Just a quick post today to remind you of TWO big crossword events coming soon!
Firstly, Boswords is just a few short weeks away, and they recently announced the constructors for this year’s tournament puzzles.
Chandi Deitmer, Kathleen Duncan, Peter Wentz, Joon Pahk, Damon Gulczynski, and the team of Emily Biegas & Sala Wanetick will be constructing this year. With a rogue’s gallery of top-flight constructors like this, the tournament is sure to be a great time!
Lollapuzzoola will be happening on a Saturday in August — Saturday, August 15th, in fact — and registration is now open!
This year’s event, Lollapuzzoola 19, has been titled “Around the World,” and promises all sorts of puzzly challenges:
Travel the globe with us through crosswords and games — the day includes tournament puzzles, warmup puzzles, a variety puzzle meta suite, a multi-crossword meta suite, and more!
Plus pizza!
There are two solo divisions for competitors: the Local Division (for newer solvers, more casual solvers, or those with less tournament experience) and the Express Division for “hardcore speed solvers with tournament experience.”
For those who solve with a buddy, the Pairs Division is always an option, and of course, the At-Home Division is available for players who can’t make it to NYC. (I’ll be solving from home for sure!)
A great summer of puzzles continues with two back-to-back highlights of the cruciverbalist calendar year.
And since we’re talking crosswords, I’ve got a 13x puzzle for you to solve today.
I tried something a little different this time around, but hopefully you enjoy! (Once you figure out the gimmick, it’ll probably be a pretty quick solve.)
Will you be participating in either Boswords or Lollapuzzoola this year, fellow puzzler? Let me know in the comments section below. I’d love to hear from you!
Clue (aka Cluedo) is one of the all-time classic board games.
It has seen numerous variations and licensed versions (like the Golden Girls edition, where you need to find out who ate the last piece of cheesecake) as well as escape room-style adaptations. Characters have come and gone, like Dr. Orchid, who took Mrs. White’s place in 2016.
It has even been turned into a movie, a comedic delight that’s on my rewatch list every year (alongside its less-appreciated but equally subversive counterpart, Murder By Death).
Now, this isn’t the first LEGO Clue board I’ve seen. In fact, I wrote about one back in 2016 that came with an interactive scorecard for your deductive reasoning.
But the set by Brickly_Pair goes above and beyond both of those previous endeavors.
The rooms are beautiful, richly detailed, and immersive. The logo in the center of the board is gorgeous. The game pieces are a little simple, but definitely feel inspired by the actual game’s pieces.
All the little nods to both its source material and classic LEGO sets (like the Wolfpack banner above the fireplace) make this a work of puzzly art as well as a fun way to revamp and revitalize a classic board game.
Now, seriously, could someone get to work on a Murder By Death set? It could have the shifting rooms, falling gargoyles, and best of all, a Jamesir Bensonmum minifig!
Do you think this Clue LEGO set will grace your shelves one day, fellow puzzler? Or would you like to see another board game get the LEGO brick treatment? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.
This week, I decided to go back in time to a book I probably read during a summer break years and years ago. It felt appropriate to read the same sort of book that would’ve been ON a summer reading list for elementary or middle schoolers.
So join me as I take a trip to 1967 as we read Nancy Drew #44: The Clue in the Crossword Cipher by Carolyn Keene (aka Harriet Adams).
Nancy’s new acquaintance Carla Ponce shows her a family heirloom that has been in her family for generations — a wooden plaque carved into the image of a monkey — and asks for Nancy’s help unraveling the mystery of the message on the back of the carving.
While Carla is being menaced by a shadowy figure known only as El Gato, Nancy recruits her friends George and Bess to join her on a trip to Peru to unravel the centuries-old mystery of the monkey plaque.
Despite attempted (and successful) thefts, attempted kidnappings, a sabotaged plane, and a murder attempt atop Machu Picchu, Nancy and her friends unravel both the story of Carla’s missing ancestor and the secret of the monkey plaque. Their journey ends amongst the Nazca Lines as they seek a lost treasure.
