Hi.

You found me, Mom & Dad.

You found me bigly. And now you want to know about The Game of Poems.

OK. The Game of Poems is a puzzle, where you try to piece together a 100-stanza renga from start to finish.

If you are the first to piece together the renga in the right order, you win The Purple Ticket.

And you can trade The Purple Ticket in for a BIG, FAT prize worth ~500 USD.

If you bought one of the first 100 copies of my book, More Poems About Purple Wizards and Our Neon-Bright Exceptionalism directly from this site, you found a Post-It note with a url (that’s how you got here) and a sticker. On that sticker is the name of your wizard’s staff. E-mail me (Jason(dot)preu(at)gmail(dot)com) that name, along with your snail-mail address, and I will mail you a post card with 1 stanza from The Game of Poems.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take your stanza (and the 99 others that become available to other players as they register their staffs) and work to compile The Game of Poems into its correct structure. The Game of Poems uses linked lines to thread stanzas together, such that the first line of every two-line stanza contains the middle line of the stanza above it while the second line contains the middle line of the stanza below it like this:

1
2
3

2
5

4
5
6

And, when two, three-line stanzas bump against each other, they will share their last and first lines like this:

4
5
6

6
7
8

Once you redeem your staff’s name, your email address will be added to a private page available to Game of Poems players, which you may use to contact other players, share stanzas, form alliances to solve the puzzle, share The Purple Ticket, etc. I will only accept solutions from registered players and, if an alliance forms to solve The Game of Poems, that alliance must be comprised of 5 or less individual players.

The Game of Poems ends one month and one week after the day of the final stanza’s release into the wild. If, after that time, no players offer a correct solution, I will eat The Purple Ticket with some avocado toast and post the correct solution to the player page, where you may read it and weep.