It’s Christmas Day, fellow puzzlers, and it’s tradition around here to celebrate the holidays with a free puzzle to solve!
This year is no exception, as I’ve cooked up something festive and fun for you.
Our friends at Penny/Dell Puzzles have a puzzle called Wordfinder, and when I thought of it, I immediately had the idea to do a holiday-themed version of it.
Merry Christmas, friends. May the holidays be kind to you.
The answers to the clues are in the diagram in their corresponding rows across and down, but the letters are rearranged and mixed together. Each letter is used only once, so be sure to cross it out when you have used it. All the letters will be used. Solve ACROSS and DOWN together to determine the correct letter where there is a choice. The first letter of each word is shown outside the diagram and next to each clue. The first answer, TINSEL, has been filled in as an example.
We’ve got all sorts of crossword-related news, updates, and stories for you today! Buckle up, and let’s talk xwds!
The Globe and Mail’s Annual Giant Holiday Crossword
Every year, constructor Fraser Simpson creates a giant holiday crossword for Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. He has been doing so since 2003, so for many Canadian crossword and cryptic fans, this is a decades-long holiday tradition!
Not only is it enormous, but it’s visually striking, as he uses a cryptic-style grid, but American-style crossword cluing.
With 628 clues and entries, this puzzly behemoth will no doubt tax even the hardiest crossword enthusiasts!
And The Globe and Mail is offering a behind-the-scenes look at their constructing process, including an introduction to cluing styles for new solvers!
While it won’t be anything new to crossword enthusiasts or established constructors, it’s still cool that they’re willing to pull back the curtain on one of their biggest promotions of the year. Demystifying crosswords just means more people get to enjoy the puzzles we love so much. And that’s a very good thing.
ACPT, Boswords Winter Wondersolve, and Puzzmo’s Open Submission Week
Just a quick reminder of all the puzzly opportunities awaiting you at the end of this year and the start of 2026!
#1: Puzzmo is holding their next Crossword Open Submission Week from December 29th to January 5th, 2026, with new and established constructors all welcome to submit their puzzly creations.
Themed and themeless puzzles are welcome, as long as they fit Puzzmo’s specs, and the Puzzmo team has created an impressively thorough document to assist aspiring constructors with their efforts. Grid specs, examples of previously published puzzles, and more await anyone hoping to see their work pop up on Puzzmo.
This online only, four-puzzle tournament (3 themed puzzles and 1 themeless) kicks off another year of puzzly events from the Boswords team, and there’s plenty to enjoy.
They’ve already announced the team of constructors lined up for this year’s Winter Wondersolve: Adam Aaronson, Wendy L. Brandes, Pao Roy, and the team of Amanda Rafkin & Amie Walker!
Boswords never disappoints, so be sure to sign up early for this one!
Making a crossword for your partner is a wonderful gift, and I’m sure the significant others of many puzzlers have either commissioned a special crossword or taken the leap and constructed one themselves!
So it was delightful to read a story where BOTH partners had the same idea.
Yup, each of them had constructed a crossword for the other in secret, revealing their linguistic efforts at the same time.
How can you not love a story like that?
Even better is the top comment on Reddit, where this anecdote first appeared: “Your shared disregard for symmetry tells me you were meant for each other.”
Clearly it’s a match made in puzzle heaven.
What are you looking forward to in the world of puzzles for 2026, fellow solvers? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.
If you’re a puzzle and game enthusiast, there are many dates and events to look forward to each year. There’s Free RPG Day, National Tabletop Day, the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, and all sorts of tournaments and contests and reasons to gather.
But after Thanksgiving, as the holiday season arrives, there isn’t really a puzzly or game-fueled event that comes to mind. (Though the Boswords Winter Wondersolve is coming in February!)
That is, there isn’t an official puzzle or game holiday in December.
But in 2013, there was a holiday festivity that brought together the worlds of puzzles and games in truly delightful and chaotically creative fashion.
For 2013 marked the birth of the White Heffalump Gift Exchange.
A heffalump… according to Disney, anyway…
You’re probably familiar with the concept of the White Elephant gift exchange, wherein everyone supplies a gift, and then a game of keeping or swapping takes over, allowing people to take turns, develop friendly little rivalries, and generally enjoy a bit of holiday frivolity.
A White Heffalump gift exchange works the same way, but with one marvelous twist: every gift is imaginary.
That year, puzzle constructor and game designer Mike Selinker brought together more than 50 puzzlers, game designers, artists, and creators from all walks of life to participate in the first ever White Heffalump gift exchange.
