[A friendly reminder that not everything is available online.
Stickers (and the story of their creation) can be found here.]
Summer’s almost here, and although we all love puzzles (and we’ve been talking about apps a lot lately), I think it’s safe to admit that puzzles have always been something of an indoor activity. So what’s a parent to do when puzzle-loving kids don’t want to go outside?
Why, take the puzzles outside, of course!
Do your kids enjoy shapes? Why not create some large-scale tangram puzzles for them? All you’d need is a sheet or two of posterboard and a pair of scissors. There are numerous designs online that you could recreate (minus the lines that show how the pieces make each shape) and challenge your young solvers to mimic with their pieces!
You could even cut the posterboard into Tetris pieces and play a game of Tetris where each kid takes a turn placing a piece, trying to leave as few open spaces between pieces as possible. (Though you’d have to be a real magician to make complete lines disappear like in the game!)
Do your kids like trivia? Why not grab a few frisbees, a hula hoop or two, and create a mini-game show!
[Frisbee golf provides the perfect model for an easily improvised puzzle game.]
Different hula hoops could be different categories or difficulty levels (either prop them up or let them sit on the ground), and the kids could show off their athleticism AND their trivia knowledge in one fell swoop! (Replace the frisbees with beanbags or softballs or whatever you like. This is a game meant to be cobbled together from whatever’s on hand.)
And of course, there’s always the ultimate fusion of outdoor adventure and puzzly skills:
Scavenger hunts are great, because you can tailor them to your audience. Do your kids love puzzles? Make the clues as puzzly as possible, incorporating riddles and anagrams and wordplay galore. Do your kids like searching more than puzzling? Be creative in crafting the list of items to find.
Since the dawn of the modern era of mobile phone technology, a new variation on the scavenger hunt has emerged: the photo scavenger hunt. Instead of finding numerous items and bringing them back to a predetermined spot, you take pictures of various items (or provide photographic proof that you’ve completed certain activities or accomplished certain tasks) and bring your phone back as evidence.
Some companies, like our friends at The Great Urban Race, offer city-specific scavenger hunts for adults, replete with puzzles, physical challenges, and all kinds of outdoor fun. Their website is a treasure trove of ideas for your own adventures.
Actually, you know what? That sounds great. Forget the kids, I’m gonna go recruit some people and go scavenging!
A Rube Goldberg machine, for the uninitiated, is a device designed to accomplish a simple task in as many unnecessary, ludicrous steps as possible. The name comes, appropriately enough, from Rube Goldberg, a cartoonist and inventor most famous for his cartoons featuring singularly silly and elaborate machines like the one pictured above.
We’ve posted videos of Rube Goldberg machines in the past, because they’re a perfect example of a mechanical puzzle in action. Only when things happen in a precise order does the machine complete its task.
There are numerous competitions pitting clever puzzlers and inventors against each other to build the most spectacular and labyrinthine Rube Goldberg device, but Purdue University’s competition has become one of the most prominent.
(Note: they haven’t yet updated their website with the results of the 2014 competition.)
This year’s competition involved zipping up a zipper, and the winning team did something no other team has done before: they placed a person inside the machine and let it run.
Check out this video from Jimmy Kimmel Live, featuring the team and their winning Rube Goldberg machine. It’s pretty great:
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’m happy to update you on some of the Kickstarter accounts we’ve featured in recent weeks.
First, the Board Games: Now Blind Accessible Kickstarter — dedicated to modifying existing card games and board games to allow visually impaired people to play — wrapped up yesterday with great success.
In total, the campaign met its goal nearly three times over! (Over $20,000!)
I’ll be sure to keep you posted on further updates from 64 Oz. Games and this very worthy cause.
And second, one lucky solver will be getting a set of Baffledazzle Code Breakers puzzles, courtesy of Rachel Happen!
Hey, I was wondering if the puzzle you hid in the Puzzlenation interview has already been solved. If not, I think I have the answer!