I was absolutely a reader of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew when I was young, so I was definitely interested to revisit one of these books for our Summer Reading series.
And man, this book does not age well.
The adventure itself is fine, dealing with numerous criminal agents and cliffhangers at the end of each chapter (although some of them are just fake-outs resolved in the first sentence of the next chapter).
But the fat-shaming disguised as comedy is absolutely brutal. Every 20 pages, Bess is being called fat or chided about her eating or exercise. It sucks. They even gave this poor girl a cow-sounding NAME.
She runs all over Peru and Argentina trying to save Nancy’s life, and they still give her endless grief over eating delicious homemade local bread. LET THE GIRL BE.
There’s also the little matter of the crossword cipher on the back of the plaque.
It’s described to us in bits and pieces as they try to read the worn-away lettering, but what we have, essentially, are four words in a foreign language which seem to be crossing in pairs.
So, even being generous in our interpretation, this is neither a crossword nor a cipher. It’s not encoded, it’s just in another language. A language one of the primary characters speaks. I genuinely don’t know why they named the book after this detail. Maybe for flow? “The Case of the Worn-Off Crossed Words” doesn’t really grab your attention, does it?
All that being said, it wasn’t a bad way to pass an hour or so. The art peppered throughout the book is fun, and the cartoonish smugglers throwing bombs and trying to toss Nancy off the top of an Incan landmark were pretty entertaining in their sinister ineptitude. (I am a sucker for incompetent lackeys.)
But I still wish there was, you know, a crossword to solve, or a cipher. That would have made the puzzle of the monkey plaque a little more engaging.
Are you doing any reading this summer, puzzly or otherwise, fellow reader? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.
It was disappointingly hard to find an image for the 250th anniversary or the Fourth of July that didn’t make me want to puke, so here you go, a map of America without the idiotic “Gulf of America” crap on it…
I confess, fellow puzzler, when I was planning ahead for July’s posts, I struggled with what to write for today. I didn’t feel inspired to create a puzzle around the anniversary, and for reasons political, moral, and also quite personal, I didn’t exactly feel in a celebratory mood when I thought of the 4th.
So I instead cast my mind back to the bicentennial, researching events and celebrations held for the 200th anniversary of the country, hoping for inspiration to strike.
And I fell down a rabbit hole when exploring the subject of time capsules.
Time capsule plaque in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which actually includes the word “sesquicentennial”…
Did you know that time capsules go missing with surprising regularity?
A time capsule was buried in the 1950s at the San Francisco International Airport. It was lost, and then rediscovered during construction in the 1970s. It was lost AGAIN, and then rediscovered again in the 1990s, close to the original intended year of the time capsule’s reopening in 2000. Serendipity.
In my perusings, a single line caught my attention:
And nestled among 150 items in the Chicago City Bank and Trust Company’s sealed-and-locked-away “Time Capsule 1976-2076” is a crossword puzzle
A crossword included in a hundred-year time capsule? One that would be halfway through its journey to the future on July 4, 2026?
I wondered what crossword was chosen to represent the world at the time.
So I immediately went on the hunt for more information.
First, I wanted to establish that the time capsule’s location was still currently known. After reading about all those lost and misplaced ones, this felt like the prudent place to start.
With the assistance of Annika Kohrt, Public Services Librarian at the Chicago History Museum, I found the location of the original bank in question at 815 West 63rd Street, Chicago.
The building is now a Chicago Landmark, as well as the home of the Englewood branch of US Bank. After talking to several very helpful and probably confused bank employees about the time capsule, I spoke to the bank manager, Tiffany, who kindly confirmed that the time capsule is intact in the bank’s vault.
I couldn’t ask for further details without sounding like I was plotting a heist, so I tabled my inquiry there.
So the time capsule still exists. Excellent!
