Campfire Puzzles
We’re not really sure what these things are called, much less who makes them up, 
or if there is a comprehensive record of these things anywhere. Amazingly the same stories and activities appear across the world, and many in different languages. We call them Campfire or Lateral Thinking Puzzles - simple scenarios or word tasks that are passed on via word of mouth, and have delighed and infuriated people alike since who knows when. We hope to collect the best of them here.
Please tell us if you know of any other that you think deserve to be added to this (rather large now!) archive - add them here and pass the link on to others to share.
Besides around the campfire, these are great for long car or train rides, or as a bonding activity after dinner with friends. They seem nerdy written here, but offer solace to some deep human need when played with friends. They can be divided into the approximate categories we’ve described here:
Psychological Quizzes - where visualizing the type of any object mentioned (and sometimes what you might do with it) reveals subconscious feelings about topics such as money, love, and death.
Who-Done-It Style lateral thinking puzzles set up a brief scenario (usually a gruesome death) - and by asking only yes-no type questions, people works out what caused the situation. to occur.
Lateral Thinking Test type puzzles ask people in a circle to guess an answer or a contribution to a hypothetical situation - which are knocked back or accepted. Gradually the participants work out that the ‘right’ answer comes from a particularly lateral source - the position of the persons’ hands, or the initials of the person, for instance.
A fourth category are Useful Lateral Thinking Competitions - where the results might generate new perspectives, inventions, or money making schemes. Enjoy!
Psychological Puzzles
The most common of these asks people to imagine walking down a path or a road. The asker names certain objects that they meet, and the audience are asked to remember how they first imagine these objects, and what they might imagine doing to the artifacts or in response to the situation. Each are said to hold insight into the individuals’ attitudes to various things. At the end the asker reveals what the objects ‘mean’.
Some objects you can use include:
A key (your ideal house?)
A bowl (your desire for money?)
A pet (your view towards romantic partners)
Some water (the person’s sex drive, and attitude to sex)
A bear on the path (obstacles)
A wall (the person’s attitude to death - do they climb over it, can they pass through it easily, et cetera).
If you know any other of these objects, let us know!
Lateral Thinking Tests
Martian Maths
The questioner makes bizarre shapes with his or her fingers on the table, in the sand, or in the air. He then asks people around the circle for the correct answer to this “Martian maths”. Each person around the circle can do their own maths “equations”. Gradually people realize that the right answer is indicated by fingers left on the askers’ leg, tabletop etc after the “maths” is concluded (1 finger = 1, 4 fingers = 4, etc).
Rocket to the Moon
The end of the world is nigh, and people can win a place on the only rocket to safety if they bring the correct two objects with them for the voyage. Around the circle people guess two correct objects and are told if they will get them on the rocket or not. People gradually realize that “right” objects have the same initials as their own names - eg. Anna Smith could bring an Anaconda and a Stapler - but not a Boa Constrictor and a Shoe. As with all of these games clues can gradually be given, and beware of ridiculing the last person to guess the logic of this puzzle!
A second version of the Rocket to the Moon can also be played by asking people for only one object. A successful object will be any containing a double letter within it (eg. a Balloon, some Green Licorice, an Elephant’s Foot, et cetera).
Useful Lateral Thinking Contests
Money Making Ideas
If you are in a car, have someone look out the window and choose an object at random. If not, somebody thinks of an object. Then everyone has to try to come up with the best way to make money with it. A street sign becomes a place to advertise, and trees are to be sold door-to-door. A truck can be used in a hundred ways to make money, but look for the best new way for the sake of the game. (A traveling grocery store?).
New Perspectives
Try the “change of perspective” technique as a problem-solving game. Take a topic ranging from morality to having a job. The aim is to come up with the most unique (and perhaps coherent) new perspective. Eg. Could there be a world where there were no jobs? What would a morality be for a virus if it had consciousness?
Concept combination
This involves taking two concepts or objects and combining them in some novel way. As a group game, the point is just to see who has the best idea. What can you come up with from the combination of a chair and a microwave? Perhaps an easy-chair that has a cooler and microwave and television built in. Or microwaveable “couch potatoes” ; a potato snack in the shape of a couch.
Lateral Thinking Puzzles
With lateral thinking questions, people ask the person who posed the question about the circumstances around the mystery. The asker cannot give the story away until solved or usually offer new information, but can answer questions adjacent to the puzzle. Sample questions might be “was he dead long?”, “Is the door locked? or “Did they want to go on the hike?”
We’ve added clues to some of these to get you going, but not all of the answers are given here - you’ll have to work a few of these out yourselves and via the comments page. For further info you can trawl for answers here, here and here.
You are driving down the road in your car on a wild, stormy night, when you pass by a bus stop and you see three people waiting for the bus: An old lady who looks as if she is about to die, an old friend who once saved your life, and the perfect partner you have been dreaming about. Knowing that there can only be one passenger in your car, whom would you choose? (The old lady - then give the keys to your friend, and wait for the bus with your perfect partner).