Constructors like Eric Berlin, Brendan Emmett Quigley, and Debbie Manber Kupfer joined artists like Stan! and John Kovalic of Dork Tower fame. Game designers like Steve Jackson, Paul Peterson, Matt Forbeck, Elisa Teague, and James Ernest showed off their imaginary creations to other attendees like writer and RPG actual play icon Patrick Rothfuss and cookbook author / Geeky Hostess Tara Theoharis.
And the entire exchange took place on Twitter, so fans and friends alike could enjoy the madcap holiday cheer.
Just some of the amazing White Heffalump offerings from its inaugural year…
A pet squid, a pocket pet named Prudence that GRANTS WISHES, “time to play with toys”, a dapper platypus, and a 29-word crossword were among some of the other silly, impossible, imaginary gifts brought to the exchange.
And although we’ve never seen anything like it again — publicly, at least — there’s no doubt that this festive explosion of maniacal creative expression inspired others to organize their own White Heffalump exchanges.
How do I know this?
Well, because I’ve hosted one for fellow puzzlers for the last eight years now, and the array of ridiculous, delightful, impractical, and mind-bending gifts have been an absolute delight to see shared.
Bob Ross’s Happy Little Trees, complete and total dominion over the planet Pluto, a paid internship with Carmen Sandiego, the ability to harness the magic of unicorn farts (*unicorn not included), a puppy-summoning button, and Your Very Own “No Pickle” Person are just a few of the glorious gifts that have been bandied about over the years of our annual imaginary get-togethers.
It’s an absolute blast, a reason to gather (virtually OR in-person), and all it costs is a little time and imagination.
Given that puzzles and games all start with that — that elusive mote of inspiration, the spark that ignites a creative wildfire — nothing feels truer to both the spirit of the season and to the heart of gaming and puzzling than a bit of White Heffalump fun.
It certainly brightens my holiday season every year. Give it a shot and see if it stirs your soul as well.
Kryptos is one of the great remaining unsolved puzzles.
A flowing sculpture made of petrified wood and copper plating, sitting over a small pool of water. That’s what you see when you look at Kryptos.
It was revealed to the world in 1990, coded by former chairman of the CIA’s Cryptographic Center Edward Scheidt, and designed by artist Jim Sanborn. Designed to both challenge and honor the Central Intelligence Agency, for decades Kryptos has proven to be a top-flight brain teaser for codebreakers both professional and amateur.
Of the four distinct sections of the Kryptos puzzle, only three have been solved.
After a decade of silence, a computer scientist named Jim Gillogly announced in 1999 that he had cracked passages 1, 2, and 3 with computer assistance. The CIA then announced that one of their analysts, David Stein, had solved them the year before with pencil and paper. Then in 2013, a Freedom of Information Act request revealed an NSA team had cracked them back in 1993!
A curious game of one-upsmanship, to be sure. Something that foreshadowed what would follow years later…
Unfortunately for puzzle fans, K4 remained unsolved.
Eventually, Sanborn began offering hints. In 2006, he revealed that letters 64 through 69 in the passage, NYPVTT, decrypt to “Berlin.” In 2014, he revealed that letters 70 through 74, MZFPK, decrypt to “clock.” In 2020, he revealed that letters 26 through 34, QQPRNGKSS, decrypt to “northeast.”
On November 20th, 2025, the solution to Kryptos sold to an anonymous bidder for $962,500, far above the predicted $300,000 – $500,000 estimate from the auction house.
At the moment, we don’t know if this anonymous bidder will reveal the solution or become the new keeper of the mystery.
You might think that the story of Kryptos would conclude there, for the moment.
On September 3rd, not long after I wrote about the upcoming auction, Sanborn received an email with the solved text of K4 from Jarett Kobek and Richard Byrne. They had discovered the solution among Sanborn’s papers at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, after the auction house had mentioned the Smithsonian in their auction announcement.
Kobek and Byrne had discovered Sanborn’s accidental inclusion of the solution in the papers donated to the Smithsonian ten years ago during his treatment for metastatic cancer. “I was not sure how long I would be around and I hastily gathered all of my papers together” for the archives, he said.
Suddenly, the auction was in doubt.
Sanborn confirmed to Kobek and Byrne that they indeed had the correct solution. Later that day, he proposed they both sign non-disclosure agreements in exchange for a portion of the auction’s proceeds. They rejected the offer on the basis that it could make them party to fraud in the auction.
Sanborn reached out to the Smithsonian and got them to block access to his donated materials until the year 2075, to prevent others from following in Kobek and Byrne’s footsteps and further endangering the auction. Meanwhile, lawyers for RR Auction threatened Kobek and Byrne with legal action if they published the text.
Sadly, Kobek and Byrne had been put in an impossible position. They have the solution that diehard Kryptos fans have desired for decades, and the possibility of coercing them into revealing the solution is hardly low. Sanborn’s computer has been hacked repeatedly over the years, and he has been threatened by obsessive fans, even claiming he sleeps with a shotgun just in case.
