It’s Follow-Up Friday: Holiday Wordplay 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’m posting the results of our #PennyDellHolidayPuzzles hashtag game!

You may be familiar with the board game Schmovie, hashtag games on Twitter, or @midnight’s Hashtag Wars segment on Comedy Central.

For the last few months, we’ve been collaborating on puzzle-themed hashtag games with our pals at Penny Dell Puzzles, and this month’s hook was Penny Dell Holiday Puzzles, mashing up Penny Dell puzzles and anything and everything having to do with winter, Christmas, the holiday season, festive songs, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, Voodoo Day…whatever you celebrate in December!

Examples include: Oh Little Puzzler of Bethlehem, ChristMasterwords, or HoliDaisy!

So, without further ado, check out what the puzzlers at PuzzleNation and Penny Dell Puzzles came up with!

Come they told me, pa-rum-pa-Home-Runs, the Diamond Rings to see, pa-rum-pa-Home Runs…

Deck the Halls With Bricks and Mortar, fa la la la la…

We’ll frolic and play, the Eskimo Right of Way, Walking in a winter wonderland.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Simon Says

Chess Words Roasting on an Open Fire

Here We Come A-Puzzling

Anagramma Got Run Over By a Reindeer

Do You Hear What I Here and There? / Do You Hear What’s Left?

Places, Please Come Home for Christmas

Ups and Downs on the Housetop / Up on the Housetop to Bottom

All I Want for Christmas Is My Two-for-One Teeth / All I Want for Christmas Is My Two by Two

Take a Letter to Santa / Writing a Letterboxes (or Letter Tiles) to Santa

The Little Drummerman / The Little Puzzler Boy

The Three Wise Men of a Kind / These Three Wise Men

Merry Christmas to All Fours, and to All a Good Night!

God Bless Us Every One and Only!

It’s the Most Wonderful Timed Framework of the Year

We Need A Little Chinese Christmas / Yes, we need a little Pine Cone

So You Say This is Christmas

Try-Angles We Have Heard on High

March of the Wooden Quotefalls

‘Tis the season for Flower Power

Santa Classified Ads is coming to town / Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Spelldown

Away in a Double Occupancy

Good Time Wenceslaus

Baby, It’s Codeword Outside

Two-Step into Xmas

Guest Star of Bethlehem

Guess Whoville

I’ll Have a Blue Christmas Without You Know the Odds

Feliz NavidOdds & Evens

Fairy Heads & Tails of New York

There’ll Be No More Matchmakers to the King

Hark! The Sum Triangles Sing!

Blackout! Friday

Reindeer Word Games

Mannheim Steam Roll of the Dice

Crackerjacks Frost

The First and Last Noel

Shadowboxing Day

We’re on the Island of Four-Fit Toys . . .

The Scoreboard in hand bear I, bedecked with Sunrays and Syllability . . .

Salvation Army Ringers

The Polar Exploraword

Home Alone: Who’s Calling?

Home Alone: Step by Step, Brick by Brick—Battle!

A Christmas Story: Everything’s Relative

You’ll shoot your eye Out of Place!

I dedicate this house to the Griswold Family Christmas: You Know the Odds.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation: Loose Tiles and Marbles

And, of course, no one could resist trying to do the Twelve Days of Christmas with puzzles:

On the 12th day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

Twelve Crypto-Riddles
Eleven Logic Problems
Ten Rapid Readers
Nine Picker-Uppers
Eight Build-a-Pyramids
Seven List-a-Crostics
Six Mini-Crosswords
Five Diamond Rings!
Four (Who’s Calling?) Birds
Three Perfect Tens
Two Turnabouts
And a Partners in a Pairs tree!

OR…

FIVE BY FIVE golden rings.
FOUR SCORE calling birds,
TRIPLETS French hens,
TWO FOR ONE turtledoves,
And a partridge IN A BIND tree!

OR…

…and a Partridge in a Picture Pairs Tree!

Have you come up with any Penny Dell Holiday Puzzles of your own? Let us know! We’d love to see them!

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PuzzleNation Product Review: Stuff and Nonsense

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In today’s product review, we look at a puzzly game all about telling stories.

Many games are about grand adventures, but only Stuff and Nonsense is about pretending to go on grand adventures to scam your fellow would-be adventurers. Can you sneak around London and gather the props you need for your impressive lie, all while avoiding the fiendishly clever Professor Elemental?

Stuff and Nonsense is a game of position, strategy, and opportunity. You travel around the game board — made of map cards — visiting various spots and picking up cards that will help you tell your fictional tale of derring-do. When you’ve collected the right cards — or enough to sell your fake story — you head to the Adventurer’s Club to tell your story.

Each time you do so, you can cash in those cards for points. Point values can range wildly depending on the cards you have and the value of your setting at a given time.

The cards are silly, creatively imagined, and often hilarious, discussing mythical events, explaining weird artifacts, and offering much-needed color to help sell your false tale.

