It’s Follow-Up Friday: Crosswordnado 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 solutions to our Sharknado and Crosswordese puzzles from the last two weeks!

Two Follow-Up Fridays ago, I posted a deduction puzzle in honor of Sharknado 3 rampaging its way across TV screens all over the world, and I challenged you to complete the schedule of mayhem wrought by our five heroes with five different weapons across five different cities on five different days! (Whew!)

How did you do?

And that brings us to our second solution. Last week, we discussed crosswordese — those words that only seem to appear in crosswords, to the dismay and bafflement of casual solvers — and I created a 9×9 grid loaded with crosswordese.

Did you conquer the challenge?

ACROSS

1. Toward shelter, to salty types — ALEE
3. Arrow poison OR how a child might describe their belly button in writing — INEE
5. Flightless bird OR Zeus’s mother — RHEA
6. Hireling or slave — ESNE
8. “Kentucky Jones” actor OR response akin to “Duh” — DER
9. Compass dir. OR inhabitant’s suffix — ESE
12. Wide-shoe width OR sound of an excited squeal — EEE
15. No longer working, for short OR soak flax or hemp — RET
16. Like a feeble old woman OR anagram of a UFO pilot — ANILE
17. Actress Balin OR Pig ____ poke — INA

DOWN

1. Mean alternate spelling for an eagle’s nest — AYRIE
2. Old-timey exclamation — EGAD
3. Unnecessarily obscure French river or part of the Rhone-Alpes region — ISERE
4. Supplement OR misspelling of a popular cat from a FOX Saturday morning cartoon — EKE
7. Maui goose — NENE
10. An abbreviated adjective covering school K through 12 OR how you might greet a Chicago railway — ELHI
11. My least favorite example of crosswordese OR good and mad — IRED
12. Ornamental needlecase — ETUI
13. Movie feline OR “Frozen” character — ELSA
14. Shooting marble OR abbreviation for this missing phrase: “truth, justice, and ____” — TAW

I hope you enjoyed both of these challenging puzzles! If you haven’t had your fill of crafty puzzlers, worry not! We’ll be tackling another tough brain teaser in two weeks!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

Lollapuzzoola 8 is near!

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This Saturday, August 8, marks the eighth annual Lollapuzzoola!

A puzzle tournament and beloved yearly tradition for top constructors and solvers, Lollapuzzoola is touted by its organizers as “the best tournament held in New York on a Saturday in August.”

The brainchild of Ryan Hecht and Brian Cimmet, this all-crossword puzzle tournament has a different unifying theme each year (last year was baseball, two years ago was birds) and is administered by the dynamic duo of Cimmet and Patrick Blindauer.

[Blindauer and Cimmet, ready to put your puzzly mettle to the test.]

But if you can’t make it to NYC this weekend, worry not! There’s an At-Home Division that will allow you to participate as if you were there! You’ll get your puzzles by email the day after the actual tournament for a very reasonable $10 fee!

I was hoping I’d get to attend this year — it would be fun to participate AND compare and contrast ACPT and Lollapuzzoola — but 8/8 is also my friend’s wedding day. Hopefully, last year’s Locals Division winner Patti Varol will provide a fun recap again!

I’m definitely looking forward to trying out the puzzles! Last year’s were a diabolical treat. (Click here for full details!)

Are you attending Lollapuzzoola or solving from home? Let me know! I’d love to hear from you!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

Get thee to a punnery!

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Wordplay is an integral part of many puzzles, from anagrams and rhymes to letter-shifting and palindromes. But perhaps the most predominant form of wordplay is the pun. (Where would Wordplay Wednesday be without them?)

Sometimes puns are Cryptogram answers or Anagram Magic Squares solutions. Sometimes they’re fiendish crossword puzzle clues that send you one way when your answer lies elsewhere, or they’re the key to figuring out the theme entries in a Thursday New York Times puzzle.

