Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
I spent a measurable percentage of my childhood doing puzzles. If we were in the car, I was probably doing a puzzle. Visiting one of my mom’s adult friends? I was doing a puzzle. A long flight? Oh, you better believe there were puzzles, though they were interrupted by bouts of reading. A short flight, though, that was puzzles all the way up and all the way down. The puzzles could take many forms, be they crosswords, logic puzzles, or ThinkFun (née Binary Arts) toys, but they were a consistent mainstay of how I spent my time.
That’s still true today. I adore a good puzzle. Sign me up for an escape room. I spent much of the first year or so of COVID getting into advanced forms of Sudoku. For months now, I’ve been dutifully starting each day with Clues by Sam. When Blaž Graca’s LOK hit a couple of years ago, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it, and my excitement was well-rewarded. That puzzle book was like nothing else I’d ever seen. The puzzles were satisfying and challenging, but it was the method in which they were communicated that most impressed me.
You see, LOK includes vanishingly few instructions. This is especially unusual because it functions via a series of keywords. Nothing in the book tells you what those keywords do. You have to discern the rules for each new addition by seeing the impact it has had on the puzzle and working out the how. It is incredibly satisfying, and a masterclass in puzzle design.
2025 blessed us with not one but two new releases from Mr. Graca’s publisher, Letibus Design. The first, Workworkwork, carries on in the tradition of LOK. This too is a relatively instruction-free spiral-bound book of increasingly demonic difficulty. The fundamental, unchanging idea is to build a single path that unites two aliens, but that makes this run through a Herculean obstacle course sound like a walk in the park.
As Workworkwork progressed, I found my sense of spatial reasoning pushed to its absolute limits. Each new rule, introduced one chapter at a time, required me to discern not only what the new rules were, but how they worked and how they could be consolidated with what I already knew. Several chapters required me to flip through pages of puzzles, uncomprehending, until I pieced together what must be true from a subsequent puzzle and worked my way back.
Workworkwork, then, is not for the faint of heart. It is exhausting in much the same way a trip to the gym is exhausting; you come out feeling tired, but better for it. The workworkwork is worthworthworth it. The final chapter extends the whole project out in directions I did not anticipate, and it was a genuine thrill to riffle through those pages and realize what I was meant to do. Much like LOK, I don’t know that I’ve experienced anything like it. Graca’s work continues to invite, to challenge, and to thrill. It’s a pity I don’t have any flights planned.
