Picture This

Mitchell Allen

19 Jun 2025 — 2 min read

Visual Puzzle Formats

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to structure a visual puzzle book that goes beyond variety and aims for progression, discovery, and depth. What follows is a field guide of puzzle types I’ve worked with or analyzed closely.

Spot-the-Differences

Mechanic: Visual Comparison
Classic visual comparison puzzle. Solvers must identify subtle changes between two nearly identical images.

Find-the-Twins

Mechanic: Deductive Search
From a grid of lookalikes, the goal is to find the only exact match pair — often with minor visual variations to distract.
Find Twins.jpg

Odd-One-Out

Mechanic: Category Logic
Among a group of items, one breaks a consistent visual rule. Pattern recognition and feature grouping are key.
Odd one out.jpg

Mazes

Mechanic: Spatial Navigation
Standard, route-finding on the printed page.

Hidden Objects

Mechanic: Search
These puzzles are an exercise in patience!
Hidden Objects.jpg

Symbol Sequence Logic

Mechanic: Pattern Recognition
These follow visual progression rules, such as rotation, size, shading or something more subtle.
What comes next.jpg

Pattern Grid (3×3 style)

Mechanic: Matrix Reasoning
Inspired by Raven’s Matrices, this type asks solvers to identify the missing piece in a logic-based visual matrix.

Visual Logic

Mechanic: Deductive Reasoning
An umbrella format including comparisons, exclusions, or symbol combinations. These require inferential steps to complete a visual rule.

Escape Room Puzzles

Mechanic: Hybrid Deduction
A mini narrative puzzle spread: visual clues, hidden locks, and sequential deduction layered into a scene. This works better as an interactive book.

Visual Math Puzzles

Mechanic: Symbolic Logic
Icons represent values in visual equations. Solvers deduce what each symbol is worth.

Visual Analogies

Mechanic: Relational Reasoning
A puzzle that asks, "A is to B as C is to what?" using image relationships instead of words.

Cut-Up Image Reconstruction

Mechanic: Spatial Assembly
Images are sliced, rotated, or scrambled. Solvers must mentally reassemble them to restore order.

Image Mashup Associations

Mechanic: Thematic Reasoning
Images evoke a shared, often metaphorical word or idea. Solvers deduce the unifying concept — subtle and abstract.
DALL-E 3 Jam References.jpg

Paint a Picture

Lemongello da Cremona, a notorious art forger, has struck again, desecrating the classics for the sake of a pun. I've captured four of them for you to solve. AI-generated art makes possible some really strange and unique puzzles. I've written before about the Connections-style puzzles (see

The Best Laid Plans

"Cartoon mice must be of a different species from the filthy, disgusting, germ-ridden things I pay people to kill." - Hillard Allen Father's Day is such a cool day for me. I have a fun father and fun kids! (My grown children are always going to

Impostor

As summer rolls into the Northern Hemisphere, you’ll want plenty of fresh puzzles. I’ve got you covered. This week, flex your word-play muscles with Color Code, tackle Impostor Syndrome, and dust off your pop-culture trivia knowledge with Seeing Stars? Finally, I've created three fresh visual puzzles

The Hidden Bias in ChatGPT's Memory (And How Puzzle Creators Can Outsmart It)

You sit down to brainstorm ideas for your next puzzle book. You fire up ChatGPT, type "Give me 15 fresh word search themes," and hit enter. The suggestions roll in—music genres, animals, seasonal activities. They look good. They feel familiar. Maybe too familiar. Three books later, you