Season 2 Card Backs

PERPLEX CITY, SEASON TWO A million stories, yet to be told

Shortcut S2CB

The Season 2 Card Backs relate to information printed on the reverse side of puzzle cards in Season 2. In the second season of Puzzle Cards, the reverse side of all Wave 1 cards had a variety of short stories, magazine articles, advertisements, or other information relating to Perplex City. In some cases, such as the "Choose Your Own Misadventure: The Mimasan Maze Mystery", a complete text was separated across multiple cards. Other card backs seem to stand alone. Many of the cards have a strong narrative Point of View and reflect internal thoughts of the characters they are describing. At this time it is unclear if the puzzle scribes, Mind Candy, or others in Perplex City are aware of the information presented on the cards. Below is a list of the threads identified to date, and the card numbers they appear on:

One Offs

Season 2 Card #001 - My…: Brotherhood of the Six advert
Season 2 Card #002 - Issue 1 – Break In: A day in The Lab
Season 2 Card #003 - Road To Nowhere: Whipsmart Ice song lyrics
Season 2 Card #005 - Ixtiliton: Poem about a spear
Season 2 Card #006 - The Beautiful Game: Cognivia advert, cipher
Season 2 Card #007 - Mini Maze: Fleming Heath talking to his children
Season 2 Card #008 - BrightEyed: Polygon Park Puzzle Marathon tips

Mostly in the Reds, there are several cards that just seem to advertise the wider world of Perplex City.

Mimasan Maze Mystery

Season 2 Card #004 - Pinball Wizard
Season 2 Card #010 - Blockwork
Season 2 Card #009 - Tapestry
Season 2 Card #012 - The Owl and the Wolf
Season 2 Card #011 - Connections
Season 2 Card #042 - Patterns of Light
Season 2 Card #041 - Toil and Trouble
Season 2 Card #044 - Opochtli
Season 2 Card #043 - Family Ties

A Choose Your Own Adventure styled story set in Perplex City's Mimasan Maze. Collated here.

Sentinel Sunday

Letters

Season 2 Card #073 - Satellites of Love
Season 2 Card #075 - PXCPD

Guy falls in love with girl, sends girl puzzle encoded love letter, girl doesn't like guy, girl pretends not to be able to solve puzzle, guy falls out of love with girl, both write into the Sentinel letters section.

Crimes of Fashion

Season 2 Card #034 - California
Season 2 Card #033 - Stepping Stones

Police Lieutenant Cornelius Day-Etherbrington and Tippy Ankron analyse the fashion mistakes of Aurora Belle and Serena Duncan.

Meeting in a Cafe

Season 2 Card #036 - Jelly Beans
Season 2 Card #035 - A-tribute-d

Someone meets someone else in a cafe. Mysteriously.

Cat's Eye Stone and Moths

Season 2 Card #037 - Issue 2 –Cornered
Season 2 Card #038 - Snakes and Ladders

The moths and the stone are intertwined and have deep religious significance, but the Perplex City tourists are stealing the stone and using it in jewellery.

Academy All-Schools Scholarship Tournament, Sekani

Season 2 Card #040 - Snapped
Season 2 Card #039 - Clash of the Titans

Our narrator muses on meeting a young underdog in the tournament - did Sekani let him win?

Futures

Season 2 Card #066 - Born Free
Season 2 Card #065 - Who Are You
Season 2 Card #068 - Inversions
Season 2 Card #067 - Pick-Up Sticks

Details of the Futures signs The Dice, The Maze, The Apple-Thief and The Hand respectively, from the Sentinel.

Earth Studies

Season 2 Card #070 - Penguin Sums
Season 2 Card #069 - Roundabout
Season 2 Card #072 - Cubicals
Season 2 Card #071 - The Cattle King

Information about Earth Studies Modules on History, Politics, Culture and Technology. How aliens see us: usually interesting, always funny.

Morgan-Hatfield-Blumenthal Syndrome

Season 2 Card #097 - 6000 Words
Season 2 Card #098 - Issue 4 – The Body
Season 2 Card #099 - Countered
Season 2 Card #100 - To The Power

A syndrome that inhibits puzzle solving: a possible cure, a short description and how a sufferer feels about the discrimination in every part of Perplex City life (or, more likely, Sophia Westernra’s Baffled as mentioned in the next article), information pamphlet produced by Morgan Pride denouncing previously mentioned book. See Stone Sleeper Crossroads below for a reference to MHBS.

