So, I was all set to write a blog post today about using your puzzling skills to win bar bets, employing simple tricks and brain-teasers to bamboozle your friends out of a few bucks.
I mentioned the idea to a buddy of mine, and he forwarded me the following video, which not only covers some of the same bets I’d planned to, but does so in video form!
And so, I gracefully bow out for today, leaving you the following visual ode to trickery. Enjoy.
Welcome to the first installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews!
All of the books discussed and/or reviewed in PNBR (PBR?) articles are either directly or indirectly related to the world of puzzling, and hopefully you’ll find something to tickle your literary fancy in this entry or the entries to come.
Let’s get started!
Our inaugural book review blog post features Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One.
Set in a world not too far in the future, Ready Player One introduces the OASIS, the next generation of videogaming and virtual interactivity. The OASIS allows you to go to school, escape from reality, and go on gaming quests, all from the comfort of home. The impoverished and generally frustrated Wade is just one of the OASIS’s many users, but his lack of funds keeps him from indulging in many of the more lavish adventures and activities available to others in the OASIS.
But things change when James Halliday, the co-creator of the OASIS, dies, leaving a challenge in his will for his fans and followers: find three keys hidden within the OASIS. Whomever finds these Easter Eggs will be granted total control of Halliday’s fortune AND company.
Wade and many of his fellow gamers know that finding the three keys might be the only way to avert a corporate attempt to monetize and economically subjugate the OASIS. Can Wade or one of his fellow gamers find the keys and save the OASIS?
Ready Player One is an outstanding debut novel, capturing the excitement and spirit of both RPGs and videogames, as well as the curious nature of Internet-bred friendships, all wrapped up in a terrifically fun adventure tale.
Both utopian and dystopian in spirit, Ready Player One is confident enough to invest time in the backstory of both Halliday and the world at large, giving the reader plenty of time to acclimate and become invested in Wade’s quest. I was quickly hooked by the intriguing world-building both inside and outside the OASIS.
But amidst the videogame trappings and ’80s pop culture references — cleverly employed as an obsession of the players, allowing them to feel vintage, rather than dated — there is an undeniable puzzly spirit at the heart of the novel: solving riddles.
Halliday leaves a riddle as the clue to unravel in order to locate the first key. Riddles continue to pop up, daring both the characters and the readers to find the solution. (Not only that, but the book itself offered a challenge for sharp-eyed readers, and one skilled puzzler won a DeLorean after solving the embedded puzzle.)
With plenty to keep puzzle fans, gamers, and pop culture aficionados engaged, Ready Player One is a terrific read. One of my favorites from the past year.
Well, I hope you enjoyed the first installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews, and I look forward to more book discussions in the future. In the meantime, keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you later.
The holiday season is upon us, and with Black Friday and Cyber Monday already making way for Thoroughly-Frustrated Shopper Thursday, I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer up some puzzly suggestions for holiday gifts.
As you might expect, I come from a puzzly family. So Christmas has always featured brain-teasing toys, 3-D puzzles, and whatever else parents and other relatives could find to keep us busy and baffled. My younger sister has passed this tradition on to the next generation with puzzle boxes for my nephews, ensuring that any holiday money is well earned by mid-afternoon.
Here are a few ideas for the puzzle lovers in your life.
For any Rubik’s Cube masters in your household, Eric suggests a marvelous variation with The Brain Cube. Instead of matching colors, you’re matching the geography of the brain, ensuring that each fold and wrinkle lines up with its neighbors. This is a real brain-teaser, available at Marbles — The Brain Store.
We’ve featured ThinkFun products on the blog before — most notably their puzzly day-to-day calendar — but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. They’ve got puzzle games and brain-teasers galore, suitable for all ages and levels of difficulty. (This hexagon one caught my eye while I was browsing.)
The folks at Hammacher Schlemmer offer all sorts of gadgetry and products, and two of them caught my eye as I perused their catalog for gift ideas.
The first was the maze bank pictured above, The Labyrinthine Piggy Bank. Any coins that fall off the track are safe and secure, but only someone with the patience and dexterity to navigate the ten feet of track within will be able to gain access!
The second piqued my interest as a lover of words and wordplay. It’s The Lexicographer’s Extended Scrabble game, a 21×21 grid with more tiles and squares than the original, allowing for more flexibility and more elaborate words. Perfect for the verbivore Scrabble enthusiast in your life.
If you’re looking for pen-and-paper puzzle goodness, our pals at PennyPress and Dell Magazines offer perfect stocking stuffers, as well as digest-sized and full-sized puzzle books. Whether it’s logic, crosswords, word seeks, fill-ins, sudoku, variety puzzles, or the Brain Boosters shown above, they’ve got you covered.
And, of course, you can’t go wrong with a one-year PuzzleNation gift subscription! With access to ten different puzzle games, as well as score tracking and two-player mode to solve with friends, hours of puzzle-solving fun await.
This is just a small sampling of the puzzle-wonderful delights available this holiday season, but hopefully these suggestions will help you trim down your shopping list this year. So good luck, keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you next time.
Yesterday Eric posted a link to a marvelous site called MazeLog, which features numerous puzzles that require a bit more brainpower than the average maze.
His post reminded me of a challenging maze puzzle I discovered last year in Ian Stewart’s deeply mathy and thoroughly engrossing book Cows in the Maze: And other mathematical explorations.
Basically, you have two starting points, and your first move can determine whether you complete the puzzle or not. All you have to do is follow the instructions, which sounds simple. Believe me, it isn’t.
“Where are the Cows?” (or “Cows in the Maze”) is impressive, to say the least, and I think it’s a worthy challenge for any dedicated puzzler. Enjoy!
(I know the image above is a little small. Click here for the full-sized version.)
MazeLog is a new Web site with original “logic mazes” — that is, mazes with some kind of tricky rule you need to follow. Sometimes the rule is as simple as following the direction of the arrow you’re standing on, or maybe you need to consider the ways various chess pieces can move. Calculation mazes require you to keep a running tally of the numbers you land on — it’s not enough to reach the finish line; you have to achieve a certain total as you do so. Once you’ve mastered enough of the mazes, move on to the monthly competition — solve a mighty tough maze and maybe win yourself a neat puzzly prize. There’s only four days left for the most recent contest, so get cracking!
PuzzCulture 