Category Archives: Games

Let’s get it (kick)started!

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The newest tool in the arsenal of big thinkers and big dreamers is crowdfunding, wherein creators take their ideas directly to the people in the hopes that a lot of small donations will add up into capital to make their ideas reality.

Websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have literally made dreams come true — heck, LeVar Burton’s Reading Rainbow Kickstarter just raised over a million dollars in ONE DAY — and it’s quickly becoming a key outlet for worthy puzzle projects. Some top-tier constructors are going straight to the fanbase with their puzzles, and with marvelous results. Constructors like Trip Payne, Eric Berlin, and Matt Gaffney have all had success on Kickstarter and Indiegogo with previous campaigns.

In the past, we’ve covered several crowdfunding campaigns, including Rachel Happen’s Baffledazzle puzzles, The Doubleclicks’ board game and pop culture-infused musical endeavors, and a company making board games and card games accessible to the visually challenged.

And I wanted to spread the world about some other puzzly endeavors that might interest the PuzzleNation readership.

The first is Peter Gordon’s Fireball Fortnightly News Crosswords.

Peter Gordon is known across the puzzle community for his Fireball Crosswords, a challenging brand of puzzle for ambitious solvers, as well as an easier weekly news-themed puzzle for The Week magazine. So now, he’s combined the two to create Fireball Fortnightly News Crosswords!

Every two weeks, you’ll receive a crossword by email that includes as many topical news-related items in the grid as possible. So you get your news and your crossword in one fell swoop. Not as difficult as his usual Fireball Crosswords, these puzzles will still let you flex your solving muscles twice a month.

With backer prizes like additional crossword books and the chance to create a puzzle with a master puzzler, Fireball Fortnightly News Crosswords might be right up your alley!

The second Kickstarter campaign features a puzzle app for Android devices.

Blackout is similar to Lights Out, Q*Bert, and other puzzle games where you must make every icon on the screen the same color, which becomes a tougher task to complete as the patterns grow more complicated and each click affects neighboring shapes.

The game will feature multiple levels of difficulty — including one where the icons change shape as well as color — ensuring it’ll keep you thinking and clicking for quite some time to come.

Finally, we have Block Party.

Block Party is a pattern-matching game featuring several shapes, colors, and patterns, and players must find parties — groupings of similar aspects or collections of each different aspect — without touching the blocks. The first player to shout “Party!” then reveals the grouping they’ve spotted, and the game continues.

Block Party combines visual reflexes, pattern-matching skills, memory retention, and spatial reasoning to create an immersive game that appears deceptively simple at the outset.

With backer rewards like a printable version of Block Party and limited-edition versions of the game, this campaign is ready to engage solvers of all ages.

The amazing thing about all of these projects is that the audience, the potential fans, have an enormous role to play not only in sharing their thoughts with game and puzzle creators, but in showing their support for designers and projects they believe in, and doing so in a meaningful way.

Here’s hoping each of these projects finds success.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

Think outside the house…

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[A friendly reminder that not everything is available online.
Stickers (and the story of their creation) can be found here.]

Summer’s almost here, and although we all love puzzles (and we’ve been talking about apps a lot lately), I think it’s safe to admit that puzzles have always been something of an indoor activity. So what’s a parent to do when puzzle-loving kids don’t want to go outside?

Why, take the puzzles outside, of course!

Do your kids enjoy shapes? Why not create some large-scale tangram puzzles for them? All you’d need is a sheet or two of posterboard and a pair of scissors. There are numerous designs online that you could recreate (minus the lines that show how the pieces make each shape) and challenge your young solvers to mimic with their pieces!

You could even cut the posterboard into Tetris pieces and play a game of Tetris where each kid takes a turn placing a piece, trying to leave as few open spaces between pieces as possible. (Though you’d have to be a real magician to make complete lines disappear like in the game!)

Do your kids like trivia? Why not grab a few frisbees, a hula hoop or two, and create a mini-game show!

[Frisbee golf provides the perfect model for an easily improvised puzzle game.]

Different hula hoops could be different categories or difficulty levels (either prop them up or let them sit on the ground), and the kids could show off their athleticism AND their trivia knowledge in one fell swoop! (Replace the frisbees with beanbags or softballs or whatever you like. This is a game meant to be cobbled together from whatever’s on hand.)

And of course, there’s always the ultimate fusion of outdoor adventure and puzzly skills:

Scavenger hunts are great, because you can tailor them to your audience. Do your kids love puzzles? Make the clues as puzzly as possible, incorporating riddles and anagrams and wordplay galore. Do your kids like searching more than puzzling? Be creative in crafting the list of items to find.

Since the dawn of the modern era of mobile phone technology, a new variation on the scavenger hunt has emerged: the photo scavenger hunt. Instead of finding numerous items and bringing them back to a predetermined spot, you take pictures of various items (or provide photographic proof that you’ve completed certain activities or accomplished certain tasks) and bring your phone back as evidence.

Some companies, like our friends at The Great Urban Race, offer city-specific scavenger hunts for adults, replete with puzzles, physical challenges, and all kinds of outdoor fun. Their website is a treasure trove of ideas for your own adventures.

Actually, you know what? That sounds great. Forget the kids, I’m gonna go recruit some people and go scavenging!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Get Your Puzzles Here! edition

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

For those new to PuzzleNation Blog, Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and update the PuzzleNation audience on how these projects are doing and what these people have been up to in the meantime.

And after talking with Leslie Billig yesterday about puzzle magazines and puzzles by mail, I wanted to do a quick post talking about the many ways modern solvers have access to puzzles.