Annika also provided me with some newspaper articles about the time capsule — librarians are the BEST, seriously — which indicated that a copy of The Chicago Defender newspaper was included in the time capsule.
The Chicago Defender is a remarkable institution.
This weekly African-American newspaper was founded in 1905, reporting on important issues of the day, railing against Jim Crow laws and segregation practices. Langston Hughes, Ida B. Wells, and Gwendolyn Brooks were among the important voices who wrote for the Defender over the years.
It became a daily newspaper in 1956, serving as a crucial voice during the Civil Rights Movement, and wouldn’t return to its weekly format for over 50 years. It is still publishing to this day in online format.
By the time the bicentennial rolled around, the Defender had celebrated 70 years as one of the most influential and outspoken periodicals in the country.
And, in fact, two different issues were included in the time capsule: the 70th anniversary edition of the Chicago Defender and the 1976 Bicentennial edition of the Chicago Defender.
With the assistance of Tony, one of the Ask a Librarian pros from the Chicago Public Library, I learned quite a bit about the Defender.
Including the fact that the Defender didn’t have a regular puzzle section in the paper.
I was barking up the wrong tree.
I was not deterred, though. With the deft help of capable researchers like Annika and Tony — I swear, the Internet is borderline unsearchable at this point, thank ALL the gods for librarians — I had confirmed the time capsule’s location, current status, and some of its contents.
So I started poring through newspaper archives and articles related to “Time Capsule 1976-2076.”
And as you might expect, Midwest newspapers gave quite a bit of coverage to the time capsule. Citizens had months to suggest items to place inside. Those items were then on display for the public to enjoy, before being sealed away that December to await the citizens of Chicago in 2076.
Items inside included:
a letter penned by the late Mayor Daley to the people of 2076
a sheet of Chicago Bears 1976 season tickets
documents from Englewood Hospital and other crucial public services
half-hour recordings of radio shows about the time capsule’s creation
albums from Johnny Mathis (“I Only Have Eyes For You”) and Sammy Davis Jr. (“Now,” featuring “Candy Man”).
Items cataloguing Chicago’s history past and present, as well as recipes, magazines, and books recounting the histories of various industries and cultural institutions, were also included to provide a snapshot of life at the time.
And among all those items, I finally spotted the item that had thus far eluded me in my historical deep dive into the time capsule:
“Dell Publishing Company – Crossword Puzzles, December, 1976.”
Unfortunately, not the issue in question, but one from the same year. Look at that disconnected grid. *shakes head*
I’ve reached out to my friends at Penny/Dell Puzzles to see if a copy of this magazine is in their archives. If so, I’ll update this post and let you know!
Oh, one more thing.
In my research, I finally found the full article containing the brief snippet that inspired this post, and I discovered a word had been cut off in the original scan.
The text actually read:
And nestled among 150 items in the Chicago City Bank and Trust Company’s sealed-and-locked-away “Time Capsule 1976-2076” is a crossword puzzle magazine.
A single word could’ve changed my entire approach.
But then again, there’s so much I wouldn’t have learned if that word had been part of my original game plan, so I don’t regret the journey.
Fifty years from today, the citizens of 2076 Chicago will be celebrating the tricentennial with, among many other symbols of times gone by, a puzzle magazine that is still being published today, and hopefully one that will still be publishing fifty years from now.
Those folks will probably never read these words.
But I want to thank them anyway.
I want to thank the people who put together that time capsule, and the people who will be opening it, for putting a little bit of feeling back into this particular July 4th for me.
One of my favorite places on the Internet might surprise you.
It’s a subreddit called r/AdventuresOfGalder, and it’s a place to celebrate those we’ve lost.
Imagine that you’re in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with your friends. You’re each playing a different character in the party, adventuring throughout the land, performing good acts and feats of derring-do.
But the real world intervenes in the cruelest way possible. Your friend passes away. And as you are slowly confronting your grief and mourning your loss, you realize a smaller loss.
Your friend’s character is still there, their story unfinished.
