Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.
And today, I’m returning to the subject of crossword contests!
Last month, I announced the latest crossword contest from the topnotch puzzlers at Barany and Friends. The contest, titled Eliminating the Competition, wrapped up on February 8, but the answer to the meta puzzle concealed within each grid was only revealed this week!
As it turns out, the crafty cruciverbalists paid tribute to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament by dropping the letters A, C, P, and T from the theme entries in the grid! Not only that, but there were no As, Cs, Ps, or Ts to be found anywhere else in the puzzle grid! Diabolical!
Open division puzzle theme answers:
They are left over after division: REMINDERS (“Remainders” with the A eliminated)
Lack of affection, say: HILLINESS (“Chilliness” with the C eliminated)
A cylindrical utensil used to flatten dough: ROLLING IN (“Rolling pin” with the P eliminated)
They’re often found in churches or on campuses: BELL OWERS (“Bell towers” with the T eliminated)
They also hid the reveal, MHU, in the lower right corner. (Fiendishly, MHU is MATCHUP with A, C, P, and T eliminated!)
You can check out the full details of the meta puzzle here, including the theme answers for both the Open Division puzzle and the Master Division puzzle, which was a doozy!
But there’s more! They’ve also announced the prizes for the winners, which include paid registrations to the ACPT, puzzle e-books, crossword subscriptions, autographed puzzle books, and specialized crossword puzzles with the winner’s name built into the grid!
They’ve truly gone all out this year to make the Eliminating the Competition contest something special. Kudos to George Barany, Ralph Bunker, John Child, Michael Hanko, and Roy Leban for creating a terrific challenge and a puzzly feast for solvers.
Did you accept the Barany and Friends challenge this year, fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers? Let us know if you did! We’d love to hear from you!
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As you can see, there are clues across three sides of the hexagonal grid: the across clues, the down-to-the-left clues, and the up-to-the-left clues.
But these clues are unlike anything I’ve seen before.
It turns out that these are regexps, or regular expressions, sequences of characters and symbols that represent search commands in computer science.
Now, anyone who has used graphing features in Excel or crossword-solving aids on websites like XWordInfo, Crossword Tracker, or OneLook is probably familiar with simple versions of regexp. For instance, if you search C?S?B?, you’ll probably end up with CASABA as the likely top answer.
Of course, the ones in this puzzle are far more complicated, but the overlapping clues in three directions make this something of a logic puzzle as well, since you’ll be able to disregard certain answers because they won’t fit the other clues (as you do in crosswords with the across and down crossings in the grid).
But if, like me, you don’t know much about reading regexp, well then, you’ve got yourself a grid full of Naticks.
If anyone out there is savvy with regexp, let me know how taxing this puzzle is. Because, for me right now, it’s like doing a crossword in a foreign language.
But I’m not the only one who feels this way. When I first checked out the post on Gizmodo, they titled it “Can You Solve This Beautifully Nerdy Crossword Puzzle?” and I laughed out loud when the very first comment simply read “Nope.”
Glad to see I’m not alone here.
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One of the most amazing things about the world today is how interconnected we all are. The Internet has made it easily to not only keep in touch with far-flung friends, but to forge new, meaningful friendships and connections with staggering ease.
And I confess, I am a total sucker for those heartwarming clickbait videos that spread the message that we are all the same. (The one of that guy doing the same dance in countries across the world comes to mind.) So seeing people from all over the world solve a Rubik’s Cube one move at a time…what can I say? It got me.
Every year, one of my favorite activities is putting together our Holiday Puzzly Gift Guide. I get to include the best products sent to me for review by top puzzle and game companies, mix in some of my own favorites, and draw attention to terrific constructors, game designers, and friends of the blog, all in the hopes of introducing solvers (and families of solvers) to quality puzzles and games.
Talking about how puzzles are relevant to daily life is one of my favorite subjects for blog posts. Brain health, stress relief, the long-term benefits of puzzle solving…we’ve discussed all these topics and more during my time as lead blogger.
This year I continued that tradition with this post about how listening to music can make you a more effective solver. It’s always interesting for me to do some research and really delve into a topic — especially scientific ones because they’re often so drastically misreported or misinterpreted by mainstream outlets — and give the PuzzleNation audience the straight story.
