projects28
Honkaku Trick Atelier
- time
- 2026
- team
- Personal project
- type
- Mystery generator, in the browser
- languages
- 中文 and English, one case in both
- built with
- Plain JavaScript; seeded and reproducible, no AI
The great tricks of the detective story, taken apart into parts and put back together by number, into a complete case file you can try to solve.
本格诡计构筑所, the Honkaku Trick Atelier, takes the devices of classic “fair play” detective fiction (the locked room, the false alibi, the impossible crime) and recombines them, adding the “flavours” of the newer schools. Each case comes as a dossier: the dramatis personae, a floor plan of the scene, the story, a list of evidence, a challenge to the reader, and a solution under a wax seal. Every case is reproducible from its number, and the whole setup travels in the link, so you can send someone the same murder.
the parts
- tricks
- 54, in seven drawers: locked room, alibi, identity, narrative, weapon and poison, logic, and the scene and the body
- flavours
- 28, from six schools: shin-honkaku, special rules, social, horror and folklore, everyday, structural experiments
- stages
- 15 settings, from a lighthouse mansion to a lodge two thousand metres up
- detectives
- 12, each with a Watson
- the rules
- Knox’s ten commandments and Van Dine’s twenty rules, checked against every case
01
Building a casePress the wax seal and a new case number is drawn. From it come the stage, the detective, a core trick and a supporting one, and a motive. Any of these can be chosen by hand or locked, so pressing the seal again keeps them and redraws the rest. The trick drawers choose which kinds of trick take part; the flavour cabinet adds the colour of a school, by hand or at random. With “strict rules” on, any part that would break Knox’s commandments is left out: the supernatural, the detective as culprit, the narrator as culprit, twins, unknown poisons.
Each case is scored before you read it: how ingenious the trick is, how fair (whether a reader could deduce it from the clues), and how pure, that is, how close to the classic puzzle.
02
Fair playThe case is written to be solved. The clues the trick needs are laid into the investigation and the list of evidence; a decisive slip that would give the answer away is replaced in the evidence by a neutral observation. Evidence cards can be marked as suspicious as you read. Then comes the challenge to the reader: name your suspect, and only then break the seal on the solution.
03
One case, two languagesThe Chinese parts are the single source of the structure: ids, scores, tags and constraints are written only there, and English is a layer of text over them. Every random decision depends on the structure alone, so a case number is the same case in both languages, and switching language translates the case in front of you rather than making a new one.
The trick atlas lists the classic novels each trick comes from. Their titles are blurred until you point at them, so nothing is spoiled by accident.
