Category Archives: Games

Where brilliance meets joyous frivolity…

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Two weeks ago, we celebrated the 29th birthday of Tetris in a blog post, and I referenced the famous MIT prank where a giant game of Tetris was played on the side of a building.

This prank is one of the most recent in a long line of “hacks”, and MIT students have performed some impressive feats of creative whimsy along the way.

From a fire hose drinking fountain in 1991 to the installation of a shower stall in a common area in 1996, from turning the dome into R2-D2 (as pictured in our opening picture) to the “discovery” of an elevator in the remains of the demolished Building 20 (purportedly leading to a secret subbasement), these are top-tier pranks executed by some of the cleverest students in the world.

The Great Dome is often the palette of choice for MIT hacks, having featured a Triforce from the Legend of Zelda video games, the TARDIS from Doctor Who (which appeared all around campus), a fire truck, the Batman symbol, and numerous other Hack endeavors.

Here, the Apollo lunar lander looks down on a statue of Athena also added by industrious students. (Apollo watching over Athena, how apropos.)

One year, board games invaded campus. Giant versions of Cranium, Mousetrap, and Settlers of Catan appeared around campus, and all of the helpful maps around campus were altered to feature Risk gameplay.

Another time, an enormous game of Scrabble appeared on the wall, complete with MIT-inspired words fluttering in the breeze.

To honor the posting of XKCD’s 1000th comic — a comic that has also made appearances on this blog — XKCD comics appeared all over campus, often spelling out “1000”.

A Newton’s Cradle with imagery inspired by the Portal video game series appeared in 2012

But the best part of MIT hacks? Wondering just how the heck they managed to pull it off without anyone seeing. Like the urban legends behind stories of cars disassembled and reassembled in a professor’s office, the technological wizardry and sneaky cunning required for these marvelous pranks makes MIT Hack enthusiasts fellow puzzlers in spirit AND practice.

A milestone worth celebrating.

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It was #5 on G4’s Top 100 Video Games of All-Time countdown, and has been consistently ranked as one of the top games of all-time by IGN, EGM, and gamers of all ages.

It’s Tetris, and it’s turning 29 this week. Yes, Alexey Pajitnov’s incredibly addictive puzzle game baby is ready to start freaking out about the future because it’s almost 30.

Tetris combines the quick reaction time and coolness under pressure of video games with several aspects of puzzlesolving to create a marvelous puzzle game experience.

Firstly, you have the improvisation and adaptability necessary for other tile-placement puzzle games like Scrabble (or Words with Friends for the app-savvy in the audience). But utilizing pieces very similar to those in a pentominoes puzzle — as I discussed a few weeks ago — you also have a spatial puzzle aspect reminiscent of a Brick by Brick.

(FYI, here’s a sample puzzle, provided by our pals at pennydellpuzzles.com.)

From scientific studies linking gameplay with lessened post-traumatic stress to utterly inspired pranks turning buildings into playable surfaces, Tetris has left an indelible mark on both puzzle culture and pop culture. (Plus, I suspect it’s made us all a little better at packing up the car for long trips.)

Happy Birthday, Tetris.

Finding the game IS the puzzle.

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Have you heard of Jason Rohrer, fellow puzzlefiends? If you haven’t, he’s a game designer with style and a keen eye for long-term planning. Specifically, a few thousand years in the future.

He masterminded A Game for Someone, the winning entrant in the “Humanity’s Last Game” challenge at this year’s Game Design Challenge. It’s a game he designed and tested with computers, so it’s never actually been played by human beings. He had the game pieces and board constructed out of titanium, and used specially chosen paper to record the rules.

Then he buried the game somewhere in the Nevada Desert.

Here’s where the puzzle aspect comes in.

He distributed lists with hundreds of potential GPS coordinates to various GDC attendees — one million possible coordinates in all — and left it in the hands of his audience.

From an article on Polygon.com:

He estimates that if one person visits a GPS location each day with a metal detector, the game will be unearthed sometime within the next million days — a little over 2,700 years.

Somehow, given the Internet’s penchant for crowdsourcing, I suspect it’ll be found a little sooner than that.

Let’s put a puzzler’s mind to the challenge.

You combine all of the lists of possible coordinates, and run them through a computer, which can organize them on a map based on location. Not only will this allow you to hit multiple coordinates nearby in one fell swoop, but it will help eliminate unlikely or impossible options (like anywhere easy digging isn’t so easy).

Then distribute your coordinated maps to a team of dedicated diggers — these delightful pups come to mind! — and get to work. A small army of geocachers could probably knock this out in a month or two.

Heck, if I wasn’t too busy trying to decipher the cryptic poem behind this treasure hunt, I might take a crack at Rohrer’s challenge myself.

Check this out, mate.

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DIY puzzling is only limited by your imagination and inventiveness. After all, pencil and paper is all you need for most improvised puzzle games (hangman comes to mind, for instance).

But if you require a bit more inspiration for some down-home puzzling, look no further than a chess or checkerboard.

I’ve written about knight’s tours before, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to chess-based puzzles and brain-teasers.

You could challenge yourself with an Eight Queens puzzle. It sounds easy but it’s deceptively difficult. Place eight queens on a chessboard so that no queen is attacking (or capable of attacking) another.

This means that no queen shares a row, column, or diagonal with another queen.

There are only 12 distinct solutions, though each one can be rotated 90, 180, and 270 degrees, as well as mirrored on the board, leading to a much larger number of acceptable solutions. Numerous variations on this theme are available to test your wits and spacial reasoning, including placing 32 knights on the board without conflict, or nine queens and a pawn.