One of the most bizarre moments of 2015 was when someone shoved their iPhone in my face and asked me what color a dress was. It wasn’t until a few moments later that I found out this was a big thing on the Internet that people were vociferously debating.
The chance to explain exactly what was going on in the photo through one of my favorite puzzly mediums — the optical illusion — was too much fun to resist, and it resulted in one of the year’s most popular, most shared blog posts.
Although it’s a highlight of the puzzly calendar every year, this year’s ACPT was extra special for me because it was the first I attended in person.
Not only did I get to meet a lot of top names in crosswords — in many cases, finally getting a chance to put names to faces after many emails and tweets exchanged — but I got to enjoy the Big Fight feel of seeing so many friends and puzzlers test their mettle against some great puzzles.
Our friends at Penny Dell Puzzles pulled off one heck of a puzzly coup when an intrepid fellow puzzler asked them for help proposing to his girlfriend with a special Escalators puzzle.
I reached out to the lucky fiancé and got his permission to share the story with the PuzzleNation readership, and as I learned more about who was involved and how they’d managed to make it happen, I just became more and more enamored with the story. I have no doubt that years from now, this will still be one of my favorite blog posts.
Guest bloggers are nothing new to PuzzleNation Blog, as Sherri regularly pops in with her app reviews, but Max Galpern pushed things to another level with his appearances throughout the year. Not only did he pioneer our first video review (with assistance from Fred), but he took over the blog for an entire day with his review of the Boston Festival of Indie Games.
Here’s hoping we can get Max back for 2016 a few times, though I suspect he’ll be in high demand.
We do a lot of reviews (board game and card game reviews, puzzle reviews, tournament reviews, app reviews, etc.) and I thoroughly enjoy introducing new puzzly products and events to my fellow PuzzleNationers and sharing my thoughts on them.
But it’s rare that we get the first shot at introducing a brand-new never-before-seen puzzle or product, and that’s what separates the Will Sudoku post from many others. Serving as the debut outlet for a new puzzle was great fun and very exciting, one of those rarities that made 2015 such a terrific year.
Brain teasers were a big part of 2015 for the blog, since several challenging ones went viral this year. But I don’t think any of them taxed my brain — both to solve AND to explain how to solve — like the island seesaw brain teaser from an episode of Fox’s sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine did.
It is an epic-length blog post — one I needed a mathematician friend of mine to help me write — but it broke down a tough puzzle bit-by-bit and explained every step. In a year of brain-melting puzzle posts, it still stands out.
I almost put announcing the Android release for the App here instead — because so many people had been asking about it for so long — but in the end, the free daily puzzle announcement won out, and not simply because it was a terrific new feature for the App, one that I feel would draw a lot of new eyes to the product.
Getting to interview Fred and talk about not just what we’ve been working on for years, but where we were headed in the future, made it feel like a special event for the PuzzleNation Team as a whole. Plus it was a chance to introduce all of you to another member of the team, something I hope to do more of in 2016.
It may sound self-serving or schlocky to talk about our flagship product as #1 in the countdown, but it’s something that we’re all extremely proud of, something that we’re constantly working to improve, because we want to make it the absolute best it can be for the PuzzleNation audience. That’s what you deserve.
Thanks for spending 2015 with us, through logic problems and love stories, through dresses and debuts, through Rubik’s Cubes and revelations. We’ll see you in 2016.
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The year is quickly coming to a close, and as I look back on an eventful year in the world of puzzles and games, I’m immensely proud of the contributions both PuzzleNation Blog and PuzzleNation made to the puzzle community as a whole.
Over the last year, we explored dice games and tile games, apps and pen-and-paper puzzles. We met designers, constructors, and creative types of all kinds. We cracked brain teasers and tackled mind-bending riddles.
We explored the history of puzzles, broadened our understanding of how puzzles and games contribute to brain health, and celebrated the lives of puzzle greats Bernice Gordon, Henry Hook, Merl Reagle, and Leslie Billig, who were taken from us too soon.
