Category Archives: PuzzleNation

The Art of the Wooden Puzzle

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Several varieties of puzzle fall under the umbrella of “wooden puzzles,” from sliding tile puzzles and jigsaws to puzzle boxes and brain teasers. Heck, I devoted an entire post to wooden puzzles last year, sharing several from my personal collection.

With the advent of more affordable laser-cutting machines, we’ve seen several puzzly Kickstarter campaigns (like Baffledazzle and Codex Silenda) successfully launched, pushing wooden puzzles into the 21st century with more ambitious designs and greater functionality than ever before.

So you can imagine both my surprise and my excitement when The Metagrobologist posted a link to a Popular Woodworking article on how to make your own wooden puzzles!

There are step-by-step instructions on how to create three different 3D wooden “burr” puzzles, and this article covers everything from construction to assembly. Exact measurements are included.

It’s clear the author is all about quality, understanding both the art behind these mechanical 3D puzzles and all the necessary steps to ensure a safe and successful build.

If only shop class in school had offered me the chance to make something like this!

In all seriousness, this post offers fascinating insight into how some of these mechanical brain teasers are made, but when you consider the care and precision it takes to produce one of these puzzles, even knowing how it’s done doesn’t make the puzzle any less fun. What a treat.

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It’s Follow-Up Friday: Crossword Art edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today, I’d like to return to the subject of crossword-inspired art!

A few weeks ago, I dedicated an entire post to crossword art, exploring paintings, mixed-media collages, and sketches that all had their roots in crossword grids and the wordplay contained therein.

What I neglected to mention is that there have also been crossword-fueled works of performance art.

In 2006, the Steven Wolf Fine Arts gallery in San Francisco — now sadly closed — hosted twin performance artists Kevin and Kent Young in an exhibition they called “Another Monozygotic Experiment in Telepathic Conveyance.”

[Images (this and the one below) courtesy of Art Business.com.]

And what, pray tell, is a monozygotic experiment in telepathic conveyance?

Simple, really. One of the twins randomly selects a crossword puzzle and attempts to psychically project each clue to the other twin, who then fills in the answers to those clues on an oversized grid.

This goes on for 40 minutes, at which point they end the attempt and compare notes to see how well their telepathy worked.

But they’re not done. Oh no.

They then proceed to dance, performing some sort of choreographed display reminiscent of country line dancing.

I don’t know what I was expecting when I first stumbled across “crossword performance art,” but I assure you, dancing never even crossed my mind.

Then again, how else would you celebrate tag-team solving a crossword psychically?

Clearly the Young Brothers have their own unique way of puzzling, but it was kind of them to share it with the world at large, contributing to the overall world of crossword art in an unexpected way.

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New Puzzle Sets for the Penny Dell Crosswords App!

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Oh yes, we’ve got a bonus post for you today, and it’s loaded to the brim with puzzly goodness for both the Android and iOS versions of the Penny Dell Crossword App!

Let’s go!

Let’s start October right with the October 2016 Deluxe Set! You get 30 easy, medium, and hard puzzles, plus 5 themed bonus puzzles to keep you on your toes!

But maybe you’re looking for something a touch less spooky?

How about our new Deluxe Fun Set 8? It’s loaded with 30 easy, medium, and hard puzzles, plus 5 bonus puzzles!

And if that’s not enough Dell-brand deluxe crossword goodness for you, we’ve got you covered!

If you want a little more bang for your buck, a few extra treats in your trick or treat bag of goodies, check out the Deluxe Fun Combo, which offers double the puzzles to choose from! That’s right, 70 puzzles ready and waiting for you to solve!

And that’s not all! For the prolific puzzlers and savvy solvers amongst you, we’ve just launched the perfect puzzle bundle. Collection 16 offers 150 puzzles designed to satisfy and challenge any puzzler!

With these four new puzzle sets to choose from, we proudly continue to set lofty standards for ourselves with puzzle quality and variety! PuzzleNation means terrific puzzles right in your pocket, and when you nab these puzzle sets, we know you’ll agree!

Happy solving!

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You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

Puzzly World Records!

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I was perusing the latest edition of The Guinness Book of World Records, and wouldn’t you know it, there was a whole two-page spread devoted to puzzly world records!

It seems appropriate to start with Rubik’s Cube records, since we just featured a speed solver in Friday’s post.

There are lots of world records involving twisty puzzles. The most Rubik’s Cubes solved while riding a unicycle? 18. The most solved underwater? 5 cubes in 1 minute, 18 seconds.

