You'll never set foot in Perplex City—not in person, and not even in a video game. You've been tasked with solving the mystery of a valuable cube that was stolen and secreted on Earth, but you can't visit the City to look for clues: All of your intel comes from studying blogs and websites, sending e-mail to fictional characters, and most of all, solving the puzzle cards that you buy on your way to beating more than 33,000 other players who are also on the hunt—and who all want the (real) $200,000 prize money.
The puzzle cards provide the meat of the game. Each carefully designed card tests your knowledge of statistics, cryptography, rock bands, Texas Hold 'Em, and English cookies. The easy ones take a few minutes or a Google search to solve, while the toughest stick you with a pair of GPS coordinates and some cryptic photos, and make you figure out what to do with them. Perplex City, which launched in the UK in 2004 but only recently came to the States, would make a fun trading-card game. But the cards are meant to pull you into the deeper story, where an alien city, a cast of characters, and a series of murders become more and more real the longer you obsess over them.