For some people, puzzling starts with the newspaper. Once you’ve caught up with local and world events, had a few chuckles over the comic strips, and perused the classifieds for the tag sales you want to check out this coming week, the crossword is part of their daily ritual.

And then there’s the bread-and-butter of our pals over at Penny/Dell Puzzles, the puzzle magazine. On the newsstand and in racks at bookstores and shops all over, puzzle magazines (and independent puzzle books) are some of the most recognizable brands in publishing, and it’s rare that I ride the train without seeing at least a few of these being enjoyed on a daily basis.

Of course, you can get puzzle magazines by mail as well, signing up for subscriptions for your favorite titles, as well as buying bundles to keep you puzzling through a long winter or an agreeable summer.

This brings me to the next avenue for puzzlers: Puzzle of the Month programs. Subscriptions like The Uptown Puzzle Club and The Crosswords Club deliver puzzles right to your home every month, in case you’ve already plowed through your puzzle magazines and the daily crosswords in the paper.

Naturally, these days, anything you get by mail, you can get by email, so there are also puzzle of the day/week/month programs online. The American Values Club Crossword offers individual puzzles as well as weekly puzzles, and many constructors (like friend of the blog Robin Stears) have subscription programs as well to keep you busy.

And, of course, there’s an ever-expanding field of puzzle games and apps for the modern solver. Your phone, e-reader, or tablet are now optimal puzzle-delivery systems, locked and loaded with puzzles anytime you’ve got a free moment or some downtime, whether it’s waiting at the doctor’s office, being stuck in traffic, or playing a round of Words with Friends around the dinner table.

It’s never been a better time to be a puzzle fan, with so many ways to enjoy your favorite brain teasers and mental challenges.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

Zip your zipper the Rube Goldberg way!

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A Rube Goldberg machine, for the uninitiated, is a device designed to accomplish a simple task in as many unnecessary, ludicrous steps as possible. The name comes, appropriately enough, from Rube Goldberg, a cartoonist and inventor most famous for his cartoons featuring singularly silly and elaborate machines like the one pictured above.

We’ve posted videos of Rube Goldberg machines in the past, because they’re a perfect example of a mechanical puzzle in action. Only when things happen in a precise order does the machine complete its task.

There are numerous competitions pitting clever puzzlers and inventors against each other to build the most spectacular and labyrinthine Rube Goldberg device, but Purdue University’s competition has become one of the most prominent.

(Note: they haven’t yet updated their website with the results of the 2014 competition.)

This year’s competition involved zipping up a zipper, and the winning team did something no other team has done before: they placed a person inside the machine and let it run.

Check out this video from Jimmy Kimmel Live, featuring the team and their winning Rube Goldberg machine. It’s pretty great:

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Word Search Edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

For those new to PuzzleNation Blog, Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and update the PuzzleNation audience on how these projects are doing and what these people have been up to in the meantime.

Today, I’d like to update you on what’s going on in the world of PuzzleNation apps and puzzles!

I’m happy to announce that we’ve just launched our latest puzzle game for the iPad, Classic Word Search!

With all sorts of delightful themed word lists, this is the word search solving you know and love, made easy with the touch of a fingertip! Just drag your finger along the words in the grid to loop them, and watch as they’re crossed off the word list one by one!

Accompanied by trivia for each themed word list, the puzzles in Classic Word Search are suitable for all ages and just waiting to be solved!

Classic Word Search joins the terrific lineup of apps and puzzle iBooks from PuzzleNation and Penny/Dell Puzzles, and we’re so excited to add another world-class puzzle to our mobile library.

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation Blog today. Stop in again soon for the latest puzzle news, app announcements, and all sorts of puzzly goodness!

PuzzleNation App Reviews: Point 2 Point

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Welcome to our third edition of PuzzleNation App Reviews! Today we continue our quest to explore the world of puzzly games and apps for your tablet or smartphone!

Our resident App player and puzzle fiend Sherri has another intriguing game for us today, so without further ado, let’s dive into her review of Point 2 Point!

If you enjoy pure puzzle games, then Point 2 Point is the game for you. This iOS game is essentially one puzzle with varying levels of difficulty.

Normally, I prefer games with more graphics than this one, but the simplicity of it lured me in. The “point” of the game is to connect all the points in each level without crossing the lines. Each point has a numerical value that represents the number of connections you must make. Each collection of levels is called a pack.

I played the introductory pack, and it kept me engaged. The game started off very simply, but as the levels progressed — some with movable dark blue points — they grew more and more difficult. For each completed level, you earned 1, 2, or 3 stars based on your proficiency.

While I prefer games with more puzzle variety and a greater emphasis on striking graphics, I was drawn into this game. I wanted to match the points and earn 3 stars for each level, and I nearly did that! Some of the levels, even in the introductory pack, were really tricky! This game really works your brain and makes you think. You really have to puzzle out the best way to connect the points.

Ratings for Point 2 Point:

  • Enjoyability: 3/5 – it isn’t a spectacular game but it is interesting and really makes you think; its joy lies in its simplicity
  • How well puzzles are incorporated: 5/5 – it is all about puzzles. You have to puzzle out how to connect the number of points to get to the maximum number of stars in each level.
  • Graphics: 1/5 – the graphics are simply lines and points, but the simplicity doesn’t distract at all from the game
  • Gameplay: 3/5 – it’s a deceptively simple game that really challenges your mind, but it really is just one puzzle repeated several times. There isn’t much variety, but the increasing difficulty keeps the game fresh.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!