Games Like What Da Font: Tidy Up the Print Shop

Thieves turned over every case in the night. The master left for the Punchcutters' Fair at dawn, and you are the apprentice: alone in a 1920s print shop, lamps on, with five thousand pieces of lead type on the floor.

Put the shop back in order

Comb two floors: the stairs, under the press, behind the machines, the corners of the archive. Ten typefaces, ten wooden cases, around five hundred sorts each.

Read the lead

Nothing on a piece of type says where it lives. You read the letter itself: the serifs, the contrast between thick and thin, the slant of the axis, the shape of the g. Two faces are almost twins until you know what to look at.

Set it, ink it, pull it

Every finished case gives up a key, and every key opens an iron box with a job inside. Set the text backwards and mirrored, lock the forme, print the poster, hang it on the wall. Each sheet hides a number that only shows under the master's lamp, and his safe has ten wheels: you choose where every poster hangs, so the combination is the one your own wall spells out.

The lead answers

Put enough type back where it lives and the shop begins to answer. Hold a sort and it points to its case. Later they come when called, and at last they go home by themselves. Nobody ever explains this.

Features