Tag Archives: DIY puzzling

Wait a Minute, Mr. Postman…

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With subscriptions to puzzle magazines like Will Shortz’s WordPlay and GAMES Magazine, as well as puzzle-by-mail services like The Uptown Puzzle Club and The Crosswords Club, there are plenty of ways to get puzzles by mail.

But one particular puzzler in the UK has put an intriguing twist on the idea of puzzles-by-mail: he’s challenged the carriers of the Royal Mail postal service to solve puzzles in order to deliver his mail.

A graphic designer by trade, James Addison was impressed by the diligence of the postmen of the Royal Mail, and he playfully decided to test their mettle with different challenges, including maps, word searches, pictograms, and other befuddling methods to conceal the intended destination of the letter.

From an article on The Telegraph website:

Although he enjoys solving puzzles himself, he said his hobby was fuelled by a desire partly to test the Royal Mail’s ingenuity and partly to honour old-fashioned letter-writing, following his mother’s advice that a handwritten thank-you note showed you had made an effort.

Well, Mr. Addison is certainly taking his mother’s words to heart. And it seems the postmen of the Royal Mail quite enjoy the spirited challenges his letters offer.

[To try your hand at solving some of Jim’s letters, including those pictured in this post, click here!]

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out our library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

On the hunt… for treasure!

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We’re well into summer, and you’re probably looking for great puzzly summer activities to share with the kids. And I have just the thing for you. Have you considered a treasure hunt? (And I’m not talking about spotting a chest at the bottom of your fish tank.)

You could organize one yourself! My friend told me a story about a treasure hunt her uncle masterminded for her and her siblings one year. He went out at low tide with a small chest of fake jewels (plus her mother’s actual pearl necklace, which she tossed in for fun), and buried it, prepared to bring the kids back a day or two later with a treasure map and let them “discover” it.

Naturally, a storm came through the next day, so they couldn’t dig it up. It was a few days before they could organize the treasure hunt, and when low tide came, the storm had so changed the landmarks and sandbars that they never found the treasure chest.

I don’t want to discourage you from embarking on your own treasure hunt adventures… just make sure it’s a place you have maximum control over.

Of course, you could always pursue one of the real-life treasure hunts lurking out there for the industrious amateur adventurer. We’ve written about a few of them in the past, but they’re hardly the only examples. For an aspiring Indiana Jones or lost member of the Goonies, real treasure awaits you.

One, surrounding a bronze statue of an owl, requires a trip to France, though. A man named Max Valentin buried it, and whomever unravels eleven clues and finds it can exchange it for a second statue valued at one million francs. (As long as you don’t get too overzealous and blow up a chapel in your quest to find it, as one amateur treasure hunter did.)

For one with an American twist, you could try to solve the mystery of the Beale ciphers. Three encrypted texts from the 1800s detail the location of a hidden cache of gold, silver, and jewels, and astonishingly enough, The Declaration of Independence is supposed to be the key to cracking the code!

While the ciphers and the story might be a hoax, you could still be the one to solve the mystery! (One group of treasure hunters stumbled upon Civil War artifacts while digging in the wrong place.)

Whether it’s a Dead Sea Scroll or the last missing treasure from a brilliant tie-in to a book, treasure could be yours this summer, even in your own backyard.

[Thanks to IO9 for inspiring this post.]

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out our library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Light and Sheep edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

For those new to PuzzleNation Blog, Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and update the PuzzleNation audience on how these projects are doing and what these people have been up to in the meantime.

And today, I thought I’d take a look back on classic video games that have found their way into the real world in curious ways.

Last week, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the puzzly video game beloved by so many, Tetris. And it was only after I posted our celebratory blog post that I realized I’d left out my favorite Tetris-themed video.

And Follow-Up Friday seems like the perfect opportunity to share it with my fellow puzzlers. So please, enjoy this video of skateboarders playing their own curious variation of Tetris while skating downhill:

Oh! That reminds me of another video-game-to-real-life translation I saw on the Internet a while back.

Did you know you can play video games with sheep? Oh yes! After some masterful choreography work, check out the work of these ingenious farmers:

And finally, I’m happy to present one of my all-time favorite Internet videos. It’s a stop-motion version of Space Invaders, played with real people in a movie theater. Need I say more?

These are not only incredibly intricate and well-executed bits of public theater; they’re a testament to what a puzzly mind can create with the time, the inclination, and a willingness to look a little bit silly. Sounds like a perfect combination to me.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

PuzzleNation Product Review: Schmovie

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Galactic Sneeze is a relative newcomer to the puzzle/board game scene — they describe themselves as a “fun stuff think tank,” rather than a company — but if their game Schmovie is any example, they definitely live up to that name.

Schmovie is the brainchild of Galactic Sneeze co-founders Bryan Wilson and Sara Farber. (Check out Sara’s session of 5 Questions here!) Schmovie challenges players to conjure up the funniest movie title for a given scenario, based on a roll of the die (to determine the genre of the film) and a card from each of two decks, the “who” deck and the “what” deck.

[So, in this case, we need a drama about a hypersensitive granny.
Can you come up with a better title than “Irritable Mrs. Howell Syndrome”?
My friend suggests “The Slow and the Furious.”]