Whether it’s a groaner or one that makes you laugh out loud, a pun can add humor and style to a puzzle.

Some of my fellow puzzlers have some classics to their credit, like Penny Press editor Keith Yarbrough’s “Public hanging” for ART, or crossword guru Eileen Saunders’ “Wombmates?” for TWINS.

But it’s not just in puzzles. Social media has given the art of punnery a new lease of life. Several YouTubers have made puns their stock in trade, like My Drunk Kitchen’s Hannah Hart and You Deserve a Drink’s Mamrie Hart. (No relation.)

Check out this video by musician and pun enthusiast Andrew Huang:

Twitter is also home to some monstrously talented punsmiths. Here are two recent favorites I stumbled across:

And did you know there are even contests and prizes for great puns?

Every May, the O. Henry Pun-Off attracts wordplay aficionados from all over to ply their trade in front of a live audience!

For a primo example, here’s a video of champion Jerzy Gwiazdowski busting out a flurry of geography puns:

What are some of your favorite puns, fellow puzzlers? Are they from puzzles, jokes, Internet memes? Leave them in the comments!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

The Penny Dell Crosswords App! Free Daily Puzzle!

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It’s Follow-Up Friday: New Puzzle Set 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, we’re talking about our flagship product, the Penny Dell Crosswords App!

This has been a great summer for us and the app! Not only are we offering a free daily puzzle to all of our users, but we’ve added a new collection to our library of puzzles for in-app purchase!

Collection Eight features 150 puzzles, collected in 5 different 30-puzzle sets: Penny Easy, Penny Medium, Penny Hard, Dell Easy, and Dell Medium! This value pack contains all five of those sets and saves you 30% over buying them individually! It’s more puzzle bang for your puzzle buck!

Click here to check out all of the terrific features of the app AND all of our available puzzle sets! You can’t go wrong with PuzzleNation and the Penny Dell Crosswords app! Enjoy!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

PuzzleNation Product Review: Adorable Pandaring

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Crowdfunding has significantly changed the world of puzzles and games by offering a new avenue for creators and fans to directly interact and determine whether a game or a puzzle suite becomes a viable product. Many puzzle constructors and game companies are using crowdfunding to both assess the public’s interest in a given game or puzzle AND to raise funds for an initial printing.

And in today’s product review, I’ll be giving the full PuzzleNation treatment to a card game born on Kickstarter and realized through crowdfunding. Let’s talk about Adorable Pandaring, created by Chris Cieslik and Asmadi Games!

In Adorable Pandaring, your goal is to gain bamboo by collecting as many adorable pandas as possible. The trouble is, everyone else is collecting pandas too, and the definition of adorable can change depending on the cards on the table! It’s panda law.

Each panda card has a value and an action. The value lets you know if the panda is adorable or not, depending on the panda law at the time. Sometimes high-numbered pandas are adorable, sometimes low-numbered ones are. Sometimes even-numbered pandas are adorable, sometimes odd-numbered ones are.

The action allows you to affect either an opponent or the game itself. You might gain bamboo, change the panda law, trade cards with an opponent, reveal hidden pandas… there are lots of options, some with exciting consequences.

This is a wonderful mix of poker-style strategy — which card information you share with your opponents and which you conceal — and Fluxx-style rule-shifting chaos. At any time, the panda law can change and your adorable pandas lose their value, or everyone’s hidden cards are revealed and bamboo is awarded.

[A random sampling of the super-cute pandas AND
several ways you can affect the game by playing them.]

And the art is delightful. The pandas are hilarious and, yes, adorable, whether they’re disappointed by dropped ice cream cones or looking sharp in secret agent tuxedo-wear.

Great fun for three to five players, Adorable Pandaring promises adorable pandas and delivers a lot more, making a terrific gateway card game for younger players and a delightful quick-play game for all ages.

(You can pick up a copy from the Asmadi Games store here.)

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!