Here’s a clever idea: A calendar you have to solve each and every day. The puzzle consists of ten tiles, which can be flipped, rotated, and overlapped to reveal the current date. Granted, you have to know the correct date in order to solve the puzzle, which somewhat goes against the very idea of a calendar, but hey: It’s a fun puzzle you can solve again and again, and that’s better than a normal calendar any day, right?
Splice is an elegant, minimalist new puzzle game, created by Cipher Prime and available for the iPad and on Steam. Each level presents you with a small number of genes, which you must organize into a precise shape. (Actually, I am not sure if these are “genes” or “microbes” or what, but only “genes” lets me use the headline pun. So it shall be.) Genes can be moved around — spliced — as long as you follow a couple of very simple rules: You only get a certain number of splices on each level, and each gene can have no more than two other genes connected to it. That’s pretty much it.
Sounds straightforward enough, but it is not always easy to predict what will happen as a result of a given splice, and making those predictions is the key to solving advanced levels. Be prepared to restart certain puzzles a few times, especially as special genes are introduced, making things even more complicated: There are genes that will mutate into two new ones, other genes that will destroy themselves and anything connected to them, and so on.
The puzzles, of course, grow increasingly devious, but it’s hard to feel tense about it when the game is this beautiful. Each level is simply presented, on a spacy mono-color background and with a calming piano soundtrack. iPad games have of late been following several tired trends — I downloaded one recently that was an exact duplicate of something I played months ago, but with different art — so it is always nice when something truly original comes along. Splice is not only original; it’s delightful, brain-crunching fun as well.
And here I thought all those games were rigged.
BAPHL stands for the Boston Area Puzzle Hunt League, a group of folks who put together day-long puzzle events twice a year. Puzzle-loving types grab their friends, form teams, and collaborate to solve a wide variety of word and logic puzzles, racing to be the first to reach the finish line. (Or, alternatively, taking it casual and not caring if you win or not.) The latest BAPHL event is coming up on September 15. If you’re in Boston or thereabouts, and you read a blog called “PuzzleNation,” you should probably find a team and join the fun! The registration deadline is September 11. If you are interested in attending but can’t find a team, contact the BAPHLers and maybe something can be arranged.
Full disclosure: I’m one of the puzzle constructors for BAPHL 6.
Greetings, fellow puzzlers and enigma enthusiasts!
I’m attending a Nerd Potluck next weekend, and I could use your input.
Now, for the uninitiated, a Nerd Potluck is a party where everyone brings something suitably nerdy. It could be a game, a puzzle, a brain teaser, or something else that fits the nerd party aesthetic.
This is a natural extension of other parties my friends and I used to throw. We’re all gamers, RPG fans, and puzzle nerds.
No matter what the occasion — birthday, homecoming, reunion, Thursday — I can’t remember a party that didn’t include a few rounds of Mafia or a spirited game of the trivia/Truth-or-Dare hybrid my friend Dan invented, Who Wants to Eat a Millionnaire?
Last time we threw a Nerd Potluck, my contribution was a handful of Politos, jokey off-kilter summaries of movie plots.
(I based the idea on the writings of Rick Polito, a writer for the Marin Independent Journal in California, who is known for his sharp single-sentence summaries of films.)
Example: Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.
Answer: The Wizard of Oz
How great is that?! The answer is very. Very great.
So, I opted to come up with some of my own to challenge my fellow puzzle-loving movie buff pals. Here’s a sampling of them:
–A suicidal man has an intense hallucinatory psychotic episode, then is saved by a timely family-organized intervention.
–The minds and opinions of a group of prisoners are gradually changed by a charismatic knife-wielding stranger.
–An improperly supervised gang of miscreants, when left to their own devices, commit acts of trespassing, property damage, assault, consort with known criminals and pillage historical artifacts for their own gain.
–A group of friends scatters and licks their wounds after bullies wreck their secret snow fort.
(Feel free to leave guesses in the comments section. I’ll follow Eric’s example, and ask you for one answer per person. I’ll post the answers in the comment section later!)
It was a fairly popular exercise in outside-the-box thinking, but it feels a bit “been-there, done-that.”
This time around, I’m working on something new, more brain teaserish than anything else.
It’s not quite ready; I’m still ironing out a few kinks stylewise. (If I have the chance, I’ll post it here next week, a few days before the Nerd Potluck. I’m sure your input would be helpful.)
But a ladyfriend of mine will be attending, and she has a different challenge in mind.
She wants to make a puzzle-themed dessert.
Naturally, I suggested strawberry shortzcake, but she was considering tiramisudoku. (I know, a puzzle fan with a sweet tooth. She’s awesome.)
So, any suggestions for puzzly dishes? Cryptograham crackers could be fun, but who wants to do all that writing in icing?
Oh well, if not, no worries. I’m sure she’ll come up with something. (Hopefully I will too!)
But in the meantime, thanks for reading. Keep calm and puzzle on, gentle readers!
Back in the early 1990s, NYNEX Yellow Pages put together an ingenious series of television commercials. Each one took a heading out of the business section of the phone book, warped its meaning, and then turned that new meaning into a thirty-second sketch. The fun part for us puzzle lovers was in trying to figure out what the pun was going to be before the big reveal at the end.
I’ve found these commercials on YouTube. It’s a shame the name of each commercial is embedded in the filename, which means you’ll likely see the punch line before you have a chance to guess it. That doesn’t make the commercials less wonderful, though.
PuzzCulture 