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. 4 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?