Great Games: The Fool’s Errand
Cliff Johnson, the man behind The Fool’s Errand, is a genius–and that’s not a word I use lightly. He also, I think, takes a delight in torturing the people who play his games. He’s made three games that I’m aware of–The Fool’s Errand, At The Carnival and 3 in Three. All are brilliant games, but The Fool’s Errand is particularly good.
The Fool’s Errand is a compilation of puzzles, based around the classic Tarot deck. The main character, the Fool from the deck, is going on an adventure in the hopes of finding fourteen mythical lost treasures. Along the way, he meets all of the other “people” of the Tarot deck, from Major Arcana like the Emperor and the Moon to the people who populate each suit. The story is told as a series of text pages in a flowing scroll, and each page has an attached puzzle.
The puzzles, of course, are the meat of the game. There’s a huge range, from old standbys like word searches and jumbles to new types of word and visual puzzles that you’ve never seen before. One particularly fun one is a card game where you don’t know the rules, but your opponent does–you have to figure out the rules as you play along and score enough points to win.
Some of the puzzles are downright diabolical: for example, there’s one puzzle where all you have to do is click on a button in one corner of the screen. But every time your mouse gets close to the button, it disappears. What you have to realize, is that on old Macs (where the game was first available), when you pulled down a menu, everything else on the computer stopped until you released the menu–they weren’t good at multitasking back then. So you have to pull down the menu that’s over the button, and release when your mouse is above it. The game can’t make the button disappear while the menu’s pulled down, and when you release the menu you have a second to click the button. I mean, who thinks of stuff like this?
In addition to the puzzles on each page of the story, there’s the wonderful “Sun’s Map”, which is a puzzle in itself–every time you reach a new page of the story, a new part of the map is added, but you need to put them in order so that they form a single continuous line representing the Fool’s journey. And once you’ve done that, there’s yet another layer of puzzles embedded in the map, this time using hints and clues that were scattered throughout the story. So you have to pay close attention to the story to unravel the final layer of puzzles and reveal the fourteen lost treasures.
I first played this game way back on the Mac Plus. I still pull it out and play it from time to time. Simply a brilliant game.
You can download The Fool’s Errand–which I strongly recommend you do–from the author’s website. It’s available for both Mac and Windows. His other two games are up there as well, and there’s a long-awaited sequel, A Fool and his Money, coming soon.
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