The auction house did disclose the discovery of K4’s solution to the bidding public, as well as the lockdown of the Sanborn archive at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
All parties waited to see what would transpire.
Still, with all this uncertainty looming, the auction closed with its $900,000+ bid, and thus far, neither the anonymous bidder nor the team of Kobek and Byrne have released the solution.
Byrne and Kobek say they do not plan to release the solution. But they are also not inclined to sign a legally binding document promising not to do so.
I waited to write about this story in the hopes that something would have been resolved in the weeks following the auction’s conclusion. But sadly, K4’s solution — and Kobek and Byrne’s potential roles in revealing it — remain unknown at the time of publishing this post.
Despite all this, the fact remains: Kryptos fans haven’t cracked K4.
But they know of four possible sources to find the solution: the Smithsonian (which is locked down), the anonymous bidder (similarly inaccessible), Sanborn (who has been fending them off for decades) and sadly, Kobek and Byrne, who remain in the crosshairs of the media, lawyers, and Kryptos enthusiasts. The pressure is mounting.
Jim Sanborn, until recently the steward and keeper of the Kryptos solution…
I suppose the best case scenario would be for someone to legitimately crack K4 and release their solution AND method for solving it.
That would free Kobek and Byrne from their burden and potential legal repercussions. That would be the triumph hoped for when Kryptos was conceived. The auction’s validity would remain intact.
Because even if the plaintext solution is revealed and someone reverse-engineers how it was encrypted, it’s a damp squib of an ending. Kryptos wasn’t solved. It wasn’t figured out. It would be a disappointing way for a rollercoaster of story to wrap up.
Timing is a fascinating thing. You never know what will suddenly become relevant again, or how something from the past will reemerge with new context and impact later.
Now, Feast of Legends made a big splash in 2019, but it’s fair to say that six years later, it’s not as relevant in RPG circles as it once was.
However, it’s funny that I wrote about it just a few weeks ago, and now it seems like Burger King is suddenly getting in on the roleplaying game scene!
Yes, Burger King’s Quest is a playable supplement for Dungeons & Dragons, featuring the Burger King Kingdom as its setting, and resurrecting several characters from Burger King’s promotional efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to counter McDonalds’ McDonaldland and its characters.
You definitely know the Burger King, but do you remember Sir Shake-A-Lot, the Duke of Doubt, or The Wizard of Fries? I sure don’t! (Who knew that The Home of the Whopper was a real place, not just a slogan?!)
Well they’re getting new life in this RPG supplement, which was unveiled at Lucca Comics & Games as part of Milan Games Week.
Right now, the game is only in Italian, so we’re not sure if English-speaking roleplayers will get their own version in the future. But thankfully the hardworking crew at the Burger King WIKI have some details on the game for non-Italian readers.
I don’t speak Italian, but I did download the game’s PDF, naturally. The art is beautiful, and clearly a lot of work went into this promotional stunt.
But you can already see a rivalry brewing with the Feast of Legends loyalists in the RPG community. (After all, I only found out about Burger King’s Quest BECAUSE of the Feast of Legends subreddit!)
I reached out to the Burger King Public Relations team to try to learn more about the promotion and any plans for it to expand beyond Italy, but I haven’t heard back yet.
So, for now at least, this remains a roleplaying curiosity. But who knows what the future holds. Wendy’s, Arby’s, and now Burger King. The fast food/roleplaying crossover space is certainly heating up!
One government agency in England celebrates Christmas a little bit differently than most.
The GCHQ — or Government Communications Headquarters — provides security and intelligence services for the British government. Back when they were known as GC&CS — Government Code and Cypher School — they were responsible for funding Bletchley Park and its successes cracking the German “Enigma” code during World War II.
And now, they provide one of the coolest and puzzliest challenges of the year, designed for solvers aged eleven to eighteen to test their skills, hoping to inspire the next generation of puzzle solvers.
At GCHQ, we love creating puzzles and breaking codes. That’s why every year we create the GCHQ Christmas Challenge, a series of fiendish brainteasers and puzzles, designed by our very own team of codebreakers. It encourages children aged 11-18 to think laterally and work as a team, as well as showcasing some of the skills they might need to become a spy.
The puzzles are not designed to be solved alone, and each student will bring something different to the challenge. At GCHQ, we believe the right mix of minds enables us to solve seemingly impossible problems.
I’ve always been impressed with what festive puzzly efforts GCHQ brings each year, and I can’t wait to see what the 2025 edition has in store for solvers.
So, fellow puzzlers, do you accept this year’s Christmas Challenge? Let us know in the comments section below!
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