Love at First Spike
Why I built a daily puzzle for show people
On every stage in the world tonight, there's little pieces of tape marking exactly where everything is supposed to go. The furniture, the props, the actor's position under a specific light.
Run over, ripped off, and occasionally ignored completely, it is the true unsung hero of the show part of show business.
It's called spike tape. And I named a game after it. But more on that in a minute.
The Agreement
Theater hides almost everything.
There's a reason for this—something like the magician's code. The crew wears black. The wings are dark. The orchestra pit is sunk. Lighting rigs are painted to disappear into the fly space above. Every piece of the apparatus that makes the magic possible is designed to vanish, so that what you experience as an audience member feels pure—effortless, seamless, inevitable.
And yet, spike tape somehow missed that memo. It slipped through. It's not invisible; audiences can see it if they look. Most don't. But it's there—a small, quiet admission that the show is a system. That someone had to figure out where everything goes and mark it, so it can be found again.
The Rooms
Pippin—the original 1972 production—was the first Broadway show to use b-roll footage in a TV commercial. Before Fosse, theater advertising was still images and copy. He put actual performance on camera, cut it like a music video, and Broadway marketing was never the same.
A Chorus Line was the first Broadway show to use an electronic lighting board. Before that, people moved dimmers by hand.
Facts like these make a show feel bigger. Like knowing someone in a show you're seeing, or understanding how a fly system works—your experience expands. Your appreciation for the work deepens.
And science, as it often does, can prove it.
The Chemistry
At coursed restaurants, chefs will often come to the table and tell you about each dish. Where the fish was from. Why they put those two things on the same plate. And the food, somehow, tastes more delicious. Why?
A 2008 study at Caltech put people in fMRI scanners and gave them identical glasses of wine—same wine, different price on the label. The brains of people who believed the wine cost more showed measurably more activity in the regions associated with pleasure. Same wine. Different experience. The knowledge changed the chemistry.
We have a deep desire to close the gap between what we know and what we want to know. And when we do learn something—when knowledge expands—not only is it satisfying, but our curiosity grows. We want more knowing.
Distance, and the closing of it, makes the heart grow fonder.
The Game
So. The game.
It's called Spike. It lives at theater.games/spike. Every day, a Broadway show is revealed through five clues. The goal is to guess the show before you run out of clues.
The design principle underneath it is earnest: every wrong guess teaches you something. The clues exist to deliver information as much as to test it. The game presents as a quiz. It's really a ploy to teach you something you didn't know about a show you love, or one you've never heard of.
Hopefully, every day, you leave with a little more appreciation for a little piece of our little multiverse.
The Kid
If I'm being honest, I built this for my 13-year-old self who obsessively listened to cast recordings and treated Playbills like Bibles.
His hunger for knowledge about theater was ravenous. The facts in Spike would've been like sharkbait to him. And I think they would've expanded his understanding of all the other people, parts, and pieces that make a show possible.
I love the name Spike and the philosophy behind it—but I also want to be honest that it's a daily puzzle for show people. It's meant to be fun and silly and ours.
Beyond Wordle, there are about 600 daily games floating around. Many of them are about sports, music, or film. It's about time theater staked its claim—so here it is.
Spike is live at theater.games/spike. With a new puzzle every single day.
Play it. And if you love it, tell someone. Games like these travel through TikToks, IG stories, group chats, and word of mouth.
Have fun!
This week in One Last Thing: Spike’s strange origin story and the paperclip that started it all.
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One Last Thing
About six weeks ago, I had a strange idea—and it was not a daily puzzle game.
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