Let’s get this puzzle (kick)started!

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The Internet has become the new frontier for innovation. The global marketplace is more open than ever, and with blogs, websites, and social media, virtually anyone with an idea can get the word out. From artists to inventors, entrepreneurs to aspiring businessmen, the Internet is as close to a level playing field as you’re ever likely to find.

The newest tool in the arsenal of big thinkers and big dreamers is crowdfunding, wherein creators take their ideas directly to the people in the hopes that a lot of small donations will add up into capital to make their ideas reality.

Websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have literally made dreams come true, and that’s as true for puzzle entrepreneurs as anyone else.

From a tangram game for your iPhone to the world’s biggest word search, from a X-shaped Rubik’s Cube variant to puzzly video games and short films, it seems like the puzzle community is as vocal in its support as it is generous.

And as I was browsing Kickstarter, I came across a few as-yet-unfunded projects that seemed interesting.

The first is a puzzle-based platformer game with a darkly artistic motif.

It’s called Monochroma, and it involves a pair of brothers solving numerous puzzles and overcoming obstacles as they explore a curious black-and-white cityscape. It’s heavy on atmosphere and suspense, and looks like great fun.

The second is an attempt to crowdfund a collection of cryptic crosswords made by some popular cryptic puzzlers (similar to successful efforts by Roy Leban, Trip Payne, and other puzzlers to fund their own puzzly endeavors). Cryptic crossword fans are a crafty and devoted fanbase, so I suspect this kickstarter will do well.

The third is an intriguing hybrid of books and board games, inspired by the legend of King Minos’s labyrinth from Greek mythology. Essentially, one player (or multiple players) tries to gain points and escape the maze that traverses every page of the book. Its one-and-done gameplay experience (there are no do-overs, apparently) might dissuade some donors, but the challenge could definitely entice some hardcore maze enthusiasts.

The last one is arguably the most ambitious, featuring a light-up life-size puzzle for attendees of the annual Burning Man festival.

Playuzzle is a grid of color-shifting polygons, and the challenge for players is to use strategically placed buttons and their own movements through the grid to make every polygon the same color. It’s like a life-size Q-Bert game!

With ideas as varied and interesting as these, the puzzle community can rest assured that we won’t run out of engaging puzzly challenges anytime soon.

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our Classic Word Search iBook, play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

5 Questions for Crossword Constructor Ian Livengood

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Welcome to the inaugural edition of PuzzleNation Blog’s newest feature, 5 Questions!

We’re reaching out to puzzle constructors, video game writers and designers, writers, filmmakers, 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 proud to have Ian Livengood as our first 5 Questions interviewee!

Ian has constructed puzzles for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, building a reputation as both a savvy constructor and a crafty cluesmith. He spends his days as a crossword editor for Penny Press, in addition to his extracurricular puzzle constructing. (And he even found time to contribute some terrific entries to two clue-centric PN blog posts earlier this year!)

So, without further ado, let’s get to it!

5 Questions for Ian Livengood

1. How did you get started with puzzles?

I started solving crosswords in high school as a way to pass the time. I was a pretty horrible solver at first, obviously, but stuck with it. I tried my hand at constructing a puzzle when I was 19 or 20 and the results were, uh, less than stellar. I think I used 82 words (78 is the limit in most outlets) with some suspect fill. I got the constructing “bug” again in my mid-20’s. I didn’t even know construction software existed — I was using Microsoft Excel and a crude wildcard search engine — but I eventually stumbled on some nice software and began to study exactly how puzzles were made. 

2. Who are three creative types that inspire you?

It’s tough to identify specific people, but I certainly respect certain types of puzzles. I really enjoy a smooth and easy Monday, a diabolically tricky Thursday-level puzzle and a tough themeless puzzle. I really admire “smooth fill.” These are the non-thematic entries in a puzzle that avoid “crosswordese” (entries you only encounter in crosswords) and that are fun and interesting to solve. Frankly, it’s really hard to pull off, and I recognize and respect the skill it took to create ’em.

