One of the best things about Halloween is guessing what people’s costumes are. Clever costumes can be great fun, and I’m a huge fan of costumes that only cost a few bucks to put together, because they really let your creativity shine through.
Punny costumes lend themselves to the low-budget costume genre brilliantly. So it’s only appropriate that we celebrate Halloween in the puzzliest way possible — by looking at some punny costumes!
It’s simple. I post a picture, and you guess what the costume is.
For example:
She’s a deviled egg!
I’ve compiled ten costumes for you to figure out. Some are mashups, some are straightforward puns. Let’s see how many you can get!
PuzzCulture’s Punderful Halloween Costume Game!
#1
#2
#3
#4
Our first dog costume! (Redacted to hide the pun.)
#5
(Redacted to make the pun less obvious.)
#6
#7
Again, redacted to hide the pun.
#8
#9
#10
How many did you get? Have you seen any great punny costumes we missed? Let us know in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you. And Happy Halloween!
[Note: I received a free copy of this game in exchange for a fair, unbiased review.]
The life of a pirate isn’t all about gold and raiding and gold and avoiding the authorities and gold and gold. It’s also about building a name for yourself. And the greatest pirates, the most feared, the most successful, they aren’t just famous… they’re INFAMOUS.
And that’s the goal of every pirate sailing the, uh, one sea in Seas of Havoc: gaining the most infamy through deeds both impressive and treacherous.
Seas of Havoc is a game for 2-5 players that is part resource management and part combat tactics.
The gameplay alternates between an Island Phase (where your skiffs gather resources from the Market or the islands surrounding the sea) and a Sea Phase (where the pirates maneuver their main ship around the board to wage war and damage their opponents’ vessels and reputations).
There is no set number of rounds in Seas of Havoc. Instead, the game ends whenever the damage deck has been depleted during a Sea Phase. That phase is completed by the players, and then they total up their infamy.
I quite like the fact that player choices (and not an arbitrary number of rounds) determines the end of play. It adds agency and urgency to the proceedings.
Now, you CAN play the game by acquiring infamy through upgrading and collecting cards and trying to avoid combat, but you’d be playing with one arm tied behind your back. Cannonball attacks and ship ramming are such big components of the gameplay that you can’t really win unless you’re at least a little bit of a bastard, if not a right bastard of a scurvy seadog.
I know adversarial games aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, so it’s worth noting there is another way to play Seas of Havoc as a solo or a collaborative game, where you (or you and your fellow players) tackle the threat of the Ghost Fleet.
I did enjoy the collaborative version of the game against the Ghost Fleet — I’m an easy mark for cooperative gameplay that’s the players vs. the game — but I also absolutely had a blast seeing how ruthless I could be against a band of friends going whole hog with cannonballs. (Especially when we grabbed some LEGO cannons and actually started firing at each other like proper scalawags.)
Speaking of cannonballs, I need to highlight how much thought clearly went into all the physical components of this game. The cards are high quality, all of the materials are sturdy, and this feels like a game that will endure many playthroughs without wear and tear.
And the designs help with your immersion! The spinning wheel on the character board, the ship pieces, and especially the flattened edge on the cannonballs… all terrific, creative choices. (I am so glad the cannonballs aren’t round, what a nightmare that would’ve been.)
That level of care means a lot to me as a board game fan, and clearly it means a lot to the team at Rock Manor Games.
Factor in the different ships and captains (allowing for great replay value as you try out various combinations) and this is a game meant to challenge newcomers and experienced players alike across many sessions at the table.
Seas of Havoc delivers exactly what it promises: chaos on land and on deck as a band of avaricious pirates scheme and smash and blast their way into high-seas history.
The mix of all-out combat with carefully tracking and taking advantage of resources offers multiple levels of gameplay that keep either phase of the game from dragging on too long.
Don’t wait for Talk Like a Pirate Day. Give this one a shot soon.
[Seas of Havoc is for ages 14 and up, and it’s available from Rock Manor Games and participating websites, starting at $60. It can also be found in this year’s Holiday Puzzly Gift Guide, coming soon!]
So it feels apropos to close out the Halloween season with a post about two women who actually unraveled some of the mysteries surrounding an encrypted manuscript involving witches!
This video by Kat Saturn details the fascinating journey she and Rian Hagebeuk embarked upon to unravel the secrets of a book entitled “The Subtelty of Witches,” supposedly published in 1657.
It was one of the longest encrypted works of the period, and yet, it sat in the British Library for decades without anyone digging into the cipher or the manuscript’s contents.
In 2018, Kat stumbled across “The Subtelty of Witches” in a list of encrypted manuscripts, and started investigating.
Along the way, she teamed up with Rian, whose facility with Latin helped immensely in unraveling the manuscript’s true contents. They reached out to professionals and fellow amateurs alike, delving deep down the rabbit hole of this manuscript.
Along the way, she and Rian determined:
the year was incorrect (the text is actually OLDER)
the contents of the manuscript had nothing to do with witches (it’s a list of verbs in Latin and Dutch from a Calepino dictionary)
the cipher was consistently applied throughout (meaning it’s unlikely this was a practice exercise for improving the author’s facility with the cipher)
the real mystery of this text wasn’t in the cipher…
It was in the book’s creation and reason for existing at all.