If that’s not your cup of tea, and you’ve got paper and scissors handy, you could whip up a quick game of pentominoes.

A pentominoes game consists of placing all of the above pieces into a given space without overlapping. You can play this on your own as a mental challenge, or add a bit of competition and strategy to it by alternating turns with other players and seeing who is the last person to place a piece on the board.

While you can use any size square or rectangle for your game board, a chessboard works well, especially since you can fit every piece on the board (leaving only a 2×2 space of uncovered squares). By setting or moving around this 2×2 space, you’ve instantly created a new challenge for yourself.

Personally, I’ve found them to be excellent palate cleansers after a few mentally-exhausting rounds of chess (though there are always variants on the game itself, like Pardu Ponnapalli’s TrimChess (image 2) and Jose Raul Capablanca’s expanded chess, if you’re looking for fresh ways to play.)

In any case, these are wonderful challenges with a minimum of set-up time, perfect for puzzlers looking for a new challenge without a lot of fuss. I hope you enjoy.

Links aplenty today!

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Today’s a day for sharing the puzzly wealth, so I’ve got a few links for your perusal.

First up is this terrific article from IO9, recommending a number of science-themed apps and games with some seriously crafty puzzle elements to them.

From RNA molecules and gene structures to brainmapping and animal classification, these will fascinate AND inform you all at once. Marvelous stuff.

Next up is a great post by Dan Markowitz on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, exploring what Rube Goldberg could have created if he was a little more petty and meanspirited. It’s Rude Goldberg Contraptions!

A series of dominoes fall, knocking over a marble that rolls off a ledge, landing on a seesaw that tips downwards, dangling a piece of cheese in front of a gerbil that runs on a hamster wheel, unfurling a roll of toilet paper into a trash can, leaving an empty cardboard tube in the bathroom that you’ll have to replace even though you weren’t the person who used it up.

And finally, a little something for the puzzlers in the audience who like some magic and swashbuckling in their solving. The creative titans behind Dungeons & Dragons are filling the gap between now and the launch of their newest system (D&D Next) by releasing dozens and dozens of out-of-print and retired modules, sourcebooks, and adventures from earlier editions of the game.

You can relive some of your all-time favorite dungeon romps, riddles, and puzzle traps at D&D Classics — they’ve already posted the first edition classic The Temple of Elemental Evil — and any you can’t find there, you can probably track down in downloadable form at DriveThruRPG.

What’s your position on that puzzle?

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The line between puzzles and games can be razor-thin, and some of the best multiple-player games have distinct puzzle aspects to them.

Today, let’s take a brief look at puzzle games I consider “position puzzles,” or puzzles where the key aspect of the solve/gameplay is a matter of tactical positioning.

The puzzle game that always comes to mind when I think of positioning is Hex.

Hex is a simple game that can get fiendishly complicated in a hurry. The goal is to create a linked chain of cells from one wall to the opposite wall, while your opponent tries to do the same. So not only is positioning a key element to building your chain of cells, but it’s crucial to depriving your opponent of similar positioning.

Best of all, the only things you need to play are a grid and a couple of pencils. My astronomy teacher in high school introduced me to Hex, and I’ve been playing it on and off for years ever since.

From Hex, let’s move on to another puzzle game that demands positioning skills and a level of strategic forethought: The Icosian Game.

The goal of the Icosian Game is familiar to anyone who’s done a Pencil Pusher or similar puzzle, requiring that you trace a path without lifting your pencil tip or revisiting any point in the diagram.

You want to visit every letter-marked spot once, and complete what is known as a Hamiltonian cycle, named for the puzzle’s creator, William Rowan Hamilton.

(Also, PuzzleNation fans will no doubt recognize some major similarities between the Icosian Game grid and the grid for our word-hunting game Starspell.)

Another classic positioning puzzle goes by many names, including Mills and Cowboy Checkers, but you probably know it best as Nine Men’s Morris.

Nine Men’s Morris is a two-player game where you try to place three tokens in a row while thwarting your opponent’s efforts to do the same. Every three-token row means your opponent loses a token, and the winner is whichever player reduces an opponent to two tokens or forces a stalemate.

Variations of this game date back to the days of the Roman Empire, but I suspect most people would recognize it in a simpler, more popular form. After all, it’s an easy leap from Nine Men’s Morris to Tic-Tac-Toe.

Today’s final positioning puzzle is a little different from the others, but it’s a personal favorite of mine. This is another game that goes by many names and appears in many forms. The version I play is called Turf Wars.

In Turf Wars, your goal is to capture as many squares as possible by drawing one line each round that connects two points. Your opponent does the same, and you slowly winnow down the board, creating opportunities to seize single squares or blocks of squares. Any time a box is enclosed on three sides, whomever draws the fourth side seizes the box.

(In this case, the puzzle game is hosted on the Ninja Burger website, so the boxes become either “Ninja” or “Samurai” depending on whether you or the computer capture the box.)

And if seizing one box encloses the third side of another box, you can seize that one as well. So there is the potential to seize multiple boxes in a single turn with some strategic line placement.

All of these games can be played with ease on paper, or with tokens scrounged up from other games, and they provide a great challenge and serious fun.

Just remember: In positioning puzzles, as in real estate, it’s all about location, location, location.

[For more ninja-centric puzzle and games fun, including the phenomenal Ninja Burger roleplaying game, click here.]