Missing Kit - his father's recollections

Season 2 Card #102 - Portrait
Season 2 Card #101 - Per Ardua Ad Astra
Season 2 Card #104 - The Pickle King
Season 2 Card #103 - Bush Bakery

An Academician goes about a normal, snowy day but when his son goes out to play in the snow and doesn't come back, wild stories circulate but the truth is never uncovered. The story continues in Missing Kit - Misc

Cube/Recons

Season 2 Card #105 - Home Town
Season 2 Card #107 - Question of Sport

Whilst there are no clear links between the two, they are both Cube related. Day in the life of a recon and a hand written cipher.

Saunion's Story

Season 2 Card #130 - Golden Duck
Season 2 Card #129 - Topologic
Season 2 Card #132 - Rescue
Season 2 Card #131 - The Thin Red Lines

Rock climbing expedition goes wrong and Daniel Saunion tries to rescue two people, possibly colleagues. Continues in About Saunion.

Stone Sleeper Crossroads

Season 2 Card #134 - The Restaurant King
Season 2 Card #133 - Irrationality
Season 2 Card #136 - Which Way Now
Season 2 Card #135 - Cats of Harbin

There are some mysterious stones at Stone Sleeper Crossroads and they look like someone sleeping. Four views are presented here: Northern Rempstone's legend of a confused warrior princess; Western Dee's legend of a thief who tried to learn the secret of Eternal Wakefulness, to the South lived an old man who said it was an inter-stellar traveller and to the East lies Perplex City. From there, Wendy Maker analysed the rocks, found something geologically interesting and then died, apparently of complications to undiagnosed MHBS

Ilja and Anja

Woodsman:
Season 2 Card #137 - Animal Magic
Season 2 Card #139 - Invoice

Frog-Catcher:
Season 2 Card #169 - Appointments
Season 2 Card #171 - 1, 2, 3, 4!

We've heard about these fables before, and now we get the actual text. The two stories come with their own morals.

Exposing Madame Blanca

Season 2 Card #162 - Melting Pot
Season 2 Card #161 - Show Your Cards
Season 2 Card #164 - Next In Line
Season 2 Card #163 - Trailhead

The narrator goes around exposing charlatans who use the supernatural to prey on grief e.g. Madame Blanca - a medium.

Voyage of the Exsuscito

Season 2 Card #165 - No Fault Of Mine
Season 2 Card #166 - Quintessence
Season 2 Card #168 - 600 Meter Cadence
Season 2 Card #167 - Enrolment

Competing horologists set sail on the Exsuscito with their chronometers to find a solution to the longitude problem but it appears they may have been lured under false pretenses by evil Academicians (there may be a link there to Missing Kit). Then pirates turn up!

About Saunion

Season 2 Card #195 - Travel Writer
Season 2 Card #194 - Artifacts
Season 2 Card #193 - I’m Sorry
Season 2 Card #196 - Marble Loss

His mum, his doctor, someone from the Brotherhood (probably Sister Cecile) and his dad recount how he's been in Greycastle hospital (despite his mum wanting to move him), asleep and dreaming since the accident five months ago, and how he woke up. Preceded by Saunion's Story.

Half Term Reports

Season 2 Card #197 - Murder at the Liar’s Club
Season 2 Card #198 - Colourblind
Season 2 Card #199 - The Name Game
Season 2 Card #200 - The Other Famous Cube

Some Half Term reports from seemingly random kids although it includes Myra Champaign and, from the surnames, a brother and sister.

Stories of Gyvann

Season 2 Card #201 - Sound Dialogue
Season 2 Card #203 - Treason
Season 2 Card #233 - Fractured
Season 2 Card #235 - How I wonder

These seem like copies of a religious text about Gyvann's life: meeting a peddlar, his wife, his dying words and his death.

Second Person Quest

Season 2 Card #225 - Kidnapped
Season 2 Card #226 - The Great Bomb Chase
Season 2 Card #227 - Collage
Season 2 Card #228 - Neography

Told in the second person, this is a weird story about 'you' passing through several odd rooms and a lift shaft.

Missing Kit - Misc

Season 2 Card #230 - Sum Other Way
Season 2 Card #229 - A Piece Of History
Season 2 Card #232 - Gel Together
Season 2 Card #231 - How I wonder

Preceded by Missing Kit - his father's recollections. Various people pick up the investigation into the disappearance of little Kit. A trail of witnesses suggest that an Academician may have taken Kit, believing he was an orphan, to perform some nasty experiment on him, although the final witness, Gwyneth Hughes, may have made that up to suit her anti-Academy political purpose. See also Voyage of the Exsuscito for evil Academicians.

Please see Brian Enigma's impressive Card Catalog for a sorted, comprehensive listing of cards.