The cipher was easily cracked — a one-to-one substitution cipher wouldn’t deter even a casual puzzler — but so many questions still remain.
Who was the author? Why was the manuscript titled this? Why were a dictionary’s partial contents encoded? What is the meaning behind the cover stamp?
Like some of the more puzzly mysteries we’ve pursued in the blog over the years, there’s always more to uncover once the puzzly part is resolved.
I purposely haven’t gone into too much actual detail — hopefully I’ve included just enough to give you a sense of the story here and pique your interest — because I think you should take the time to watch Kat’s entire video. It’s always best to hear from the creators themselves!
This story is the perfect counterpoint to the Voynich discussion a few weeks ago.
I made a point in that post of highlighting that I wasn’t throwing shade at nonprofessionals in scholarly fields. I simply wanted something more reliable than “this looks like this, so they must be related” and wild conjecture.
And Kat and Rian’s work is exactly what I was talking about.
Kat and Rian aren’t professionals, they’re enthusiastic amateurs, but they are scholars nonetheless. They’ve done fantastic, reproducible work, drawing reasonable and insightful conclusions from verifiable data.
They’ve thoroughly and meticulously documented their steps, they’re continuing to pursue leads, and they have genuinely, impactfully contributed to both awareness of the manuscript and the facts surrounding it.
But even with that dark cloud hanging over the puzzle community, there is plenty going on in cryptic crossword chatter for solvers and setters alike to enjoy.
Chameleon posted a terrific article on MyCrossword about an interesting variation on the hidden-style clue. For example, a traditional hidden clue would have “Scottish snack offered in disco nearby” cluing SCONE, since it’s hidden in “diSCO NEarby.” But Chameleon’s version is slightly more difficult. (Personally, I love it!)
And the team at Cultura Connector have announced that they’re 60% of the way to unlocking a $20,000 match for the charity!
They are raising funds for their first GRIT Ukraine program, enabling Ukrainian facilitators to lead a 12-week LARP program with Ukrainian young people living in Poland to strengthen resilience, communication, emotional awareness, problem-solving, and connection with Ukrainian youths.
And with a week left to go, your help could make a huge difference.
Please share the link and donate if you can. It would be so amazing to reach out to young people halfway around the world and show them the magic of storytelling while helping build them up.
What Puzzle Words Sent American Solvers to Google?
I love digging into data. It’s fascinating to see what you can learn from sifting through carefully cultivated information.
And I’m not alone in that. The team at UnscrambleX also love data, and they’ve shared some of their findings.
UnscrambleX is a free word scrambler, anagram solver, and Scrabble word finder all in one, and they’ve been crunching solver data for the last year.
And it turns out, between June 2025 and October 2026, the words that baffled or eluded solvers weren’t small, obscure ones, overly long entries, or crosswordese.
As Adrian Talvik, spokesperson for UnscrambleX told me, “The words that stop people aren’t the long ones. They’re words people have seen on a menu or a perfume label but never had to spell.”
NEROLI topped the list with 65,684 US searches on May 28, 2026, twice the next word (POMELO, 31,911 on May 18). Three of the five hardest came from the fruit bowl or the perfume counter, hard days come in themes (BÉCHAMEL, TERIYAKI and TZATZIKI on July 2)…
You can check out their full article here, including how they gathered and analyzed their data.
And we’ll have more interesting puzzle-data tidbits from UnscrambleX in the coming weeks!
Unfortunately I didn’t have time to test out any new puzzle apps or sites this week, but I promise that feature will return next Monday.
Did I miss any puzzly news or fun board game stories from the last few weeks? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.
[Note: I received a free copy of this product in exchange for a fair, unbiased review.]
Anne Morrow Lindbergh once said that good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
And it’s hard to deny that. Whether it’s a late night chat with friends, a conversation over drinks with a colleague or a loved one, or a spirited debate at a cocktail party, engrossing discussion is good for the soul, good for the mind, and good for the ego, whether people agree with you or not.
Sometimes these conversations emerge organically, and other times, someone asks a question that prompts discussion, debate, disagreement, understanding, or some combination of all.
Well, if you’re looking to spark a conversation, THINK. Conversation Cards are an excellent place to start.
Each of the 120 high-quality cards in the THINK. deck poses a question in one of eight headline categories. It could be about faith, technology, morality, public service, or our role in society / the world at large.
For example: What should a society reward more: effort, skill, risk, or results?
And as the discussion unfolds, you can flip the card over and delve into the topic with several follow-up questions. They might ask you to go deeper into your own beliefs, or to ponder a specific scenario related to the main question, or pose a tangential hypothetical.
But each card is carefully crafted to ask difficult questions without judgment, and encourage everyone at the table to share their thoughts and consider the words and opinions of others.
(Obviously some cards will lead to more agreement than others, but most are worded in a way that at least encourages some debate, even if most people will end up agreeing.)
