Category Archives: Games

Classic Word Search iBook… making a name for itself!

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Hello puzzle fans and PuzzleNationers!

Yes, it’s another bonus Friday post, because I simply can’t resist spoiling you just a little bit more. =)

This will be a short one. I just wanted to talk about our Classic Word Search iBook Volume 1, because I’m so immensely proud of it, and it reached a few amazing milestones over the last week.

First off, it was featured by Apple in the Made for iBooks category, which was a wonderful bit of boost and validation.

Not only that, but Classic Word Search Volume 1 was ranked #1 in the Arts and Entertainment category!

And check out the stiff competition!

Lastly, but certainly not leastly, we cracked the Top 200 iBooks, peaking (at last check) at #167!

Thank you so much for your continued support, fellow puzzlers! We love making puzzles here at PuzzleNation, and seeing Classic Word Search hit these highs has been an absolute pleasure.

5 Questions with Tanya Thompson of ThinkFun

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Welcome to the fifth edition of PuzzleNation Blog’s interview feature, 5 Questions!

We’re reaching out to puzzle constructors, video game writers and designers, writers, filmmakers, and puzzle enthusiasts from all walks of life, talking to people who make puzzles and people who enjoy them in the hopes of exploring the puzzle community as a whole.

And I’m excited to have Tanya Thompson as our latest 5 Questions interviewee!

Tanya is Head of Inventor Relations at ThinkFun, literally traveling the world to meeting with inventors and puzzle innovators in order to create new puzzle game products under the ThinkFun brand. She was part of the team that made Laser Maze a reality — check out our review of Laser Maze — and in the photo, she’s playing around with their latest puzzle game, WordARound (another coup for her and the ThinkFun team).

Tanya was gracious enough to take some time out to talk to us, so without further ado, let’s get to the interview!

5 Questions for Tanya Thompson

1.) What in your estimation makes for a truly great puzzle or puzzle game?

Good question. It depends on the context. If you’re asking me personally, as an avid gamer and puzzler, I like puzzles that are new or innovative. I have over 1000 puzzles in my collection and I attend the International Puzzle Party (IPP) where some of the brightest puzzle minds (creators and solvers) gather. I love it when I see something truly new, whether it be a mechanism, a component or a solving technique.

If you’re asking me what I look for regarding a ThinkFun puzzle or puzzle game, that’s different. For ThinkFun it needs to be commercially viable. It has to be interesting to the masses, not just puzzle nuts like myself. If it can sit on the shelf and cause people just walking by to pick it up and play with it, then it might be right for ThinkFun.

As for my favorite puzzles – That’s a tough question. I have a lot of favorites. I love Rush Hour because I think ThinkFun revolutionized the toy and game industry with it. This was an entirely new way of doing puzzles. Of the classics, I love the Soma Cube, both for its elegance and its mathematical completeness.

I must mention designers here too. I love Iwahiro because he always surprises me with his puzzles. One year he’ll do wood, then aluminum, then cloth. He is so creative. Vesa Timonen and Timo Jokitalo develop wonderful single player games as well as aha-style. Oskar van Deventer has revolutionized twisties. Akio Kamei creates the most beautiful puzzles that look like everyday objects and the key to their solutions lie in those objects. Kagen Schaefer does exquisite puzzle furniture. I could go on and on!

2.) What ThinkFun products are your favorites, and which are you most proud of? Is it difficult to walk the tightrope of producing challenging, educational, AND fun products?

I love ThinkFun and what we stand for. We produce addictively fun games that sharpen and challenge your mind. We want to make the world better thinkers. I think our products do just that. I’m especially proud of this year’s releases Laser Maze and Word Around because I championed them into the company from the inventors. However kudos need to be given to the amazing Product Development team that took the ideas and made them into exceptional products as well as our incredible sales and marketing teams who knew just how to get them out into the world. You asked if it is difficult to walk the tightrope of producing challenging, educational AND fun products, it’s not so much that it’s difficult, it’s more that it is who we are. We’re awesome tightrope walkers!

