Book Report: Matching Minds with Sondheim

It's a book about Stephen Sondheim, focusing on his puzzles and games rather than on the stuff he's most famous for, theater. Of course, it's the puzzle-y and game-y parts that I'm interested in, because I played The Game, a variety of puzzle hunt in which teams drive around from puzzle to puzzle over the course of a weekend. Thanks to Scott "Puzzalot" Royer, I'd learned a bit about The Game's history—and Stephen Sondheim's name kept popping up. I even buckled down and used a microfiche reader at the library to read (and transcribe) a 1969 London Times article about Sondheim's puzzle hunts and games. Matching Minds with Sondheim sums it up: An exploration of all the vastly different, creative offshoots of Sondheim's Murder Game can seem to go on forever. … the Los Angeles moviegoer who watched [The Last of] Sheila in 1973, was inspired to design his own multicity scavenger hunt, which inspired Disney's 1980 film Midnight Madness, which inspired one of its moviegoers to create a…