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice all live in the same house. Bob and Carol go out to a movie, and when they return, Alice is lying dead on the floor in a puddle of water and glass. It is obvious that Ted killed her but Ted is not prosecuted or severely punished (One is a goldfish and the other a cat).
A body is discovered in a park in Chicago in the middle of summer. It has a fractured skull and many other broken bones, but the cause of death was hypothermia. (Airplane stowaway falls out of landing gear).
A woman in Paris in 1895 is waiting for her husband to come home. When he arrives, the house has burned to the ground and she’s dead (This is a true story. Windows in Paris at that time were imperfect and could act as lenses. One particularly hot day, the sun shining in through such a window caused a woman’s lingerie (which she was wearing at the time, awaiting her husband’s return) to catch fire, and eventually the entire house caught fire and the woman was burned.
A man lives on the twelfth floor of an apartment building. Every morning he wakes up, gets dressed, eats, goes to the elevator, takes it down to the lobby, and leaves the building for work. In the evening, he goes through the lobby to the elevator, and, if there is someone else in the elevator (or if it was raining that day) he goes back to his floor directly. However, if there is nobody else in the elevator and it hasn’t rained, he goes to the 10th floor and walks up two flights of stairs to his room (a dwarf, he can only reach the top button with the aid of an umbrella).
A man is in a returning from Switzerland by train. If he had been in a non-smoking car he would have died The man used to be blind; he’s now returning from an eye operation which restored his sight. He’s spent all his money on the operation, so when the train goes through a tunnel he at first thinks he’s gone blind again and almost decides to kill himself. Fortunately, the light of the cigarettes people are smoking convinces him that he can still see).
In the middle of the ocean is a yacht. Several corpses are floating in the water nearby (Went swimming, but no boat ladder).
Two men lie dead in a locked cabin in the woods in winter. How did they die? (Air crash - the men are pilots flying freight, and they were the only ones on board).
A man is found hanging in a locked room with no furniture and a puddle of water under his feet (he hung himself on a block of ice).
A man walks into his house, up the stairs, turns on a light, and kills himself - why? (The house is a light house and he has forgotten to turn on the light and sees a crashed ship).
A man is dead in a puddle of blood and water on the floor of a locked room (stabbed himself with an icicle).
A man is lying, dead, face down in the desert wearing a backpack (failed parachute).
A man is dead in a room with a small pile of pieces of wood and sawdust in one corner (The man is a blind midget. For various reasons too complicated too to go into, someone else has been sawing small pieces off of his cane every night, so that every day he thinks he’s taller. Since his only income is from being a circus midget, he decides to kill himself when he gets too tall. (Variant answer: instead of sawing pieces off of his cane, someone has sawed the legs off of his bed. He wakes up, stands up, and thinks he’s grown during the night.)
A man is riding a subway. He meets a one-armed man, who pulls out a gun and shoots him. (Several men were shipwrecked together. They agreed to survive by eating each other a piece at a time. Each of them in turn gives up an arm, but before they get to the last one, they’re rescued. They all demand that the last man live up to his end of the deal. Instead, he kills a bum and sends the bum’s arm to the others in a box to demonstrate that he fulfilled the bargain. Later, one of them sees him on the subway, holding onto the overhead rings with the arm he supposedly cut off, realizes he cheated, and kills him).
A pile of sawdust and a man dies (midget saws half way through a clown’s stilts).
A man is sitting in bed. He makes a phone call, says nothing, then goes to sleep (wakes up snoring neighbor).
A man goes into a restaurant, orders abalone, eats one bite, and kills himself (A shipwreck survivor, he was told human flesh was abalone).
Adults are holding children, waiting their turn. The children are handed (one at a time, usually) to a man, who holds them while a woman shoots them. If the child is crying, the man tries to stop the crying before the child is shot (don’t be alarmed - it’s kids being photographed with Santa).
Abel walks out of the ocean. Cain asks him who he is, and Abel answers. Cain kills Abel.
A woman comes home with a bag of groceries, gets the mail, and walks into the house. On the way to the kitchen, she goes through the living room and looks at her husband, who had blown his brains out. She then continues to the kitchen, puts away the groceries, and makes dinner (..?)
A man takes a two week cruise to Mexico from the U.S. Shortly after he gets back, he takes a three day cruise which doesn’t stop at any other ports. He stays in his cabin all the time on both cruises. As a result, he makes $250,000 (..?)
As I drive to work on my motorcycle, there is one corner which I go around at a certain speed whether it’s rainy or sunny. If it’s cloudy but not raining, however, I usually go faster (..?)
Hans and Fritz are German spies during World War II. They try to enter America, posing as returning tourists. Hans is immediately arrested (..?)