Clues:
a “clever British spy” (female)
translating Polish sayings
French public transport
navigating into new waters
There was a woman of Polish nobility who worked as a spy for the British SOE during WWII, which combines the first two clues. She outwitted the German Gestapo on various occasions and even tricked a Gestapo officer into carrying her package of illicit documents into Poland by making him believe it was a bag of black-market tea for her mother.
(You could link French public transport to her as well: the most famous public transport system in France is the Métropolitain or subway, which is an underground network. She, as a spy, was also part of an underground network, and she also operated in France.)
Her whole life was a series of “navigating new waters”:
from Polish nobility to adventurous spy
she had a “varied” love life
She skiied into occupied Poland with British propaganda, so if snow counts as water, this would work 🙂
After the war, she worked as a cruise ship stewardess and literally navigated new waters.
So, is the answer to the hidden riddle Christine Granville? Or am I thinking in the wrong direction?
She was, in fact, correct, and will soon receive her very own set of Baffledazzle Code Breakers puzzles.
Here’s hoping Baffledazzle sees the same sort of wonderful success as the folks at Board Games: Now Blind Accessible.
Welcome to another edition of PuzzleNation Blog’s interview feature, 5 Questions!
We’re reaching out to puzzle constructors, video game writers and designers, board game creators, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and puzzle enthusiasts from all walks of life, talking to people who make puzzles and people who enjoy them in the hopes of exploring the puzzle community as a whole.
And I’m overjoyed to have Rachel Happen as our latest 5 Questions interviewee!
Rachel is the entrepreneur behind Baffledazzle, a Kickstarter campaign to create visually striking, challenging jigsaw puzzles for a new generation of savvy puzzlers. Baffledazzle originated as Tumblr and Twitter accounts that encouraged viewers to try different activities and explore Rachel’s unique brand of visual and mental puzzles.
As an avid puzzle solver herself, Rachel strives to turn every new puzzle into a learning exercise, making Baffledazzle puzzles an intriguing mixture of hands-on puzzling and solver-driven exploration.
Rachel was gracious enough to take some time out to talk to us, so without further ado, let’s get to the interview!
5 Questions for Rachel Happen
1.) How did you first get into puzzles?
Honestly, I can’t remember! I have always been really into puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles were my school-break staple for many years. I’d spend snowy days lying on the floor, sorting pieces by color. In fourth grade I had a math teacher that would give us those grid-based logic puzzles to fill time. I just devoured them. I solved them all and collected them in a binder. She had no idea what to think of me.
But my interest in puzzles really ramped up a couple of years ago when I stumbled on a 1960s-era Springbok and it knocked my socks off. They were doing things that pushed the jigsaw puzzle medium forward, visually and conceptually. I absolutely love exploration and challenges so finding both in a jigsaw puzzle was heaven.
I started buying up old Springboks and learned all about Par and Stave and the centuries-old tradition of beautiful wooden jigsaw puzzles. Then I read Anne Williams’ excellent book on jigsaw puzzle history and just thought, “I have to try making my own puzzles.”
[A glimpse at Code Breakers, one of Rachel’s puzzly designs.]
2.) Many of your creations, both on your YouTube channel and in your Kickstarter campaign, have both a puzzle aspect and a research aspect. Is it safe to say that your optimal solving experience goes beyond paper or puzzle pieces? What appeals most to you about that style of puzzling?
Ah, you put this so beautifully! Yes that’s exactly right. I want to use puzzles as a path, instead of making puzzles for puzzles’ sake. I aim to make puzzles that take you somewhere new, show you something you haven’t seen before. The solving experience I’m looking for is one of discovery.
I love that style of puzzling because one minute you’re quietly solving a puzzle and the next you’re combing through the history of public transit in France or plugging common Polish sayings into Google Translate, hot on the trail of the next clue. It pulls you away from your desk and pushes you out into the world. By making puzzles about real things (facts, people, moments in history, cultural traditions, etc.) I’ve tried to give solvers another way to engage with the world, another way to explore it.
