5 Questions with Constructor Trip Payne

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Welcome to another edition of PuzzleNation Blog’s interview feature, 5 Questions!

We’re reaching out to puzzle constructors, video game writers and designers, board game creators, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and puzzle enthusiasts from all walks of life, talking to people who make puzzles and people who enjoy them in the hopes of exploring the puzzle community as a whole.

And I’m excited to have Trip Payne as our latest 5 Questions interviewee!

A freelance puzzle constructor for over twenty years, Trip Payne is one of the most prolific and respected names in puzzles. A multi-time champion at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, he’s been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Uptown Crossword Club, GAMES Magazine, Will Shortz’s WordPlay, and numerous other outlets.

On August 1, he’s launching his latest Puzzle Extravaganza, a collection of a dozen different puzzles (plus a special metapuzzle) for only $10! Previous extravaganzas have featured themes like the 2011-2012 television season and the Man of Steel himself, Superman, but this year’s theme is a closely guarded secret! Check out the details here, including an offer for three bonus crosswords!

Trip was gracious enough to take some time out to talk to us, so without further ado, let’s get to the interview!

5 Questions for Trip Payne

1.) How did you get started with puzzles?

As a very young child, I was attracted to the black-and-white crossword patterns, and my parents noticed that interest and bought me children’s puzzle books. I was always into riddles, magic, games — everything sort of related to puzzles.

Eventually I started coming up with puzzles for my elementary and junior high school newspapers, and when I was 15 I had my first puzzle published nationally in GAMES Magazine.

2.) What, in your estimation, makes for a great puzzle? What do you most enjoy — or try hardest to avoid — when constructing your own?

In terms of crosswords, my #1 rule has always been: It’s All About The Fill. Of course you want a great theme and clever clues, but the second you resort to weak entries, you’ve lost my interest. A lot of people are willing to “justify” weak entries because they’re “necessary” to pull off a wide-open grid or an ambitious theme; I don’t agree with that. With enough work, and perhaps a willingness to pull back a little from the original concept, you can pretty much always avoid poor fill.

Look at Patrick Berry: his themes are great, and you’d have to inspect his puzzles with a microscope to find a weak entry anywhere. That’s not magic — he just has high standards and a willingness to put in the work to make his puzzles as good as they can be.

A great puzzle is one that gives a satisfying “a-ha” at some point, that makes the solver glad that they’ve invested the time with it.  In a logic puzzle, it may be some clever leap that has to be taken; in a word puzzle, it may be an interesting anagram or misleading clue; it may be on a larger scale, as when you discover how the answers to various puzzles interact to solve an overall “metapuzzle.” 

3.) You’re a three-time American Crossword Puzzle Tournament champ and a perennial top 10 finisher. How does tournament solving differ from regular solving, and do you think your experiences with game show environments (like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Million Dollar Password, and Scrabble Showdown ) helped you thrive in the ACPT?

Well, not perennial, since I retired in 2011 (though I did compete one final time in Lollapuzzoola in 2013). My game show work all came after my ACPT championships, so there was no real connection there. But I do think that the fact that I was a professional puzzlemaker before I started competing in puzzle tournaments helped me; for one thing, you get a sense of letter patterns and a feel for how a puzzle constructor might have filled a corner.

4.) What’s next for Trip Payne?

I’m currently editing the Daily Celebrity Crossword for PuzzleSocial, and I have a few other regular assignments, such as the “wordoku” in TV Guide and my themeless crosswords for the Washington Post Puzzler.

I plan to continue making my annual extravaganzas and hope to completely overhaul my website, tripleplaypuzzles.com, within the year. And I also hope to continue doing work writing and researching for TV game shows, and perhaps pitching my own game show ideas to producers.

5.) If you could give the readers, writers, and puzzle fans in the audience one piece of advice, what would it be?

Enjoy the puzzles that you love, but experiment: there are all sorts of great innovative puzzles out there, and you might be surprised what you end up enjoying.

Also, buy my puzzle extravaganza!

Many thanks to Trip for his time. Check out his website for links to all his puzzly endeavors, and be sure to follow him on Twitter (@PuzzleTrip) for the latest updates on his many irons in the fire! Can’t wait to see what puzzle fun he conjures next.

