Traps Gallery

Since 1989 my friend Jay and I have exchange trapped presents at Christmas. When I say trapped I mean it in the classic Circle of Death game style — if you open the present carelessly a buzzer will sound or explosive cap will trigger. It all started when we were designing traps for live-action role-playing games, but quickly became a challenge to one-up each other each year. These days we open all the other presents first and then settle down with our flashlights, dentist tools and wire clippers to work on opening each other's presents while the rest of the family eats pie and enjoy themselves making unhelpful comments.

Jay and I each have our own style of trap-making. Jay has become a master of secreting traps in places that you'd think he couldn't access. His high-point is probably the time he gave me a deck of gaming cards that he had somehow unsealed, hollowed out, rigged with a cap-popper trap, then resealed and re-shrinkwrapped such that it looked like new again. (That's rivaled by Christmas 2003, when he managed to plant an explosive inside a cut-then-resealed chocolate egg.) My style leans towards completely mechanical traps, but I'm always trying a new angle on things. My favorite is still the time I gave him a "special" version of Looking Glass' PC game System Shock, which included a specially-included candy-red button in the second room of the game that when pressed would berate him for not checking closely for traps as it dropped powerful monsters on his head. (It always helps to know the programmers...)

Most of these traps have been lost to history (though perhaps one day I'll try to recreate the especially impressive ones) but below are some of our more recent creations.

Trap	Type	Designer	Date
Diet Coke & Mentos, V.2	Chemical, chest	Bug	June, 2008
Diet Coke & Mentos	Chemical, chest	Jay	Christmas, 2007
Laser	Audio, chest	Jay	Christmas, 2006
Under Glass	Explosive, small box	Bug	Christmas, 2006
Multishot pellet-gun trap	Dart, hinged-lid box	Bug	Christmas, 2005
Exploding drawer trap	Explosive, drawer	Bug	June, 2005
Teddy bear trap	Audio, embedded	Jay	Christmas, 2004

More to come...