3.) What’s your relationship to puzzles and games, and how did you come to be an integral part of ThinkFun?

I’ve always loved puzzles and games. My first career was a mathematics teacher and I used puzzles and games in my classroom to inspire my students. One of ways I did this as a teacher was to organize a SNAP Math Fair in my school. It brought puzzles into the classroom.

Through my work with SNAP I met Bill Ritchie, the CEO of ThinkFun. Bill soon hired me, and now I travel the world meeting inventors to bring in the new ideas for ThinkFun, and then work as part of a team that develops the ideas into products. Bill is also very passionate about reaching communities of people that want activities and games to exercise their brains. So I am also on a team of people working on programs that do just that! I love what I do and I’m blessed to have such a great job with ThinkFun!

4.) What’s next for Tanya Thompson and ThinkFun?

What’s next for me? Who knows. I’d love to attend TED someday, I’d love to travel to Asia and I’d love to sit and play a board game with Wil Wheaton. More imminent, I have been asked to launch a puzzle/game newsletter this fall. It will focus on great puzzle/game people in our industry, and will include a puzzle/game takeaway.

I am also excited to soon be off to find our next big thing! I’ve built an incredible network of inventors and creatives and I look forward to the fall when our submission cycle opens back up and I’ll be out there seeing great new ideas again! What’s next for ThinkFun? You’ll have to wait and see but you can be certain that it will be more products and programs that will sharpen and challenge your mind!

5.) If you could give the readers, aspiring inventors, and puzzle fans in the audience one piece of advice, what would it be?

Live passionately and get involved. I am passionate about mathematics, puzzles, games and education. When I was a teacher, I taught with passion. It brought me to ThinkFun and I now have a job that allows me to work within the fields I’m passionate about. 

Also, get involved with other people who share similar passions. I chair a committee called the Gathering for Gardner – Celebration of Mind (G4G – CoM) that promotes Martin Gardner’s life’s work. Martin wrote a column for 25 years in Scientific American called Mathematical Games. He was passionate about math, magic and puzzles.

Around his birthdate of October 21st parties/events occur around the world. Big or small, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that people gather to share math, magic and puzzles. I was lucky enough to call Martin a friend and I am honored to be a part of this organization.

I am also on the Executive Advisory Board of the Chicago Toy and Game Week, a great series of events held in November for anyone wanting to know more about or to network within the Toy and Game Industry.

Many thanks to Tanya Thompson for her time and ThinkFun for their puzzly camaraderie! With so many interesting and innovative puzzle games in their arsenal, I’m sure we’ll be talking about them again soon.

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our Classic Word Search iBook (recently featured by Apple in the Made for iBooks category!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

PuzzleNation Reviews: ROFL!

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Here at the PuzzleNation blog, we love spreading the word about new puzzle-solving experiences of all sorts.

So we were intrigued when we heard about a new puzzly party game that utilized textspeak and abbreviations. We contacted the folks at Cryptozoic about it, and they were gracious enough to pass along a free copy of ROFL!, allowing us the chance to give it a thorough PuzzleNation vetting.

And ROFL! is a seriously fun time.

Masterminded by John Kovalic (artist for games like Munchkin and Apples to Apples, creator of the comic strip Dork Tower), ROFL!’s concept is simple.

Players try to create abbreviations of pop culture terms, phrases, and quotations for other players to decode, using only the symbols available on a standard keyboard. (So basically, numbers, letters, punctuation, and a select few others.)

So everyone takes turns being The Guesser (the one who must unravel the abbreviations conjured up by the other players, The Writers), starting with the person who used the fewest characters in their abbreviation. You award points for correct guesses (to both Guesser and Writer), and whoever has the most points after three rounds wins.

Groups of up to seven can play (three is the minimum needed), and with hundreds of possible messages (the cards are double-sided to maximize options) across six categories, you’re not likely to run out of new abbreviations to solve anytime soon.

(Plus with personal whiteboards, markers, erasers, and tokens, you have everything you need boxed up and waiting for you.)

