Tag Archives: About Us

Announcing a puzzly contest!

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Hello puzzlers and PuzzleNationers! It’s big announcement time!

That’s right, it’s a special bonus Friday post! In honor of the PuzzleNation Blog’s one-year anniversary, we’re announcing our first PuzzleNation Community Contest!

The idea is simple. Tell your friends about PuzzleNation, and have them join our blog readership, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter! And when they do, make sure they tell us YOU brought them to the PuzzleNation Community!

For example…

Ask your friends to “like” us on Facebook and then post this on our wall – “Thanks for recommending PuzzleNation, your name here.”

(We’ll be keeping track of our most enthusiastic PuzzleNation contestants through Facebook comments, Twitter replies, and blog notes.)

Why you ask? Well, we’re giving away a prize bundle of our Classic Word Search iBooks (all three volumes) to three puzzle fans: one for bringing in the most Twitter followers, one for bringing in the most Facebook fans, and one for bringing in the most blog readers!

It’s a great way to bring new eyes to PuzzleNation and expand the membership of the puzzle community!

And guess what? That’s not all! We’ll also be selecting a few names at random to receive one of our Classic Word Search iBooks as well! So if you’re shy about recruiting friends to PuzzleNation, there’s still a chance for you to receive a terrific prize!

We’ll be running our Community Contest for the next week, alongside our usual blog posts and daily Facebook content. Thank you so much for the enthusiasm and support, and we hope to see some new faces among our loyal puzzle fiends very soon!

Happy Birthday, PuzzleNation Blog!

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That’s right, my fellow puzzle fiends and PuzzleNationers! One year ago today, the very first PuzzleNation Blog post went live on WordPress, and we’re overjoyed to embark on a new year of sharing puzzly goodness of all sorts with you!

After 365 days, 170 posts, and hours and hours of discussing the best and brightest, the weirdest and most wonderful, the most fascinating aspects of the worldwide puzzle community, we’re still going strong and busier than ever!

With the recent launch of our Classic Word Search iBooks (Volumes one, two and three!), as well as our interview feature 5 Questions (new one coming Thursday! Check out the first two installments here and here!), we’ve been looking forward quite a bit lately.

So we thought we’d take this opportunity to look back and chronicle some of the awesome achievements that our homebase, PuzzleNation.com, has accomplished since its launch.

It started with seven games — Tanglewords, Classic Crossword, StarSpell, Classic Sudoku, Crossword Raiders, Classic Word Search, and Guessworks — later adding Diggin’ Words, Classic Fill-In, and Invisible Word Search to the roster of playable puzzle games.

(Stormy, Barkley, Copernicus, Sam, Veronica, Lorenzo, and Kana, the Diggin’ Words dogs, wish the PuzzleNation Blog a happy one-year anniversary!)

Looking back, it’s kind of amazing when you consider how many puzzles have been solved since the launch of PuzzleNation.com.

The top 3 PuzzleNation puzzle games solved the most times since launch are (#3) Invisible Word Search, (#2) Diggin’ Words, and (#1) Classic Word Search (with nearly twice as many solves as Diggin’ Words).

Those same 3 puzzle games were the top 3 puzzles solved in the last 2 months.

The top 3 puzzle games in the first 2 months of PN’s existence were Classic Word Search, Guessworks and Crossword Raiders.

(Classic Word Search… clearly a favorite among puzzlers, since it was the most popular puzzle both then AND now!)

(Also, ignore the little blue triangle at the top of the pyramid. That’s just a festive party hat.)

 Classic Word Search also had the biggest increase in solves since launch. Not double, not triple, but SIX TIMES as many Classic Word Search puzzles were solved in the last two months as there were in the first two months!

Another notable improver was Tanglewords, which doubled from about 1,000 solves in the first two months to about 2,300 in the last 2 months.

But each of those games means puzzle points collected by PuzzleNation users…

Which does make you wonder…

How many points have puzzlers collected since PuzzleNation.com launched?

As it turns out, a staggering amount:

Look at some of those totals! Over 31 million PuzzlePoints for Classic Sudoku! Over 63 million PuzzlePoints for Guessworks! And a mindboggling 770 million PuzzlePoints in Diggin’ Words! (No wonder those dogs always look so thirsty!)

As you can see, even the smallest sliver of the pie represents thousands and thousands of solves by PuzzleNation players!

All this adds up to over half a MILLION puzzles solved since launch!

And the PuzzleNation Blog is proud to be the voice of PuzzleNation and the place where you can find all things puzzly (and PuzzleNation-y) on the web!

Thank you for a terrific year, and here’s to many more good things to come! (Including a big announcement later this week, so stay tuned!)

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our Classic Word Search iBook (three volumes to choose from!), play 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!

Welcome to the new PuzzleNation.com blog!

Quote

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Game of Hounds and Jackals

Game of Hounds and Jackals.
Ancient Egypt’s answer to “Angry Birds.”

There’s never been a better time to be into puzzle games than right now.  There are thousands of them available online, on your mobile device, available for your XBOX, PlayStation or Wii…  No matter where you find yourself or what type of puzzle game you’re interested in, you can usually get your fix pretty much at any time and any way you want it.

But.

There are thousands of puzzle games out there.  The Apple’s iOS App Store sports over 13,500 games in the puzzle category and there may very well be 10 times that number online in the form of Flash and Facebook games.  And let’s face it… Maybe not all of them qualify for the “puzzle game” category, have the highest production qualities, or are even all that fun.

For the puzzle lover looking for something fun and challenging this is a puzzle in and of itself. How to cut through all the dross to find the gold?

That’s where our new blog comes in! As a new feature of PuzzleNation.com, our blog’s goal is to bring you relevant news, opinions, and reviews from the puzzle solver’s point of view to help you find what’s new and interesting in the world of puzzles.

In addition to upcoming topics such as “What the #&!% is a puzzle game, anyway?”, we’re really looking forward to discussing and analyzing some great (or perhaps not so great) puzzle games, new or classic, regardless of whether they’re the traditional word-style games like Diggin’ Words, Classic Word Search or Bookworm,  physics puzzlers like Where’s My Water or Cut the Rope or visual/logic puzzles such as a Myst or Machinarium.

So that’s what we’re doing here — and we’re just getting started.  We hope you like the idea and come along with us for the ride.  Check back often by subscribing to our Twitter Feed or Liking us on Facebook.  And always feel free to comment on our posts or let us know if there’s something you’ve seen in the puzzle world that you’d like us to write about!

The PuzzleNation crew!