and one digital element viewed on the website. This means that some of the information is “locked” until you reach that floor, so puzzles can’t be solved out of order, because you wouldn’t have all the information until you get to that floor. With the Gazette being just one sheet of paper (and the online element being just for hints and final answer submission), there was essentially no locked information. Everything had to be hidden in plain sight. One puzzle in the paper should be where the player starts and the answer to it is always what unlocks the next puzzle. It was a tricky thing to have each puzzle resolve into guidance for the player and then be able to solve the next puzzle in line.
You’ve released a deluxe box set including Volume One and Volume Two of The Hincksville Gazette. Was it fun to revisit these and add in some bonus content?
It was very fun for me to revisit and not as much fun for Ace. I love editing. When releasing the deluxe box set, we went back and re-playtested every issue of the Gazette and made small tweaks to make them slightly more beginner-friendly. Smoothing out any rough edges of a puzzle is my favorite part of the job. Also designing the pins, stickers, and pencils and connecting them to Hincksville businesses and events was a lot of fun. I love “living” in the world of Hincksville. Ace doesn’t work on the graphic design side of things, and he doesn’t enjoy editing, he just wants to move on to the next new idea, which is a great thing. As a team, we balance each other out because I would stay on the same project refining it forever.
Puzzle-wise the subscription for The Hincks Gazette and the deluxe box sets are exactly the same. People may want to opt for the boxed sets if they enjoy the world-building aspect and/or having collectables from the game. The boxed sets do include two copies of each paper, so it can also be a good idea if you’re puzzling with a partner and don’t want to share the paper.
Have we seen the last of Hincksville?
You have not seen the last of Hincksville! We have a couple of irons in the fire in Hincksville and one of them is just about ready and we’re very excited about it. It should particularly appeal to people who love to read books, people who love to read books without actually reading books, and people who love to read books but can’t finish a book because they can’t take the suspense and google the plot halfway through (e.g. Anna).
There are so many forms of puzzle games available – are there any formats you would like to explore in future that you haven’t yet? Did you ever toy with the idea of a Hincks Escape Room?
Yes, there are definitely formats that we want to explore in the future that we haven’t yet. One great thing about Hincksville is that it’s a town full of weird yet normal people, businesses, events, and committees. This means that we can fit just about any type of game into something that could be happening in Hincksville, which gives us a ton of room to invent.
We have thought many times of what it could look like to make and run a physical escape room, but no I don’t believe we’ve ever actually considered a Hincks-themed one. It’s an interesting idea!
Have you considered any collaborations with other puzzle designers? Is there anyone in particular you would love to work with?
For sure! We’ve collaborated on projects like The Book of Dreams or events like Puzzletember and would love to keep collaborating on these types of things. Our current collaboration is with Jonathan Chaffer, creator of the Holiday Hijinks series. We were thrilled when he reached out to us about starting a separate line of 18-card escape games, using the same format as Holiday Hijinks, but the IP of the board game Endangered (published by Grand Gamers Guild). The second game in the series will be released next and focuses on the lemur leaf frog.
There are so many people in the puzzling community that we’d love to work with, but I have to call out Lauren Bello for her game The Morrison Game Factory. The storytelling in that game is unreal. Her and Rita Orlov of PostCurious are just a powerhouse, what a great duo. I would love to see them create more games together. And it would be awesome to create something with them.
You have played a LOT of escape rooms over the years, what are some of your favourites?
Love this question. We have to shout out our local scene in Arizona. The Nemesis Club is on another level. It’s like a Disneyland of escape rooms. Also, The Immersive Machine is a must-play and owners Scott and Kay are enthusiasts themselves and it shows in every minute of the room. For favorites outside AZ, mine is The Secret at Whitmore Estate at Breaking Point Escape Rooms and Ace’s is The Storykeeper at Locurio.
Have you particularly enjoyed any “play at home” games recently? What are some of your all-time favourites?
We recently played The Medusa Report by Diorama. Amazing, such solid puzzles.
In a similar but different vein, we recently playtested the VeheMusical puzzle hunt. The live online hunt happened on Friday, November 8th, so already in the past, but I’m sure they will keep it up to play after the fact. It was so fun and creative and is a shorter hunt, so great for people who have never played a puzzle hunt before to see what one is like.
For all-time faves, the Trapped Takeout from Trapped Puzzle Rooms series, the Noside games from Unlock, and of course The Morrison Game Factory.
Any final comments?
Just that we are so grateful for this community! Very grateful to be in the same realm with so many creative, joyful, brilliant, and inventive players, designers, and enthusiasts.
Thank you!
Thanks to Anna and Ace for giving some insight into their company and the wonderful games they produce. If you haven’t already played their games, please check them out. They are fun, whimsical and full of heart!
Discount code: For a limited time only, use code “HOHOHINCKS” on the Bluefish Games website to get 20% off of your order.
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