It's a book about Stephen Sondheim, focusing on his puzzles and games rather than on the stuff he's most famous for, theater. Of course, it's the puzzle-y and game-y parts that I'm interested in, because I played The Game, a variety of puzzle hunt in which teams drive around from puzzle to puzzle over the course of a weekend. Thanks to Scott "Puzzalot" Royer, I'd learned a bit about The Game's history—and Stephen Sondheim's name kept popping up. I even buckled down and used a microfiche reader at the library to read (and transcribe) a 1969 London Times article about Sondheim's puzzle hunts and games.
Matching Minds with Sondheim sums it up:
An exploration of all the vastly different, creative offshoots of Sondheim's Murder Game can seem to go on forever. … the Los Angeles moviegoer who watched [The Last of] Sheila in 1973, was inspired to design his own multicity scavenger hunt, which inspired Disney's 1980 film Midnight Madness, which inspired one of its moviegoers to create a similar game, which he eventually took to Microsoft, …
Everything I found out hinted that there was plenty more to know: Sondheim ran puzzly treasure hunts at friends' parties; he ran public treasure hunts for charities, he brought british-style cryptic crosswords to the US, he… Anyhow, this book gets into a lot of that. I'm glad I read it.
It was slow going for me. I think this book expected to be the second Sondheim bio read by a Sondheim fan, not necessarily knowledgable about games or puzzles. E.g., here's how Oscar Hammerstein is introduced in the book: "Hammerstein". I read that and thought "Oh, right, uh, I think he worked on Oklahoma! and some other stuff important enough that I'm going to smack my forehead that it slipped my mind over the years." On the other hand, noted board game expert Sid Sackson gets two pages of introduction. In a gathering of nerds, I'm probably not the biggest board game fan, but even I know about Sid Sackson. But if you expect your reader to be already-knowledgable about Sondheim's theater-stuff but new to gnarly games, allotting two pages for Sackson's introduction makes sense, as does assuming that the reader already knows Hammerstein mentored Sondheim and worked on The Sound of Music, how could you forget that? 😳
This book delivers the goods. E.g., there's a version of Sondheim's Murder Game puzzle as presented in Games Magazine. There are snippets of puzzles from later Sondheim hunts, albeit maybe just enough to get the flavor. Like, I tried solving a rebus and got nonsense—only to read on and find out the book just showed the top â…“ of the puzzle. I, avid puzzler, was miffed: why only show the top bit? But this was probably sensible for the audience; most folks probably weren't trying to solve the puzzles they encountered in the book. No, really. I was kinda surprised to find an erratum in the fourth printing of the book, especially in a puzzle; shouldn't eagle-eyed puzzlers already have spotted+reported all of those? But of course, it makes sense if most readers aren't slowing down to solve the puzzles. (Also, that puzzle was a reprint of a cryptic crossword by Mark sHalpin; so you can bet that the truly serious puzzle-nerds probably chuckled "ah yes, I remember solving this delightful trifle back when it first appeared," instead of, like me, struggling through with nice-but-not-amazing cryptic crossword skills.)
It's kind of weird the way that celebrities keep popping up, but I guess it makes sense. If I wanted a puzzlehunt to involve a fax machine clue, I'd ask my friends to find out who had a fax machine they could loan out for the weekend. Same with Sondheim, except in his case, the friend was Stephen Fry‽ So random.