There are different ways to handle this. The character could be quietly retired, or become an NPC played by the Dungeon Master. The game itself could end and a new one begin in its wake.
When I lost a friend to suicide who had been part of my D&D game at the time, his character ended up becoming a chosen of his faith, and elevated into my game world’s pantheon. There are still references to him to this day in my other games, since he continues to be a part of my world. It is my small way of honoring my friend.
Every group finds a different way to deal with this at their table.
But you can also honor both your real-life loved one and their roleplaying character at r/AdventuresOfGalder.
Named for Galder the Conjurer, the character played by a man named Laurence who sadly passed away from cancer in 2018, this subreddit is dedicated to those we’ve lost. It is a repository of stories about those people and the characters they played. Their fictional adventures are shared here, their good deeds chronicled.
And sometimes, other Dungeon Masters incorporate these characters into their own home games, bringing new life to these wonderful creations of those we have lost.
It’s an electronic version of lore building, sharing stories of larger-than-life deeds around the campfire, stories that can then go on and evolve and become larger and stranger and funnier and more grandiose as others retell the stories. It’s a part of an ever-growing newborn mythology.
At a time when people feel adrift, alone, confused and hurt and scared, they can come to r/AdventuresOfGalder and find waiting ears and friendly shoulders to lean on. They can share their grief and their love and all the good times for others to enjoy.
Yes, it’s an incredibly sad place, but it’s also beautiful. You should check it out sometime.
School is out, and it got me thinking about summertime during the school year. I can remember looking forward to reading every summer break.
There would be lists of possible choices to read, and I inevitably discovered something fun and fascinating that I might not have plucked from a shelf otherwise. It’s how I first encountered the original Sherlock Holmes stories, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and other classics.
And I thought it would be fun to revisit those days of summer reading for a few weeks with puzzle-centric book reviews!
Most people know Stephen Sondheim as a titan of Broadway and the American stage, the composer and lyricist behind dozens of iconic works. West Side Story. Gypsy. Into the Woods. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. (My personal favorite? Assassins.)
Many puzzle enthusiasts know him for his advocacy for cryptic crosswords (aka British-style crosswords). New York Magazine featured his cruciverbalistic efforts for years, and Will Shortz now possesses Sondheim’s exhaustive collection of Listener cryptic crosswords.
But fewer puzzlers know about Sondheim’s love of games or his penchant for creating puzzly scavenger hunts and murder mystery events.
Which makes this magnificent deep dive into Sondheim’s love of games and puzzles even more of a treat.
Joseph takes us into Sondheim’s puzzle- and game-filled home, decorated and adorned like an immersive snapshot of hobby history. He shares the puzzly influences behind some of Sondheim’s theatrical and cinematic endeavors. He reminisces with those celebrities and luminaries who participated in Sondheim’s legendary puzzly adventures and remember them fondly.
The reader even gets a few wonderful glimpses into the creative process behind these one-off experiences.
Plenty of biographical texts reveal the author’s affection for the subject, or grant insights into them that the casual reader or fan might not know. But it’s very rare to feel like I got a chance to pick the brain of their subject and learn from them.
Joseph’s diligent research and narrative storytelling lets the reader feel like they’re at the table with him and Sondheim, plotting a puzzly adventure together.
With photos galore, puzzles to solve, and even instructions for creating your own versions of Sondheim’s puzzle and game events, this was part-biography, part-game design guide, featuring the best of both worlds.
Some celebrities are onions, revealing new layers as you go deeper. When I was a theater major, I was delighted to learn more about Sondheim the musical theater composer. When I started working with puzzles, I was delighted to learn more about Sondheim the cryptic crossword aficionado.
And after more than twenty years in my puzzly career, I’m still learning about Sondheim on both levels, thanks to Barry Joseph’s Matching Minds With Sondheim.
Make some time this summer for this book. You won’t be disappointed.
Are you doing any reading this summer, puzzly or otherwise, fellow reader? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.
PuzzCulture 