We spread the word about numerous worthwhile Kickstarters and Indiegogo campaigns, watching with glee as a puzzle/game renaissance continued to amaze and surprise us with innovative new ways to play and puzzle.
We celebrated International TableTop Day, the debut of The Indie 500 crossword tournament, a new Star Wars movie, the 80th anniversary of Monopoly, new world records set by Rubik’s Cube solvers, and a puzzly wedding proposal, and we were happy to share so many remarkable puzzly landmark moments with you. Heck, we even solved the mystery of The Dress!
It’s been both a pleasure and a privilege to explore the world of puzzles and games with you, my fellow puzzle lovers and PuzzleNationers. I recently posted my 450th blog post, and I’m even more excited to write for you now than I was when I started.
And that’s just the blog. PuzzleNation’s good fortune and accomplishments in 2015 went well beyond that.
In January, we launched the Penny Dell Bible Word Search for iPad, and in March we started our monthly hashtag games. In May, we added Penny Dell Jumbo Crosswords 2 for iOS devices, and July saw the debut of our Crossword Clue Challenge every weekday on Twitter and Facebook.
But the standout showpiece of our puzzle app library has been the Penny Dell Crossword App. With our Dell Collection puzzle sets, our monthly Deluxe puzzle sets, and the 2015 Deluxe Combo (not to mention our various value packs and supreme bundles), we maintained a steady stream of quality puzzle content for solvers and PuzzleNationers.
We added a free daily puzzle feature for all users, and just before Christmas, we launched the Penny Dell Crossword App for Android devices, ensuring that more puzzle lovers than ever have access to the best mobile crossword app on the market today.
[Fred, our Director of Digital Games, shows off the Penny Dell Crossword App
at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in March.]
And your response has been terrific! We amassed over 1500 followers for the blog and we’re closing in on 1700 followers of the PuzzleNation Facebook page, numbers that are both humbling and very encouraging.
2015 was our most productive, most exciting, and most creatively fulfilling year to date, and 2016 promises to be even brighter.
Thank you for your enthusiasm, your support, and your feedback, PuzzleNationers. Have a fantastic New Year. We’ll see you in 2016!
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This Saturday, August 8, marks the eighth annual Lollapuzzoola!
A puzzle tournament and beloved yearly tradition for top constructors and solvers, Lollapuzzoola is touted by its organizers as “the best tournament held in New York on a Saturday in August.”
The brainchild of Ryan Hecht and Brian Cimmet, this all-crossword puzzle tournament has a different unifying theme each year (last year was baseball, two years ago was birds) and is administered by the dynamic duo of Cimmet and Patrick Blindauer.
[Blindauer and Cimmet, ready to put your puzzly mettle to the test.]
But if you can’t make it to NYC this weekend, worry not! There’s an At-Home Division that will allow you to participate as if you were there! You’ll get your puzzles by email the day after the actual tournament for a very reasonable $10 fee!
By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.
And today, I’d like to return to the subject of crossword tournaments!
This has been a great year for crossword tournaments so far. The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament featured a new solving record — under 2 minutes for Puzzle #1! — as well as a nailbiter of a finale between Dan Feyer and Tyler Hinman.
Not only that, but the first Indie 500 tournament has now come and gone, and I’ve heard nothing but good things from competitors and organizers alike. (I’m looking forward to tackling the competition puzzles myself this weekend and seeing how I do!)
And constructor and friend of the blog George Barany informed me that another tournament looms quite close!
The Fourth Annual Minnesota Crossword Tournament is next weekend in St. Paul, Minnesota, and while the competition is open mostly to locals, there is a downloadable puzzle pack for stay-at-home solvers to enjoy!
Local tournaments like the Minnesota Crossword Tournament are not only great ways to meet fellow solvers and test your puzzle mettle, but they often also serve as fundraisers for good causes. For instance, proceeds from the Minnesota tournament will benefit The Friends of the St. Paul Public Library.
I’ll try to keep you apprised of any and all tournaments, my fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers, so you can participate, enjoy the company of other solvers, and contribute to the greater puzzle community as a whole. So be sure to let me know if a tournament is taking place near you! (And whether you’re competing!)
PuzzCulture 