3. What puzzly endeavors are you currently working on?

I teach a crossword construction class every Sunday in the Spring and Fall in New York City to a group of seniors. As a class, we go through the process of picking a puzzle theme, building a grid, filling the grid and writing the clues. The goal is to get the collaborative puzzle into the New York Times.

Also, I have a book coming out in Spring 2014 called “Sit and Solve Sports Crosswords” through Sterling Publications. As you might guess, the book has 42 easy-medium 10×10 sports-themed puzzles. Since I’m a sports nut, this was a really fun one to make. Available wherever books are sold.

4. You were recently interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation regarding your crossword construction class. What was that like, and how did that affect how you see yourself as a constructor?

Yeah, that was a lot of fun. A Canadian NPR producer was solving a recent Sunday New York Times puzzle that class made and thought it would be fun to interview the seniors that helped contribute to the puzzle. I can’t say my Q-rating has really spiked, but it’s always nice to get positive feedback from solvers.

5. If you had a million dollars and three Hawaiian islands, what would you do with them?

Well… since I’m a skier and not much of a beach guy, I’d sell the islands and just go heli-skiing everyday. That sounds pretty nice.

Many thanks to Ian Livengood for his time. Check out his ebook of 25 easy puzzles here, and keep your eyes peeled for his work in the New York Times (Monday’s puzzle is a Livengood original)!

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our Classic Word Search iBook, play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

Teasing your brain (and your job applicants)

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Did you ever have a job interview where someone posed a mental test or brain teaser?

These were all the rage a few years ago and I’ve heard plenty of stories from friends and acquaintances who applied for jobs only to find themselves wandering down tangential rabbit holes instead of presenting their credentials in the best light.

How many golf balls can fit in a school bus? How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle? Why are manhole covers round? How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

Google (among other companies) became notorious for this sort of on-the-spot cognitive analysis, but in an interview with The New York Times, senior vice president of people operations at Google Laszlo Bock admitted that these kinds of questions proved completely worthless as predictors of employee creativity or performance.

As a puzzle guy, I can appreciate the spirit behind asking these questions. When you present a seemingly unsolvable puzzle, you’re not really looking for the solution, you’re looking for the resourcefulness of the solver. When you present a brain teaser that demands great results with only two tries, you’re examining the interview’s insightfulness and efficiency.

The problem is… abstract problem-solving isn’t the same as actual problem-solving. I daresay the interview is the most stressful part of many jobs, so the pressure you endure sitting in the hot seat and trying to earn a job overshadows the pressure you’ll endure actually doing that job. After all, there’s not a yes-or-no implied after each question when you’ve got the job, but that uncertainty permeates the interview process.

But, Bock also explains how properly-framed questions about problem-solving can be more useful indicators:

Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.

I’ve never had to answer a brain teaser like the ones listed above, not even when I interviewed to be a puzzle guy. Of course, if you ask me how many golf balls can fit in a school bus, my first answer would probably be “more than I could ever need.” Plus I don’t do windows.

[Check out this io9 article for greater detail, including source links and list of former Google interview questions.]

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

Palindromic answers for all and sundry!

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As promised, here are the answers to Friday’s PuzzleNation live game, a.k.a. the Palindromes challenge! Thank you to everyone who gave it a shot. I look forward to doing another live puzzle game soon!

TWITTER

1.) Forgetful cats. (2 words)

Answer: Senile felines

2.) Love in the Italian capital. (2 words)

Answer: Amore, Roma

3.) First-person speaker favors a particular mathematical constant. (3 words)

Answer: I prefer pi.

4.) Instructions to hoist in conjunction with the speaker. (6 words)

Answer: Pull up if I pull up.

5.) A fencing challenge offered to a reluctant opponent. (3 words)

Answer: Draw, o coward!

6.) Young Mr. Hawthorne attacked a lama. (4 words)

Answer: Nate bit a Tibetan.

7.) Orders to retreat, given to one’s distant pixie. (5 words)

Answer: Flee to me, remote elf.