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!

Puzzles from Across the Sea

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A fellow puzzler passed me a copy of a Spanish puzzle book, and I thought I would share its intriguing visual and linguistic stylings with the PuzzleNation audience. (I’ve done this once before with a German puzzle book, and I hope to obtain more from other countries to really give PuzzleNation a PuzzleInternational flavor!)

Now, my Spanish isn’t as sharp as it used to be — any facility I once had with the language, I credit to years spent selling hot dogs outside a Home Depot, rather than six years of classes across middle school and high school — but I should be able to muddle through enough to explain the variations in these puzzles from ones you might be more familiar with.

In any case, let’s get to the puzzles! [Click on each for a larger version.]

The first thing you notice about these clued grids is that there’s none of the diagonal symmetry that defines traditional crosswords. Instead, there’s a curious singlet-letter arrangement along the top and left side. (It’s almost like a kakuro puzzle, with shared clue boxes offering across and down hints.)

Here the across and down clues offer hints for overlapping letters, like a Brick by Brick mixed with a Camouflage puzzle.

This puzzle works by isolating syllables in each hexagon cell, and creating words by reading these syllables in the direction indicated by the arrows next to each clue.

In this “sopa de letras” — a word search, but literally translated as “soup of letters” — the solver must identify each of the 12 drawings around the grid and find those words in the grid.

This one is pretty self-explanatory, as the solver places letters to form five-letter words according to the set letters and the arrows provided. (Interestingly enough, the title translates as “Noughts and Crosses.”)

Ah, here’s something familar! A logic puzzle is a logic puzzle no matter where you travel.

This wonderful spread of variety puzzles offers an array of challenges, with puzzles involving encryption, letter-shifting, deduction, and brain teasers!

It’s always a treat to explore puzzles from another culture’s perspective. Thanks for taking this journey with us today.

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!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Apps and Alex edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

For those new to PuzzleNation Blog, Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and update the PuzzleNation audience on how these projects are doing and what these people have been up to in the meantime.

And today, I’ve got two terrific announcements for you all!

First and foremost, we’ve updated our Apps and iBooks page to reflect the latest puzzles and platforms available! Crosswords, Classic Word Search, and Sudoku puzzles await you there, ready for your mobile devices! Enjoy!

And second, since we’ve been talking about trivia recently, it seems utterly apropos that I stumbled across this video on the Guinness Book of World Records website this week.

It’s host Alex Trebek accepting the certificate for Most Game Show Episodes Hosted by the Same Presenter (Same Program), officially documented by Guinness (hardly the show’s first world record, but easily its most impressive).

For the record (and the Record!), Alex zoomed into first place by hosting his 6,829th episode of Jeopardy!:

Thank you for checking out Follow-Up Friday! If there have been any posts or puzzle-centric stories featured here that you’d like us to follow up on, let us know! It could be the subject of next week’s Follow-Up Friday post!

Pints and Puzzles

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If you’re a habitual crossword solver or a puzzle enthusiast in general, odds are you’ve got a good head for trivia.

Many of the puzzlers I know are vast storehouses of information, cobbled together in an incomprehensible mishmash of disorganized, dusty filing cabinets, containing endless wonder and factoids galore. They might not be the tidiest minds, but they’re invariably the most interesting.

And whether you exercise your voluminous knowledge with games like Trivial Pursuit, puzzles like crosswords, or online trivia associations like Learned League, you should know of yet another avenue to explore to satisfy your thirst for random facts and obscurities: the pub quiz.

Pub quizzes and trivia nights have been around for a long time now. While I was on vacation in Alaska, I participated in two nights of pub trivia shenanigans courtesy of Geeks Who Drink, wherein I performed admirably and represented PuzzleNation with honor, dignity, and no small amount of self-congratulatory cheering.

But did you know that puzzles are also quickly becoming prime entertainment options at bars and pubs worldwide?

Oh yes! The folks behind Puzzled Pint are the best known purveyors of pub puzzles these days, offering first a location-based puzzle for solvers to unravel (in order to discover where the next puzzle event will occur), then more puzzles to enjoy when solvers arrive!