Two talented US World War II spies are perfectly trained and parachuted into Germany. On entering a bar, both are immediately shot by a SS officer (they are African American).
A man is found dead in his parked car. Tire tracks lead up to the car and away (..?)
A man called to a waiter in a restaurant, “There’s a fly in my tea!” “I will bring you a fresh cup of tea,” said the waiter. After a few moments, the man called out, “This is the same cup of tea!” How did he know? (Sugar was put in it by the man).
A man dies in his own home (..?)
A man gets onto an elevator. When the elevator stops, he knows his wife is dead (power blackout in a hospital).
A man is lying face down, dead, in the desert, with a match near his outstretched hand. He is nude (he drew the short straw in a hot air balloon going down over the desert).
She said “I love you,” and died (..?)
Tim and Greg were talking. Tim said “The terror of flight”. Greg said “The gloom of the grave”. Greg was arrested (Greg was a WW2 German spy - no normal American would have memorized all verses of the national anthem!)
An avid birdwatcher sees an unexpected bird. Soon he’s dead (he watched it get sucked into the engine of his jet).
A man is lying dead in a room. There is a large pile of gold, jewels, and so on on the floor, a chandelier attached to the ceiling, and a large window through which rays are coming (The room is the ballroom of an ocean liner which sank some time ago. The rays are manta rays. The man ran out of air while diving in the wreck).
A man walks into a room, shoots, and kills himself (shooting craps at a casino).
A man marries twenty women in his village but isn’t charged with polygamy (he’s not the groom…)
Approximately how many people live in Los Angeles per capita? (only one!).
A man pushes a car up to a hotel and realizes he’s bankrupt (playing Monopoly).
A woman goes into a convenience store to buy a can of Coke. She pays for it with a $20 bill and receives $20.05 in change. No mistake was made (Converting Canadian/US dollars, Australian/ New Zealand dollars, etc).
As a man jumps out of a window, he hears the telephone ring. He tries to stop himself, but can’t (finds out he’s not the last man on earth).
There is blood on the ceiling of my bedroom (squashed mosquito).
A man with a sack is found dead on the floor in the living room (dead Santa Claus).
There is a dead man lying in the desert next to a rock (Superman and kryptonite?).
A man is found dead in the arctic with a pack on his back (Clue - wolves).
A plane crashes exactly on the Texas/New Mexico border - where do they bury the survivors? (Nowhere - you don’t bury survivors!).
A man is lying dead in a phone booth (The man caught a large fish and was so excited he went to a phone booth to call his wife. In trying to describe the size of the fish, he said, “It was THIS big!” and stretched his arms wide to indicate its length. His arms went through the sides of the phone booth, his wrists were sliced by broken glass, and he bled to death).
A man couldn’t find a chair, so he died (lion tamer).
A married couple goes to a movie. During the movie the husband strangles the wife. He is able to get her body home without attracting attention (..?)
Two children born in the same hospital, in the same hour, day, and year, have the same mother and father, but are not twins (Clue - more?).
A man tries the new cologne his wife gave him for his birthday. He goes out to get some food and is killed (..?)
A couple will build a square house. In each wall they’ll have a window, and each window will face north (Clue - where’s south?).
A man walks into a bar and asks for a drink. The bartender pulls out a gun and points it at him. The man says, “Thank you,” and walks out (hiccups)
There are a pipe, a carrot and a pile of pebbles together in the middle of a field (Clue - melting).
The telephone rang in the middle of the night and the woman woke up. When she answered it the caller hung up. The caller felt better (The husband did not use a coin but called to say that he got there ok).
A woman throws something out a window and dies (..?)
A car without a driver moves; a man dies (..?)
A man is found dead in an alley lying in a pool of red with a stick near his head (poisoned ice block/ popsicle).
A man dies of thirst in his own home (..?)
A man is found dead outside a large marble building with three holes in him (silly alert - a paleontologist is killed by a triceratops he awoke from some ice).
An ordinary American citizen, with a clean police record but no passport, managed to visit over thirty foreign countries. He was welcomed in each country, and left each one of his own accord. He did this in one day (he’s a postman delivering to foreign embassies).
Joe, wearing a mask and carrying an empty sack, leaves his house. An hour later he returns with a full sack. He goes into a room and turns out the lights (..?)
Two men enter a bar. They are served identical drinks. One lives; the other dies (poison in the icecubes - one drinks more slowly than the other).
A black man dressed all in black, wearing a black mask, stands at a crossroads in a totally black-painted town. All of the streetlights in town are broken. There is no moon. A black-painted car without headlights drives straight toward him, but turns in time and doesn’t hit him (it is daytime).