All the while, you must dodge Professor Elemental, who is moving around the board investigating your shenanigans. If you end up in the same spot as him, you face a penalty (either losing a card or having every card in your hand drop one point each in value.)

[The game comes with these colored tokens (top), but you can opt for the slightly more expensive (& delightful) Meeples of the Professor & various faux adventurers (bottom).]

What makes this game such a puzzly treat is the mix of strategy and opportunity. You can take whatever cards you get and hit the Adventurer’s Club frequently to rack up smaller amounts of points more frequently, or you can bide your time and then hit the club less often for higher point values.

But either way, there’s always the looming threat of crossing paths with the Professor at a bad time and losing a key card or crucial points.

Plus, the map is different every game based on how you lay it out, so there’s a lot of replay value here.

Stuff and Nonsense is available from Cheapass Games for $25, and is featured in our Holiday Puzzly Gift Guide! What great fun.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuhGMA–r7M]

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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!

The Crystal Maze returns!

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[Host Richard O’Brien tempts you into testing your mettle in The Crystal Maze.]

Crowdfunding strikes again!

This time around, fan support and puzzly outreach has resurrected The Crystal Maze, a classic puzzly TV show from across the pond.

From 1990 to 1995, contestants would team up to overcome physical and mental obstacles under a tight time limit as they tackled the show’s signature themed zones, including an Aztec one, a medieval one, and an industrial one, earning crystals for every completed puzzle or activity.

Those crystals could then be converted into time allotted to confront the final challenge: the Crystal Maze itself.

The Indiegogo campaign raised nearly double what the team of designers was asking for! But, instead of a TV show, The Crystal Maze is returning as a fully interactive experience for the public, tasking you with completing these challenges yourself.

With the recent popularity explosion of Escape the Room experiences, this seems like a fantastically entertaining next step in immersive puzzle-solving.

[A computer-generated mock-up of the new Aztec zone.]

Not only are there actors to play various roles within each zone, but host Richard O’Brien is returning to “welcome guests in a time-honored fashion.”

Tickets are on sale now for the March 15, 2016, launch of The Crystal Maze experience in London. You can book individually (£50 on weekdays, £60 on weekends), sign up with a full team (8 people), or book an entire session (32 people, since 4 teams can run through each session). Each session runs approximately 90 minutes.

Hopefully you’ll do better than this player:

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One Puzzle Set to Rule Them All!

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Last week, we released our December Deluxe collection for the Penny Dell Crosswords App, offering 35 terrific themed puzzles. Not only do you get 30 easy, medium, and hard puzzles, but there are 5 bonus puzzles you can unlock as you solve!

The December Deluxe was the last of the twelve seasonal deluxe puzzle sets we released in 2015, each of them chock full of terrific content. And you might be saying to yourself, “Self, is there a way I could download every deluxe puzzle set in one fell swoop, as any delightful brilliant puzzler would certainly desire?”

Yes you can! We’re overjoyed to announce our 2015 Deluxe Combo, a collection of every deluxe puzzle set from throughout the year!

That’s right, we’re talking 420 puzzles delivered right to your mobile device with ease! It’s the perfect year-end gift for any crossword lover on the go! Simply check out the App Store for this and all things PuzzleNation!

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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: Thanksgiving Answers 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’m posting the answers to last week’s Thanksgiving Slide-O-Gram puzzle!

Here’s the grid and puzzle to jog your memory:

Using the given letters, place the eleven Thanksgiving words and phrases below into the diagram above, one per row. When all the words and phrases are entered properly, one of the columns reading down will spell out an 11-letter word that is related to Thanksgiving.

Casserole
Corn
Cornucopia
Cranberry sauce
Giblets
Pumpkin pie
Rolls
Stuffing
Sweet potato
Turkey
Turnip

So let’s take a look at the completed grid!

Our bonus answer tying the word list together was, appropriately enough, CENTERPIECE.

(If you had trouble with the puzzle, the anchor words that would’ve gotten you going were Corn, Cornucopia, Giblets, Pumpkin pie, and Cranberry sauce.)

How did you do? Let me know in the comments below!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

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!

A brand new puzzle set for the Penny Dell Crosswords App!

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Oh yes, we’ve got a special bonus post for you this week, because we’re celebrating a new puzzle set for the Penny Dell Crosswords App.

Just in time for the holidays, we’re overjoyed to announce our newest downloadable content for the Penny Dell Crosswords app, the December 2015 Deluxe set, is now available! Just open the App, then tap Puzzle Store on the home screen.

Our December Deluxe set offers 35 terrific themed puzzles, and that’s certainly some great puzzle content to help celebrate the season! Not only do you get 30 easy, medium, and hard puzzles, but there are 5 bonus puzzles you can unlock as you solve!

With this new deluxe set of puzzles, we’ve continued our proud tradition of publishing the best crosswords available to the mobile audience. Terrific crosswords right in your stocking (or your pocket)! What more could you ask for?

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

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!