Now, puzzles and pubs are hardly strangers to one another. Local blacksmiths often tasked their apprentices with creating mechanical puzzles like the one above (known as disentanglement puzzles) because forging the intricate pieces was excellent practice of various blacksmithing skills. These puzzles often found their way into nearby taverns, becoming popular pub activities and challenges.

As it turns out, you can find puzzles anywhere these days. And there’s nothing trivial about that. =)

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 App Review: Puppy Sanctuary

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Welcome to our fourth edition of PuzzleNation App Reviews! Today we continue our quest to explore the world of puzzly games and apps for your tablet or smartphone!

Our resident App player and puzzle fiend Sherri has another intriguing game for us today, so without further ado, let’s dive into her review of Puppy Sanctuary for the iPad and iPhone!

If you enjoy cute and adorable puppies, then Puppy Sanctuary is the game for you. It is a match-3 iOS game (in the vein of Candy Crush) that is much more than a simple match-3 game.

Puppy Island has been invaded! Your mission, should you accept it, is to rescue the trapped puppies and keep them safe and happy in your sanctuary. This is an incredible game, seeming so simple yet surprisingly complex. It starts off as a match-3 game and morphs into something much more interactive.

You can play the game in a relaxed or timed mode. To rescue the puppies, you have to remove all of the red tiles from the game board by making matches of 3 or more tiles.

You can swap tiles in any direction, and you create power-ups when you make matches of 4 or more. The longer the match, the stronger the power-up. In these levels, your matches fill an energy meter that, once full, you use to blast a large chunk of tiles. Once the red tiles are gone, the puppy is rescued and placed in your sanctuary.

There is more to do in this game than just rescuing puppies. You have gem levels where you earn gems to spend in the sanctuary store and you earn special gifts. In these levels, you match the gems in groups of 3 or more in order to drop the gifts to the bottom of the board.

This game also has hidden object levels, where you earn food, water, and other stores for your puppies. You can also find hidden gems in these levels. Yet another level type is the bubble shooter. In these levels, you must stop an alien from creating a puppy trap. If you have a ball you can’t use, you can shoot the alien!

The levels get progressively more complex as you progress in the game, so the game boards don’t get stale. Also, once you have saved puppies, your saved puppies keep the trapped puppy company at the bottom of the board. You can even interact with the pups, and they will do tricks!

All that makes for a great game and I haven’t even gotten to the sanctuary part of the yet!

Once you have saved some puppies, they get placed in a sanctuary where it’s your goal to keep them happy. With the gems you accumulate, you can buy toys and decorations for them. The decorations get placed in the sanctuary, and you use the toys to interact with the pups. Tapping on each puppy will bring up its profile and heart meter. A full heart meter makes for a very happy puppy.

There is just so much to do in this game that I cannot see how one can get bored playing. The game map is awesome. Each variety of level has an icon, so you can see what level is coming, and each level provides a preview. There is just so much more to see and do with this game. I just cannot recommend this game more.

Ratings for Puppy Sanctuary:

  • Enjoyability: 5/5 — I loved this game. The puppies are absolutely adorable, and there are a good variety of game types.
  • How well puzzles are incorporated: 4/5 — With the variety of game styles and challenges, this is much more than a match-3 game.
  • Graphics: 4/5 — The puppies are distinctive and have their own personalities, and the game boards are eye-catching and interactive.
  • Gameplay: 5/5 — There is so much to do in this game and one shouldn’t get bored.

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!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Optical Illusion edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

For those new to PuzzleNation Blog, Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and update the PuzzleNation audience on how these projects are doing and what these people have been up to in the meantime.

And today, I’d like to follow up on the subject of optical illusions with a marvelous new example for you.

I’ve written about optical illusions on several occasions, because they’re wonderful visual puzzles that play with our perceptions in clever, unexpected ways. We either see two images in one, or an object floating in space, or we’re simply misled by careful use of angles and lighting.

The band OK Go released their latest music video this week for the song The Writing’s On the Wall, and the video beautifully utilizes numerous optical illusions to create a mind-bending visual experience.

Check it out:

And this is not the band’s first foray into puzzly music video creation, since they took part in an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine for their song This Too Shall Pass:

Here’s hoping they unleash more puzzle-infused fun in their next video.

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!