It’s Follow-Up Friday: International Puzzle Day edition!

Posted on January 29, 2016 by gmdirect

Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

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 puzzly holidays!

[Let’s celebrate with some crossword cake!]

Today is International Puzzle Day (or National Puzzle Day, depending on who you ask), and we here at PuzzleNation couldn’t resist getting involved in the puzzly celebrations!

In fact, we went all out this year, building a puzzle fort from various puzzle magazines! Check it out!

And that’s just for starters. We’ve also assembled a new rundown of all the terrific puzzle apps and games PuzzleNation has to offer!

From the iOS and Android versions of the Penny Dell Crossword App (including new puzzle collections for both!) to our Classic Sudoku, Classic Word Search, and Bible Word Search apps, you can get all the details on our library of apps right here!

And to cap off the day’s festivities, we’ve collaborated with our pal Darcy over at Penny Dell Puzzles to concoct a little puzzly quiz for you!

Click here to find out What Kind of Puzzle Am I?, complete with links to share your results across social media!

So how are you celebrating International Puzzle Day? Are you kicking back with your favorite app or puzzle book? Meeting with friends to do a bit of tabletop gaming? Or maybe tackling an Escape the Room event and testing your puzzle mettle! Let us know in the comments!

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View a Clue: Crossword Animals

Posted on January 28, 2016 by gmdirect

Welcome to the third edition of PuzzleNation Blog’s newest feature: the View a Clue game!

I’ve selected ten animals that commonly show up in crossword grids — some have become crosswordese at this point — and I want to see if the PuzzleNation audience can identify them from pictures. It’s a visual puzzle I call View a Clue!

Without further ado, let’s give it a shot!

#1 (5 letters)

#2 (3 letters)

#3 (3 letters)

#4 (5 letters)

#5 (4 letters)

#6 (3 or 4 letters)

#7 (4 letters)

#8 (3 letters)

#9 (5 letters)

#10 (4 letters)

How many did you get? Let me know in the comments below! And if you have ideas for another View a Clue game, tell us below!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

Pizza puzzling!

Posted on January 19, 2016 by gmdirect

I ordered pizza the other night, and being a puzzly guy, I couldn’t help but find a puzzle hiding beneath the lid of that pizza box.

The pizza was cut into eight slices, as you’d expect, all of roughly equal size. And I started to wonder: what if you had more than eight people sharing one pizza?

The simple solution would be to cut those pieces down the middle into long, thin pieces. But were there other solutions out there, other shapes that would allow more people equal access to a shared pizza?

So I did a little research, and I stumbled upon this recent Gizmodo article, which discussed a mathematical paper titled “Infinite families of monohedral disk tilings.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely going to start calling pizza slices “monohedral disk tilings.”

Anyway, mathematicians had apparently tackled the pizza problem before, and they believe the solution rests with tessellation, the use of the same shape or symmetrical shapes repeated over and over to fill a given space.

When you think about symmetry and tessellation, you tend to think of straight lines.

But the amazing thing about these solutions to the pizza problem? They all abandon straight lines.

As you can see, there are numerous variations that work from this shield patterning. Since the shields are the same, dividing the shields up into equal parts in different forms yields other solutions.

And that use of arcs (curved lines) instead of straight lines makes patterns that would normally only work in squares, pentagons, and other shapes work for circles, like your friendly neighborhood pizza.

But there are more solutions for the pizza problem lurking out there if you abandon the three-sided piece and try more exotic shapes. Check out these patterns:

Granted, the average pizza slicer isn’t going to be dicing up a pie into 28 or 36 pieces… but it’s nice to know there are options out there, in case a few dozen friends stop by unexpectedly on pizza night.

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It’s Follow-Up Friday: Pixel Puzzle edition!

Posted on January 15, 2016 by gmdirect

Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

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 puzzle art!

I stumbled across this terrific art print from 30 Squared a while back, and I thought it would make a fun puzzly challenge for the PuzzleNation readership.

We’ve got twelve famous vehicles from movies and television, presented in pixelated form.

Can you identify the TV shows or movies that featured these iconic vehicles? Let’s put your pop culture knowledge to the test!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

PuzzleNation Looks Back at 2015!

Posted on December 29, 2015 by gmdirect

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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It’s Follow-Up Friday: December Wordplay edition!

Posted on December 25, 2015 by gmdirect

Welcome to Follow-Up Friday! And Merry Christmas!

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, we’re returning to the twin subjects of puns and wordplay!

As everyone on our PuzzleNation Facebook page knows, we post memes and puns twice a day every Wednesday in a celebration of linguistic playfulness we call Wordplay Wednesday.

On Wednesday, I shared a few holiday-themed images. But I had so many left over that I thought I’d share them with you today! Please enjoy!