Some of the best social games — Superfight, Cult Following, Secret Hitler — involve passionate discussion and challenging strongly-felt opinions as part of a winning or losing strategy. THINK. bypasses the gameplay aspect entirely, focusing on discussion.
It’s obviously not appropriate for every get-together (I’ll probably leave it at home come Thanksgiving, heh), but I am looking forward to my next chance to pull out the deck and have a thoughtful exchange of ideas with friends.
[THINK. is available for $29.99 at thinkconversationcards.com. There’s no age listing, but I wouldn’t play with kids, given some of the challenging topics. It lists 2-6 players, but the more the merrier, I say.]
In 2021, Matt Ginsberg’s crossword-solving program Dr.Fill won the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. The top prize still went to a flesh-and-blood solver, but the program solved most of the tournament puzzles in under a minute and only made three mistakes the entire tournament, recording the top score for puzzles 1 through 7.
Of course, Dr.Fill had been “competing” for years at the ACPT before this victory. I believe in its first competition, it placed 141st.
As it turns out, Dr.Fill is not alone. The world of cryptic crosswords has its own Dr.Fill in the form of Dr. Siddhartha Chatterjee’s AI program, Darmok.
At last year’s Times Crossword Championship, Darmok solved two of three semifinal puzzles in seven minutes, but gave up on the last puzzle with one clue unsolved. (That tournament was won by champion solver Mark Goodliffe, who notched his FOURTEENTH win at the tournament.)
Not only because Goodliffe’s potential 15th title was instead claimed by 29-year-old solver Liam Hughes — marking the first new name on the championship in a quarter century — but because this year, Darmok outperformed every human competitor at the tournament.
The final puzzle tripped up Goodliffe, third place finisher Peter Steggle, and Chloe Hutton, who actually finished the puzzle first, but with the same critical error made by Goodliffe and Steggle.
Hughes got it right in ten minutes.
Darmok got it right too, and faster.
And I do have to say, this is a more impressive result than Dr.Fill’s because cryptic crosswords involve a different level of wordplay in its cluing than American-style crosswords. Answer words can hide in other phrases, in anagrams, in initialisms, in pairs of definitions, in soundalike words, in rebus-style assemblies of words and letters.
So for an AI program to parse all that linguistic trickery… that’s quite something.
So what was the clue that stumped much of the field, save for our human and AI champions?
2-Down: Wolf trap missing its lowest crosspiece? (5)
I’ll leave the explanation at the bottom of the post. Good luck!
Star Trek fans and meme enthusiasts will no doubt recognize the inspiration for the name of Dr. Chatterjee’s creation. “Darmok” is an iconic episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Captain Picard struggles to communicate with an alien species that communicates through metaphor and allusion.
Although the alien captain sadly perished in his attempt to bridge the communication gulf between himself and Picard, the Darmok AI’s victory required less bloodshed.
And yet, there was a loss.
AI programs have taught themselves to solve Rubik’s Cubes, Deep Blue bested Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, and IBM’s supercomputer Watson defeated previous Jeopardy! champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings to nab a million-dollar prize.
An AI program called DeepMind taught itself to play several Atari games with superhuman proficiency, and AlphaGo, an AI developed by Google based on DeepMind, twice defeated Ke Jie, the 19-year-old Go tournament champion ranked number one in the world.
Dr.Fill claimed crosswords, and now Darmok has claimed cryptic crosswords.
Did you solve that cryptic clue yet?
Here’s a hint: other answers would’ve given you the crossings S_A_F.
So, yes, the robots have arrived, and they know their wordplay.
The question now becomes: how long before they’re creating crosswords and cryptics that rival the creativity and cleverness of humans?
And I think Amoeba’s conclusion is as heartening as it is accurate:
As a solver, I love the feeling of going head to head with a setter (even an anonymous one), and unravelling and admiring the clues they’ve written. As a setter, that’s what I hope people who solve my puzzles enjoy. This human part of crossword-setting is not, I believe, something that technology will one day supersede; it is an essential part of why we do them.
I’ve solved computer-generated crosswords. I’ve seen AI-created art.
And I’ve found both lacking.
Just as American solvers know the constructors who challenge them and tickle their brains with sparkling wordplay, cryptic setters have built wonderful reputations for themselves as cunning, playful, and surprising.
We look for these names. We accept their challenges. And we celebrate the joy of solving together, the symbiosis of creation and solution, tying linguistic knots and unraveling devious wordplay.
Community in puzzling, that’s the missing bit AI can’t match. A constructor/setter and a solver, meeting across the grid, through the clues.
That’s magic.
And speaking of, here’s the solution to the cryptic clue that tripped up so many.
Wolf trap missing its lowest crosspiece? (5)
“Wolf” is the definition. Both SCARF and SNARF could fit that clue, as all mean to devour or eat.
But the rest of the clue eliminates one of those options.
“Trap” points to the word SNARE, and reading down the grid, a trap missing its lowest crosspiece would be a SNARE with the bottom part of the E cut off.
SNARE becomes SNARF.
Did you get it?
What do you think of Darmok’s cryptic-solving success story, fellow puzzler? Let me know in the comments section below. I’d love to hear from you!