I also love that there are no rules! They’re puzzles where you’re supposed to look up the answers on your phone. I wanted to make puzzles that acknowledged the omnipresence of information. I’ve tried to draw on that skill for searching by asking solvers to harness it and navigate into new waters, find new sources, and piece things together.
[In this video, Rachel discusses the Baffledazzle Kickstarter
campaign she launched earlier this month.]
3.) You mention in your Kickstarter video that you’re also a dancer and a clothing designer. How does the creative process for those activities compare to creating a BaffleDazzle video or puzzle?
Ooh, good question! I feel like the creative process is very similar because I’m hyper-focused on experience. Creation of any kind usually starts with an experience of my own. Maybe I saw something, learned something, or felt something that I thought was worth sharing. From there I think about how I can capture that experience in an object, activity, or performance.
For me, it’s not enough to just share the thing. Seeing a picture of that hilarious dog isn’t the same as walking around a street corner and just seeing it there. You don’t feel that same silly elation of encountering something bizarre out of nowhere. Similarly, reading a couple of sentences about a clever British spy isn’t the same as sliding a dusty book off the shelves of a deathly quiet library, flipping it open, and seeing her face, discovering her story like some forgotten treasure.
I do everything I can to capture that experience, then iterate and iterate and iterate! I credit my love of “let’s try it again!” to years of training in a ballet conservatory, where you can never practice too much.
When it starts to feel done, I take a step back and ask if I’ve made something that rewards people for their time. Have I captured the experience? Does this deliver something new? Will people walk away seeing the world a little differently? If the answer is yes then I push it out into the world!
[A few of the intricate pieces that make up the Baffledazzle puzzle
Cirkusu, which we’ll be reviewing on Tuesday!]
4.) What’s next for Rachel Happen and Baffledazzle?
More puzzles!! I have a big backlog of puzzle ideas that I’d love to create. Having my own laser cutter will make prototyping new puzzles much easier, so I’m putting 110% into this Kickstarter campaign to (hopefully!) fund that purchase.
Aside from puzzles, I’d like to explore other experiences that could be paths to discovery. We’ll see what sorts of shenanigans I can get up to with a laser cutter in the workshop!
5.) If you could give the readers, writers, entrepreneurs, and puzzle fans in the audience one piece of advice, what would it be?
See how many chips you can eat in a stack! But seriously, I would say: make things first, then worry if they’re any good. The only difference between someone with a business and someone with a good idea is that one of them acts like they know what they’re doing.
But wait! There’s more! Rachel has hidden a puzzle in this interview! The first person to provide the answer — either in a comment on this post or on one of Rachel’s social media platforms — will win a set of four Code Breakers puzzles!
(This offer is not contingent on the success of the campaign; she’s already produced these Code Breakers. And this puzzle never expires! If someone solves it years from now, she’ll still send them their prize.)
Many thanks to Rachel for her time. You can check out (and support) the Baffledazzle Kickstarter by clicking here, and be sure to check out Rachel’s other creative endeavors by following her on Facebook, Twitter (@Baffledazzle), and on her Tumblr page.
Welcome to another edition of PuzzleNation Blog’s interview feature, 5 Questions!
We’re reaching out to puzzle constructors, video game writers and designers, board game creators, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and puzzle enthusiasts from all walks of life, talking to people who make puzzles and people who enjoy them in the hopes of exploring the puzzle community as a whole.
And I’m overjoyed to have Rena Nathanson as our latest 5 Questions interviewee!
Rena Nathanson is the CEO (aka the Top Banana) of Bananagrams, a puzzle company built around family-friendly dice and tile games with anagram, pattern matching, and word building elements.
Bananagrams and its fellow puzzle games have won numerous awards and accolades from family groups, and the brand is in good hands with Rena at the helm, continuing to add new products to the Bananagrams puzzle family in the spirit and tradition of Bananagrams patriarch Abe Nathanson.