ROFL! slots beautifully into the same party-game niche as Taboo and Scattergories: games that rely on the ingenuity of your fellow players to make the most of the gameplay, and ones that evoke fits of laughter with total ease.

I recruited four fellow puzzlers to try it out over lunch, and not only were we playing within minutes, but the laughs were rolling soon after.

I’ll give you an example from our second round:

The quote to guess was “It’s quiet over there. Too quiet.”

So I quickly scribbled “ITS QT > THR, 2 QT”

13 characters. So I placed my marker on the 13, and luckily, I used the fewest characters, so the Guesser turned to me first.

There’s only one guess per Writer, but I was optimistic.

The guesser got the first part easily. “It’s quiet over there…”

But then she paused. Uh-oh.

“It’s quiet over there… Two quarts?”

Everybody burst out laughing. (She did end up getting it on her second try, but the points go to the second Writer in that case.)

From a puzzle perspective, figuring out how to abbreviate quotes and sentences (all while the sand in the timer quickly dwindles) is a terrific puzzly challenge. After all, anyone who solves crosswords is intimately familiar with unscrambling unlikely (and sometimes baffling) abbreviations, and with the proliferation of textspeak thanks to greater and greater smartphone use, you’re sharpening your ROFL! skills every time your phone vibrates.

But writing your abbreviation is also an exercise in strategy. Do I risk using fewer characters in order to go first (first guess is worth the most points), or do I hedge my bet and go for clarity, even if I’m second or third to go?

Here’s an example from our game:

The quote was “Live long and prosper.”

So I put all my eggs in one basket and wrote “L L & PSPR”, hoping that “prosper” would carry the load and the Guesser would be able to figure out the rest from there. With only 7 characters, I was the first Writer on the board.

The Guesser was stumped, though. Time ran out before she could even guess.

The next Writer stepped up. (She used 9 characters and was next in line.)

Her abbreviation was “Lg Lv & PSPR”, and even though she accidentally mixed up the order of “live” and “long”, the Guesser immediately blurted out “Live long and prosper!”, securing them 2 points a piece.

In this instance, it was worth using a few extra characters and sacrificing being first in order to get the points.

With the social aspect, the improvisational aspect, and the puzzly aspect, ROFL! pushes a lot of ideal game-playing buttons, and it does so with style.

(And don’t tell the bosses, but the game was so popular that we played again during work hours the same day. *wink*)

All in all, it’s a good time for puzzlers and board game fans alike. John and the Cryptozoic Entertainment crew have a real winner on their hands here.

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! Don’t forget about our PuzzleNation Community Contest, running all this week! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our Classic Word Search iBook (three volumes to choose from!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

5 Questions with Jordan Diehl and The Great Urban Race

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Welcome to the third edition of PuzzleNation Blog’s newest feature, 5 Questions!

We’re reaching out to puzzle constructors, video game writers and designers, writers, filmmakers, and puzzle enthusiasts from all walks of life, talking to people who make puzzles and people who enjoy them in the hopes of exploring the puzzle community as a whole.

And I’m excited to have Jordan Diehl as our latest 5 Questions interviewee!

Jordan is a Senior Manager for the Great Urban Race, a city-spanning puzzle competition that combines puzzle-solving, scavenger hunts, and physical challenges to create a unique, whirlwind challenge based around the landmarks and curiosities of a given city. (Previous GUR events have taken place in Seattle, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, and many other American cities.)

Teams gather to tackle the numerous mental and physical obstacles in a certain amount of time as they explore the city. Players are allowed to have remote help as well, often recruiting friends as “tech support” to hunt down locations for them en route. (I’ve served as tech support for my sister on several occasions. Check out our previous GUR adventures here.)

It’s a terrific workout, a great mental exercise, and some serious fun.

With the latest edition of the Great Urban Race hitting New York City in two days, Jordan was gracious enough to take some time out to talk to us, so without further ado, let’s get to the interview!

5 Questions for Jordan Diehl and the Great Urban Race

1.) The race is a combination of mental dexterity and physical endurance, often requiring contestants to solve on the fly. How much does each city impact the puzzles the contestants encounter? Do you choose certain cities with puzzles/questions already in mind, or do the cities dictate the puzzles?

