Happy new year! If you’re looking for a whole bunch of great puzzles to kick 2013 off right, you have come to the right place. A bunch of talented puzzlemakers have big, wonderful projects in the works, and there’s still plenty of time for you to jump on board.

Trip Payne is just a couple of steps away from funding his new Kickstarter project, which means we’ll be seeing a crossword extravaganza from him later this year. What’s a “crossword extravaganza,” you ask? It’s crosswords and then some. Each puzzle in the set will give the solver a particular answer. All of these answers will then be combined to reveal the “meta” answer — the solution to the entire extravaganza. Depending on how many backers Trip gets, one or more people who submit the meta answer will be in the running for a $100 prize. Of course, for most of us puzzle-lovers, a brand-new challenging puzzle set is prize enough. Do yourself a favor and pledge $20 so that you can get the three bonus puzzles — a themeless crossword, a great cryptic, and a one-of-a-kind “Something Different” crossword.

Roy Leban of Puzzazz also has a Kickstarter project going: Unique Puzzles for a Yankee Echo Alfa Romeo. This will be another puzzle extravaganza, stretching across the whole year. He’s promising a wide variety of puzzles, and again, if you pledge beyond the basic level, you’ll get bonus puzzles as well. Furthermore, the project itself is a mini-puzzle-hunt! There are three puzzles on the Kickstarter page itself (one of them cleverly hidden); two more puzzles were recently revealed in the updates. Solve ’em all and keep the answers handy.

Not every puzzlemaker is going through Kickstarter. Andrew Ries has been putting out a Rows Garden puzzle every week for some time. Now he’s just a few days away from launching a twelve-puzzle contest. Jump in before the puzzles are released on January 13th.

Finally, Thomas Snyder, a world-champion logic puzzle solver, launched his own new project as the New Year’s Ball dropped: He’ll be providing an original, handmade logic puzzle every day, Monday through Saturday, at his new blog, Grandmaster Puzzles. Sign up for an account so you can enter your solutions and make a run for the leaderboard.

I think one of my new year’s resolutions should be stocking up on pencils…

A great story from crossword constructor Brendan Emmett Quigley. He wrote on his Facebook page the other day that a friend of his, Alex, had sent him an e-mail:

The lady that sits next to me in the lab has a 10 year old son who’s just of the age to be questioning Santa. Since Santa sees all, he decided to write a Christmas list in code, and only utter the decryption key to the code once, out loud, to a friend of his on the playground, under the assumption that Santa or his agents should hear it and would decrypt his list. His mom and dad have been working on the code for a week or two now with little progress, and Christmas is getting close. Think you know a puzzle geek that wants to take a crack at it?

The coded message is as follows:

Vdge Fxqct,
Wlju vdgz bcn J iyci b bnsjgpgwwo, gpb jsijgm gp fhrga: kxfabmt ivryt, Frqeqkg, bcn J iyci hju Mtnnxvrhcfpf gp icqyayeqpj xjfqwo ryu. Prdju xqz!

As Alex points out in his e-mail to Brendan, the first and last phrases sync up nicely to “Dear Santa” and “Thank you.” But what about the rest of it? Click through to see how a group of puzzle solvers helped save Christmas.

The Beet Box.

(Thanks to Wes Carroll)

A little dash of cartoony wordplay for you.

From Wrong Hands, via Walk in the WoRds.

You know the famous logic puzzle about using a boat to get a wolf, goat, and a head of lettuce across a river, right? Well, in Puzzle Land, this is only the beginning of what you might be asked to transport from one bank to the other. River Tests Pro provides eight such logic problems for iOS, with more puzzles coming — and right now the app is free. (Alas, the app dpesn’t provide the wolf-goat puzzle with an alternative solution.)