What about the smallest Rubik’s Cube? It’s only 10 mm, and it can be turned and solved just like a regular-sized Rubik’s Cube.

You know, friend of the blog Hevesh5 has helped set a few world records, but that should come as no surprise, really. Domino records are being set and then shattered all the time. I recently stumbled across a video where a top domino artist and his team set the record for the most mini-dominoes toppled:

And for something a little grander in scale, check out this video of a curious domino world record: the longest human mattress domino toppling:

How about the largest domino ever toppled? Prudential Financial created a domino that was over 30 feet tall, 15 feet wide, and 4 feet thick, which they toppled as the last domino in a chain where each domino increased in size until the world-record domino fell.

And for an amazing endurance test, a team of 60 people maintained a domino circle that toppled for 35 minutes, 22 seconds, continuously replacing dominoes as they fell around and around and around again.

Here’s one for the Scrabble fans in the audience. The highest opening score in a Scrabble tournament is 126 points for the word MUZJIKS (using a blank for the U), played by Jesse Inman in the 2008 National Scrabble Championship.

Speaking of personal achievements, Ashish Dutt Sharma of Rajasthan, India, created the world’s largest word-search puzzle! Inside a grid of 129,600 letters, you can find over TEN THOUSAND words on Sharma’s list.

Of course, given its size, it’s actually impossible to have a definitive list of words in the puzzle, because of the vast number of potential letter combinations in the grid. All the words that were intentionally placed in the list mix with hundreds more formed unintentionally.

[Image courtesy of Getty Images.]

To close out this rundown of world-record puzzles, let’s return to the time of King William III and Queen Mary II of England, who commissioned a hedge maze in Hampton Court Palace in Surrey, which still stands today, more than three hundred years later, as the oldest hedge maze in the world.

These are just a sample of the amazing puzzly accomplishments that have been achieved all over the world by intrepid puzzle fans. I can’t wait to see what my fellow puzzlers come up with next.

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You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Rubik’s Race edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today, I’d like to return to the subject of Rubik’s Cubes!

You know, every time I think I’ve seen it all when it comes to Rubik’s Cube, some enterprising solver proves me wrong yet again. I mean, in writing three blog posts a week here for years, I’ve seen a LOT of cool things done with Rubik’s Cubes.

I’ve seen the world’s largest Rubik’s-style cube being solved, a building turned into a solvable Rubik’s Cube, a new speed-solving world record of 5.25 seconds, and a Rubik’s Cube solved one move at a time by strangers across the globe.

And now, we’ve got our first cross-disciple Rubik’s race. Anthony Brooks, a Rubik’s speed solver, pitted his twisty puzzle skills against the speed of Usain Bolt from his 9.81 second run in the 100 meters at this year’s Summer Olympics.

So…how did he do?

Granted, I think it would have been a fairer fight if Brooks was running on a treadmill or something at the time, but it’s still a funny comparison. Apparently, not all contests of speed are created equal. (Says the guy who just ate eight chicken nuggets in the time it took Bolt to run 100 meters. I don’t know if that means I won or I lost.)

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The Art & Design of a Geometric Puzzle

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It’s rare to get a glimpse inside the puzzly creative process.

Sure, plenty of crossword constructors are happy to share how particular puzzles of theirs came to be, but many constructors and designers, whether we’re talking mechanical puzzles, pen-and-paper puzzles, or electronic puzzles, keep their techniques and tricks secret. They’re like magicians that way.

So when a puzzler takes you behind the curtain, it’s a rare and special treat. The website Gamasutra recently hosted such an event when app designer and puzzler Paul Hlebowitsh explained in detail how he designs the puzzles for his app RYB.

In Paul’s words, “RYB is very similar to ‘Minesweeper’ or ‘Hexcells,’ but instead of using numbers or symbols, it uses colors. The colored dots inside of a shape tell you how the neighboring shapes are colored.”

I love the devilish simplicity behind the solving. It’s so universal that it transcends the language barrier. Simply show another person the first step, and they’ll pick it up immediately.

Paul goes on to explain how one particular puzzle evolved as he sought the perfect mix of puzzly challenge and unique solvability.

He took this:

and eventually ended up with this:

It’s a fascinating read, one I can’t do justice to with a brief summary, so I suggest everyone check out the full post to watch an impressive constructor at work. Being walked step-by-step through a build by the designer is a delight.

I also have to praise the puzzles themselves. The mix of geometric shapes and colors creates a truly striking image. I think I’m gonna get a print made of this one and put it on my wall:

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You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!