If you’ve ever picked up a puzzle magazine or downloaded a puzzle suite, you can’t help but be impressed by how much puzzle content can be offered in a relatively small space.

Across a half-dozen or dozen pages, you might encounter loads of different puzzly challenges to test you in various ways. Math puzzles, deduction puzzles, trivia, word searches, anagrams, spatial acuity… all of these puzzly disciplines and more could be covered in a single puzzle packet.

But it does make me wonder… what if it was confined to a single page? How much puzzling can you cram onto a single 8.5 x 11 piece of paper?

Let’s start simple.

A single, untouched crossword puzzle. Freshly printed. 15x, probably. Perhaps 17x. Maybe you have a subscription service. Maybe you nabbed a PDF online from any number of talented constructors.

Three or four columns of clues fill the page, along with that pristine grid, waiting patiently for you to start filling in answers.

But there’s still a lot of white space on that page. We can probably fit more puzzle on that page.

Check out this Crostic puzzle, published by our friends at Penny Dell Puzzles:

Read the clues, fill in the answers, and then fill in the corresponding letters in the grid below to build some trivia.

Not only is it a straightforward puzzle, but it fills the page nicely, and you’re hardly losing any real estate to explanations or anything other than the puzzle itself.

But I think we can still fit a bit more puzzle onto the page.

How about a Rows Garden puzzle?

Between that visually impressive grid, the across clues, and all the different bloom clues, that page is starting to fill up nicely.

But can we go further?

Indeed, we can, if we delve into the world of one-page RPGs.

[Click here for more details on this bundle.]

Yes, we’re talking about an entire roleplaying game — rules, setting, character details, and gameplay — distilled onto a single piece of paper.

There are all sorts of places to hunt down one-page RPGs to fit whatever kind of game you’d like to play. Sarcastic or serious, fantasy or sci-fi, quick-play or long-form, clever game designers have got you covered.

One of my favorites is Grant Howitt, who creates both longer roleplaying games and one-page games to keep your roleplaying experiences fresh.

Perhaps his greatest creation when it comes to one-page RPGs is a little game called Honey Heist.

[That is a LOT of detail jammed into a small space.
Click here for a larger version you can actually read.]

There are two things you need to know in Honey Heist:

1. You and your fellow players are attempting to pull off the greatest heist ever.
2. You are a BEAR.

Yes, in Honey Heist, every player portrays a criminal bear trying to steal a king’s ransom in honey from a honey convention.

Some of my favorite roleplaying moments over the last few months have been in games of Honey Heist. It’s a very silly idea, yes, but also one that allows for strategic gameplay, immersive roleplaying, and memorable experiences. What more could you ask for?

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We’re sure there are other puzzles or puzzle experiences that also do an impressive job of condensing a metric ton of puzzling into a single page.

Can you think of any that we missed? Do you have any favorite one-page puzzles or games you’d like to see in the spotlight? Let us know in the comments below! We’d love to hear from you.

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