Great Urban Race is all about finding the hidden gems of the city we are in, so we like to incorporate interesting and historical facts about the city whenever possible when creating puzzles!  We have a group of cities that are perfect for Great Urban Race, and we love visiting those on an annual basis. (Full list on our website here) There are some types of puzzles that we can incorporate in multiple cities, but in general we like to be pretty city-specific.

We do puzzles of all levels of difficulty, but some of our favorites are Sudoku, logic puzzles, as well as word-puzzles.  Our site is actually being updated now with some example clues—those can be found here.

2.) The Great Urban Race has held events all over America. Which city offered the most challenging race, either in terms of puzzles or the physical challenges?

The cool thing about Great Urban Race, both as a participant and as an Event Director, is that every year AND every city are completely different and pose their own challenges.  Each race has at least one challenge that will put Masterminds (what we call our participants) out of their comfort zone in either a fun or scary way—some past examples of this have been jumping off a 50 ft platform onto a large inflated airbag, rock climbing, walking on fire, and eating some pretty gross things.  It’s our favorite to plan but also the most challenging piece of each race for us as well!

3.) How many people contribute to each race’s puzzles? Do you have a resident puzzlesmith, or does everyone get a chance to contribute?

We have a team of eight dedicated Event Directors for Great Urban Race.  Everyone gets a chance to contribute to the city’s puzzles, but we do have one “Cluepervisor” who is our resident expert on writing clues and thinking of new and exciting challenges.  The Cluepervisor and her team have a pretty awesome job—they take everyday items and think of how to make it a fun challenge for our participants and do a LOT of puzzle solving for inspiration.

4.) What’s next for The Great Urban Race?

Our regular season is in full swing and will conclude November 2nd in San Diego.  We are so excited to announce that our 2013 National Championship will be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico.  The top 25 teams from each city qualify for this event where the stakes are even higher and the cash prizes are much bigger as well.  New this year, we will be distributing the cash prizes as a total of $10,000 between our top 8 teams.  We’ve also re-launched several of our 2014 locations and registration is available now!

5.) What is one thing you’d like every competitor (and aspiring competitor) to take away from the experience?

We are focused on providing a fun and unique experience for our competitors. We want you to be challenged both mentally and physically, but also give you a Saturday to remember! The cool thing is that it can really be what you make of it—you could run upwards of 8-10 miles and have a really great body and mind workout or take public transportation and run less than 2 miles but learn a lot about your city and complete some really fun challenges along the way.  There’s definitely something for everyone in Great Urban Race!

Many thanks to Jordan Diehl for her time. Check out the Great Urban Race on their website for plenty of race pics and details! I can’t wait to see what they’ll cook up next.

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our Classic Word Search iBook (three volumes to choose from!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

Happy Birthday, PuzzleNation Blog!

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That’s right, my fellow puzzle fiends and PuzzleNationers! One year ago today, the very first PuzzleNation Blog post went live on WordPress, and we’re overjoyed to embark on a new year of sharing puzzly goodness of all sorts with you!

After 365 days, 170 posts, and hours and hours of discussing the best and brightest, the weirdest and most wonderful, the most fascinating aspects of the worldwide puzzle community, we’re still going strong and busier than ever!

With the recent launch of our Classic Word Search iBooks (Volumes one, two and three!), as well as our interview feature 5 Questions (new one coming Thursday! Check out the first two installments here and here!), we’ve been looking forward quite a bit lately.

So we thought we’d take this opportunity to look back and chronicle some of the awesome achievements that our homebase, PuzzleNation.com, has accomplished since its launch.

It started with seven games — Tanglewords, Classic Crossword, StarSpell, Classic Sudoku, Crossword Raiders, Classic Word Search, and Guessworks — later adding Diggin’ Words, Classic Fill-In, and Invisible Word Search to the roster of playable puzzle games.

(Stormy, Barkley, Copernicus, Sam, Veronica, Lorenzo, and Kana, the Diggin’ Words dogs, wish the PuzzleNation Blog a happy one-year anniversary!)