An Arab sheikh tells his two sons that are to race their camels to a distant city to see who will inherit his fortune. The one whose camel arrives last will win. The brothers, after wandering aimlessly for days, ask a wise man for advise. After hearing the advice they jump on the camels and race as fast as they can to their destination (told to swap camels).
A man meets a one armed man on a subway, who pulls a gun and shoots him (..?)
A woman buys a new pair of shoes, goes to work, and dies (..?)
A man is found hanging in an otherwise empty locked room with a puddle of water under his feet (hung himself on a block of ice and waited).
A man carrying an attache case full of $20 bills falls on the way to the bank and is never seen again (It is a river bank).
The pope is giving a speech. A man in the audience shoots the mayor who is behind the pope (The pope has returned to the village where he began his priesthood fifty years earlier. He was late for the ceremony, so the mayor spoke first; he claimed to be the first person to give confession to the pope, fifty years earlier. When the pope arrived, he related that the first confession he had heard was that of the murder of a young woman. The man in the audience had a sister who was murdered at that time).
A man is lying drowned in a dead forest (he was scuba diving when a firefighting plane landed nearby and filled its tanks with water, sucking him in. He ran out of air while the plane was in flight; then the water, with him in it, was dumped onto a burning forest).
A man travels to twenty countries and stays in each country for a month. During this time he never sees the light of day (mummy).
King Henry VIII is lying at the bottom of the stairs with a gash across his face (clue- think about art).
Joe wants to go home, but he can’t go home, because the man in the mask is waiting for him (think of a game).
A man lies dead in a room with fifty-three bicycles in front of him (’Bicycle’ playing cards - the extra card gave him away as a cheat).
A woman has incontrovertible proof in court that her husband was murdered by her sister. The judge declares, “This is the strangest case I’ve ever seen. Though it’s a cut-and-dried case, this murderess cannot be punished.” (Siamese Twins).
A dog becomes successful in real estate before finally falling to bad luck and being arrested (playing Monopoly).
A man is holding a box. Though he cannot see into it, he knows what’s inside (he’s allergic to it).
There’s a flash of light, and a man dies (..?)
A man lives on the twelfth floor of an apartment building. Every morning he takes the elevator down to the lobby and leaves the building. In the evening, he gets into the elevator, and, if there is someone else in the elevator — or if it was raining that day — he goes back to his floor directly. Otherwise, he goes to the tenth floor and walks up two flights of stairs to his apartment.
In his own home a man watches as a woman dies, yet does nothing to save her (it was on TV).
There is a dead man, a beetle on top of a book, and a pile of bricks (the book is a Volkswagen service manual, the beetle is a car, and the pile of bricks is what the car fell off of).
A rope breaks. A bell rings. A man dies (..?)
How could a baby fall out of a twenty-story building onto the ground and live? (Simple, via the bottom floor window)
A man and his wife raced through the streets. They stopped, and the husband got out of the car. When he came back, his wife was dead, and there was a stranger in the car (..?)
A husband coming home hears his wife call “Bill, don’t kill me!”. He walks in and finds his wife dead. Inside are a postman, a doctor, and a lawyer. The husband immediately knows the postman killed his wife (the other two are women).
A little girl was warned by her guardian never to open the cellar door or she would see things that she was not meant to see. One day while her guardian was out she did open the cellar door. What did she see? (The outside world - she was kept in the cellar).
Bruce wins the race, but he gets no trophy (Bruce is the horse).
There are six eggs in the basket. Six people each take one of the eggs. How can it be that one egg is left in the basket? (The last egg was taken with the basket).
A hunter aimed his gun carefully and fired. Seconds later, he realized his mistake. Minutes later, he was dead (..?)
On an archeological dig, the frozen remains of a man and woman are found. Immediately, the archeologists realize that the remains are those of Adam and Eve (no belly button).
A man is lying dead in a room. There is a large pile of gold and jewels on the floor, a chandelier attached to the ceiling, and a large open window (..?)
A horse jumps over a tower and lands on a man, who disappears (a chess game).
A man walks into a bar and asks for a drink. The bartender pulls out a gun and points it at him. The man says, “Thank you,” and walks out (a hiccup cure).
Two people are talking long distance on the phone; one is in an East-Coast state, the other is in a West-Coast state. The first asks the other “What time is it?”, hears the answer, and says, “That’s funny. It’s the same time here!” (..?)
A boy and his father are injured in a car accident. Both are taken to a hospital. The father dies at arrival, but the boy lives and is taken to surgery. A grey-haired, bespectacled surgeon looks at the boy and says, “I cannot operate on this boy — he’s my son.” (The surgeon is the boy’s mother)
The best book we’ve found with some more of these, and other lateral thinking puzzles, is Sit & Solve. Full of things that made us want to pull our hair out - and once we solved them - enjoy watching others do the same.
Did you work any of ours out? Or do you know any others that are not on the list, or need an answer? Leave a comment below and we’ll put our collective heads together.