Each round, one player is the Schmovie Producer. This person rolls the die and flips over the Who and What cards. Every other player writes down their movie titles on their erasable boards, and then turns them in to the Schmovie Producer face down. The Producer shuffles the boards to keep the players anonymous, then reads each title aloud. The Producer then chooses a favorite, and that player earns a Schquid Trophy.

The first player (or team) to earn 5 Schquids wins the game.

This is a terrific game for puzzlers, because creativity and wordplay are such a key component. (Considering how many crossword puzzle clues are puns or plays on words, a facility with groaners is something most puzzlers already have in their skill sets.)

You can write anything as your film title, whether it’s your own creation or a pun based on an established film — whatever gets a bigger laugh or best shows off your cleverness.

And you can even try out Schmovie from the comfort of your own phone or computer. There are frequent rounds of Schmovie played on Twitter and Facebook by the game’s creators, complete with electronic Schquid trophies!

With plenty of replayability and enough cards to keep your wordplay muscles in fighting trim for a long time to come, Schmovie is punderful fun for all.

[Glenn’s note: For anyone who has noticed the similarity between Schmovie’s play mechanic and the @midnight television show’s game #HashtagWars, it seems to be a happy accident that both emerged on the pop culture scene in late 2013. @midnight debuted in October, weeks after Schmovie started hitting stores.]

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Nice Round Number edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

For those new to PuzzleNation Blog, Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and update the PuzzleNation audience on how these projects are doing and what these people have been up to in the meantime.

And today marks my 200th blog post for the PuzzleNation Blog.

Now, two hundred of anything is a big number. That’s the average number of seeds in a strawberry, and the average number of lights on a Christmas tree. Two hundred miles a day was the average daily distance covered by the Pony Express.

It’s a landmark. You pass “Go” in Monopoly, you get $200. Not that many television shows made it to 200 episodes. (The Office and The Cosby Show each had 201 episodes, The X-Files 202.)

While I’m well behind Gunsmoke’s 635 or Law & Order’s 456, or the thousands of episodes attributed to soap operas, game shows, and talk shows, I still think it’s a pretty neat milestone.

And I’m grateful. Writing for PuzzleNation Blog has introduced me to all kinds of new puzzles and solving styles. I’ve had the opportunity to interview fascinating people both inside and outside the puzzle community, and I’ve explored how puzzles have influenced and participating in both important historical moments and the world of pop culture.

It has been both a blast and a privilege, and I look forward to celebrating many more milestones with you, my fellow puzzlers.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

Let’s get it (kick)started!

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The newest tool in the arsenal of big thinkers and big dreamers is crowdfunding, wherein creators take their ideas directly to the people in the hopes that a lot of small donations will add up into capital to make their ideas reality.

Websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have literally made dreams come true — heck, LeVar Burton’s Reading Rainbow Kickstarter just raised over a million dollars in ONE DAY — and it’s quickly becoming a key outlet for worthy puzzle projects. Some top-tier constructors are going straight to the fanbase with their puzzles, and with marvelous results. Constructors like Trip Payne, Eric Berlin, and Matt Gaffney have all had success on Kickstarter and Indiegogo with previous campaigns.

In the past, we’ve covered several crowdfunding campaigns, including Rachel Happen’s Baffledazzle puzzles, The Doubleclicks’ board game and pop culture-infused musical endeavors, and a company making board games and card games accessible to the visually challenged.

And I wanted to spread the world about some other puzzly endeavors that might interest the PuzzleNation readership.

The first is Peter Gordon’s Fireball Fortnightly News Crosswords.

Peter Gordon is known across the puzzle community for his Fireball Crosswords, a challenging brand of puzzle for ambitious solvers, as well as an easier weekly news-themed puzzle for The Week magazine. So now, he’s combined the two to create Fireball Fortnightly News Crosswords!

Every two weeks, you’ll receive a crossword by email that includes as many topical news-related items in the grid as possible. So you get your news and your crossword in one fell swoop. Not as difficult as his usual Fireball Crosswords, these puzzles will still let you flex your solving muscles twice a month.

With backer prizes like additional crossword books and the chance to create a puzzle with a master puzzler, Fireball Fortnightly News Crosswords might be right up your alley!

The second Kickstarter campaign features a puzzle app for Android devices.

Blackout is similar to Lights Out, Q*Bert, and other puzzle games where you must make every icon on the screen the same color, which becomes a tougher task to complete as the patterns grow more complicated and each click affects neighboring shapes.

The game will feature multiple levels of difficulty — including one where the icons change shape as well as color — ensuring it’ll keep you thinking and clicking for quite some time to come.

Finally, we have Block Party.

Block Party is a pattern-matching game featuring several shapes, colors, and patterns, and players must find parties — groupings of similar aspects or collections of each different aspect — without touching the blocks. The first player to shout “Party!” then reveals the grouping they’ve spotted, and the game continues.

Block Party combines visual reflexes, pattern-matching skills, memory retention, and spatial reasoning to create an immersive game that appears deceptively simple at the outset.

With backer rewards like a printable version of Block Party and limited-edition versions of the game, this campaign is ready to engage solvers of all ages.

The amazing thing about all of these projects is that the audience, the potential fans, have an enormous role to play not only in sharing their thoughts with game and puzzle creators, but in showing their support for designers and projects they believe in, and doing so in a meaningful way.

Here’s hoping each of these projects finds success.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!