FACEBOOK

1.) Television premiere (2 words)

Answer: Tube debut.

2.) Young comic strip miscreant did wrong. (2 words)

Answer: Dennis sinned.

3.) Exclamation to grab the attention of the lad toting certain fruit. (3 words)

Answer: Yo, banana boy!

4.) Weather unsuitable for cheering or owl noise. (4 words)

Answer: Too hot to hoot.

5.) Question a Gotham City resident might ask after the caped crusader’s first appearance. (6 words)

Answer: Was it a bat I saw?

6.) Post’s indecorous citrus fruit (3 words)

Answer: Emily’s sassy lime.

7.) Show boredom in a manner akin to Caesar. (5 words)

Answer: Yawn a more Roman way.

And if there’s some kind of live game puzzle challenge you’d like to see, be sure to let us know! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

Give your brain a proper workout.

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Puzzle-solving has already been a terrific distraction, a solid way of challenging yourself, and an optimal timekiller, especially now that smartphones and tablets have made puzzle games more portable than ever. (Including our own just-announced Classic Word Search iBook!)

But puzzles can do more for you than just entertain and pass the time. More and more scientific studies are coming out every year that confirm just how important keeping the mind active and engaged can be for our long-term health.

Numerous studies state that cognitive function, memory recall, and general mental acuity can all be sustained (or even improved) by regular doses of puzzly goodness.

It’s with that in mind that the AARP has launched Brain Fitness, an online program targeted specifically for retirees, ambitiously offering to improve “Attention, Brain Speed, Memory, People Skills, and Intelligence.”

I played the free trials offered by Brain Fitness to explore them from a more puzzle-centric perspective. (More exercises are available with a subscription fee.)

The features available without a subscription include tests of your reaction time to visual stimuli, assessments of observational skill, and visual acuity, as I tracked multiple moving objects on a screen, reporting visual patterns with clicks of my mouse, and scanned for inconsistencies (essentially playing “Which of these things is not like the others?”).

While these are more mental exercises than puzzle games, they’re certainly challenging, and I found myself looking not only to test myself, but to better my performance in subsequent rounds.

It’s essentially a gym for your mind, offering different tasks to keep various skills sharp. It’s a valuable service, to be sure.

And I’m proud to say that a lot of those same mental challenges and exercises are fundamental parts of PuzzleNation‘s roster of puzzle games.

Diggin’ Words and StarSpell not only challenge reaction time and visual acuity, but focus as well, as you avoid distractions (the dogs and the spinning space station, respectively) while anagramming and manipulating the letters on the screen.

Tanglewords and Invisible Word Search encourage deductive reasoning and observational organization as you whittle down false paths and red herrings en route to completing each grid.

As a puzzler, I’m proud to count PuzzleNation as part of a growing network of resources for those who want to keep their wits sharp and their minds keen.

[Please note that I am making no promises about potential health benefits of our puzzles; I’m simply reporting on the results of certain studies regarding puzzles and brain health. The jury is definitely still out on this subject.]

For the latest updates on PuzzleNation news, you can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. And for news from all corners of the puzzle community, keep visiting our blog!

Big announcement time!

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Greetings, PuzzleNationers and puzzle enthusiasts!

We’ve been teasing this announcement for a while now, and we’re proud to say you’ll be among the first to hear the good news…

PuzzleNation is expanding to include iPad users! The first PuzzleNation iBook is now in the iBookstore — based on the Classic Word Search game you know and love — and we’re very excited to welcome iPad users into our puzzle-loving community.

Click here to check it out: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/puzzlenation-classic-word/id670993791?mt=11

(Please note, the iBook is only for iPad. It does not work on iPhone, iPod touch or Android devices.)

As puzzle fans ourselves, we’re overjoyed to be joining the mobile market this way and contributing to the puzzle community in general. It’s an exciting time here at PuzzleNation, and there’s so much more to come!

For the latest updates on PuzzleNation news, you can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. And for news from all corners of the puzzle community, keep visiting our blog!