Looking back, it’s kind of amazing when you consider how many puzzles have been solved since the launch of PuzzleNation.com.

The top 3 PuzzleNation puzzle games solved the most times since launch are (#3) Invisible Word Search, (#2) Diggin’ Words, and (#1) Classic Word Search (with nearly twice as many solves as Diggin’ Words).

Those same 3 puzzle games were the top 3 puzzles solved in the last 2 months.

The top 3 puzzle games in the first 2 months of PN’s existence were Classic Word Search, Guessworks and Crossword Raiders.

(Classic Word Search… clearly a favorite among puzzlers, since it was the most popular puzzle both then AND now!)

(Also, ignore the little blue triangle at the top of the pyramid. That’s just a festive party hat.)

 Classic Word Search also had the biggest increase in solves since launch. Not double, not triple, but SIX TIMES as many Classic Word Search puzzles were solved in the last two months as there were in the first two months!

Another notable improver was Tanglewords, which doubled from about 1,000 solves in the first two months to about 2,300 in the last 2 months.

But each of those games means puzzle points collected by PuzzleNation users…

Which does make you wonder…

How many points have puzzlers collected since PuzzleNation.com launched?

As it turns out, a staggering amount:

Look at some of those totals! Over 31 million PuzzlePoints for Classic Sudoku! Over 63 million PuzzlePoints for Guessworks! And a mindboggling 770 million PuzzlePoints in Diggin’ Words! (No wonder those dogs always look so thirsty!)

As you can see, even the smallest sliver of the pie represents thousands and thousands of solves by PuzzleNation players!

All this adds up to over half a MILLION puzzles solved since launch!

And the PuzzleNation Blog is proud to be the voice of PuzzleNation and the place where you can find all things puzzly (and PuzzleNation-y) on the web!

Thank you for a terrific year, and here’s to many more good things to come! (Including a big announcement later this week, so stay tuned!)

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our Classic Word Search iBook (three volumes to choose from!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

Puzzles and games: A community of hobbyists

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A friend of the blog passed along a fascinating article analyzing the current gaming market.

The piece encompasses console games, PC games, mobile games, and MMOs (massive multiplayer online games, like World of Warcraft), and not only categorizes different types of gaming experiences, but predicts the future of the gaming business as a whole.

From the article:

“The concept of one true gamer community will be less feasible as evergreen hobbies grow in popularity. Instead, we have a crazy mixing bowl of diverse, separate, long-term communities. Few will share the same values or goals. Few players will consider themselves having anything in common with players of a different game.

Social organizations such as PAX will still promote common ground, much like the Olympics promotes common ground between athletes. But day-to-day cross-pollination will be rare.”

And his conclusion is one that rings true for puzzle-games particularly:

“The shift comes from realizing that individual digital hobbies will soon to be the default play pattern.”

Puzzles and puzzle games are famously singular endeavors. Crosswords and Sudoku puzzles hardly lend themselves to group play (unless you’re asking for help), and often the only “interaction” comes in tournaments or other forms of competition wherein individuals are pitted against each other in isolation.

The expansion of puzzles and puzzle-games into the mobile market (tablets, smartphones, etc.) has helped solidify this. Whether it’s Angry Birds or our own Classic Word Search iBook, puzzle-solving games remain something of a solitary hobby.

(The big exception to the rule here is, of course, Words With Friends and other Scrabble variants.)

But the similarities between the PuzzleNation community and the gaming community don’t end there.

We too have our “grinders” (those who enjoy one particular game to the exclusion of others, posting impressive monthly scores) and our “aficionados” (those who dabble in all kinds of puzzles, peppering the scoreboards with their name across numerous puzzle variants).

You know, the line separating puzzles and puzzle-games is a tenuous one, and while I’ve spent a good deal of time myself parsing out the differences between the two, it’s always nice to be reminded how much puzzlers and gamers have in common. We’re two very enthusiastic communities with a lot of overlap.

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our Classic Word Search iBook (three volumes to choose from!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!