Blue Prince is a phenomenal puzzle game about methodically, meticulously excavating a fractal web of interlaced mysteries and metanarrative plots to navigate a shifting labyrinth, a geopolitical intrigue, and a troubled family legacy.
It’s also, it turns out, a hype as hell competitive event capable of filling a conference hall with cheering spectators, as proven by a Blue Prince speedrun race at SGDQ 2025 this week.
For mere humans like you and I, progressing through Blue Prince is a process involving dozens of hours of randomized runs, note taking, misguided speculation, and realizing how bad you’ve gotten at math while staring at a dartboard. For SGDQ runners Radringtail and Bobbyburm, however, it’s an hourlong head-to-head sprint testing each competitor’s mastery of the Mount Holly Estate.
Oh, and it’s bingo. They’re doing bingo in this one.
Let me explain: Radringtail and Bobbyburm weren’t just racing towards a single finish line. They were competing to be the first to complete a series of hand-selected Blue Prince objectives, arranged on a 5 x 9 bingo board mimicking the floorplan of the Mount Holly Estate.
Some of these objectives, like “solve 2 parlors” or “use an elevator” are fairly simple. Others deeper into the board, like “light four blue flames” or “7+ allowance,” involve completing multi-stage puzzles or postgame progress.
Unlike a normal bingo board, Radringtail and Bobbyburm didn’t just need to claim five squares in a row. Beginning on the bottom row, they had to chain together adjacent objectives to create a path through the entire length of the board, much like a Blue Prince player has to draft a path through Mount Holly to reach its legendary 46th room.
And it ruled. Four minutes into the run, when both runners were simultaneously completing one of the game’s more obnoxious logic puzzles in just seconds, I knew I was in for a show.
These are players who’ve built a deep, internalized pool of knowledge about Blue Prince and its puzzles, turning what’s typically a steady, contemplative affair into a contest of high-stakes, high-speed calculation. It’s a staggering display of improvisational problem-solving, requiring both runners to weigh probability and time investment across in-game runs—all while needing to dynamically alter their strategy based on their competitor’s place on the board. Brains have never been bigger.
I won’t spoil the outcome, but I hope it communicates how worth a watch the race is when I say that, at 20 minutes and 26 seconds, the audience starts cheering over a runner making a contraption. Everyone loves a contraption.
SGDQ 2025 runs until July 13. You can watch it live on Twitch. As I write this, a pair of runners are frantically collecting emeralds in Sonic Adventure 2. What more could you want?