Rena was gracious enough to take some time out to talk to us, so without further ado, let’s get to the interview!
5 Questions for Rena Nathanson
1.) Bananagrams is a game designed by a family for families. Can you tell us a little bit about how Bananagrams came to be, and how the family dynamic contributes to the company as it stands today?
First and foremost, Bananagrams is a labor of love. As a family we loved playing games, especially word games, but we wanted something fast-paced that the whole family of varying ages could play together. At first we intended to create something just for us, but we showed it to a few friends and family, and everyone said, “You must share this with the world!”
My Dad (who was 75 at the time), myself, and my two kids, Aaron (then age 7) and Ava (then age 11) created the game. My mother, who was in theater and set design, created the pouch… we literally sewed the first few by hand. My Dad came up with the name, exclaiming: “This anagram game is driving me bananas!,” hence “Bananagrams.” We created Bananagrams as a family, for families (and friends!) to play together.
[The distinctive Bananagrams pouch, beside a game in progress]
2.) In addition to several English versions, you also have Bananagrams sets designed for other languages. How do you choose which languages get their own edition of Bananagrams, and are there any new editions forthcoming?
Bananagrams is currently available in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Norwegian and Hebrew. Swedish and Icelandic are in production. Our criteria for producing a foreign language edition is: do people want it!? If there is sufficient demand, we are happy to produce it.
3.) You’ve got several variations on the letter-tile puzzle, including Appletters, PairsinPears, and Zip-It. Were these all created in-house, or were they pitched to you? How do you know when a game is right for the Bananagrams family?
We created all our games in-house. We developed Appletters and PairsinPears in response to fans looking for a Bananagrams-like game for a younger audience. As for Zip-It, our fans requested something that would capture the magic of Bananagrams, but that could be played in a more compact space.
All our games “travel well,” but Zip-It is the ultimate travel game. It takes up a lot less real estate than Bananagrams, so you can play it on a plane or airplane tray, and the scoring mechanism is on the pouch itself via zippers and numbers.
[A look at the extended Bananagrams puzzle family.]
4.) What’s next for Rena Nathanson and Bananagrams?
My goal is that every school and every household on earth has a set of Bananagrams. Global Domination! Nothing too lofty or anything! Ha!
But seriously… my father had many aspirations for Bananagrams, and there are many things I would like to see to fruition in honor of him. There is still a long way to go in building and strengthening his legacy.
5.) If you could give the readers, writers, aspiring game designers, and puzzle fans in the audience one piece of advice, what would it be?
If you have an idea, be passionate about it, don’t take no for an answer and be prepared for some very hard work! Also, know when to ask for help. None of us knows everything, and I wouldn’t be where I am today without all the support and help and advice from various people in all aspects of the industry, which I continue to receive gratefully to this day!
Many thanks to Rena for her time, as well as Bananagrams PR wizards Lesley Singleton and Judee Cohen for their time and assistance. Be sure to keep up on all things Bananagrams by checking out their website and following them on Twitter (@Bananagrams). I can’t wait to see what they come up with next!
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, and that’s as true for puzzle entrepreneurs as anyone else. Many 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.
And I wanted to spread the world about some other puzzly endeavors that might interest the PuzzleNation readership.
This marvelous musical duo has not only written songs about numerous nerdy subjects — board games, Dungeons & Dragons, and dinosaurs among them — but they’re also champions of self-expression and self-confidence, especially among the geek girl community. (Their song “Nothing to Prove” served as the buoyant soundtrack of a video decrying “fake geek girl” nonsense.)
Pairs, a card game for two to eight players, was just launched yesterday by the folks at Cheapass Games. A 5-minute card game where the goal is to NOT gain points, Pairs is designed to be easy to learn and easy to play.
[Click here to check out our session of 5 Questions with Cheapass Games president and game designer James Ernest.]
Apps and online games have also gotten into crowdfunding. There’s Colorino, a color-matching strategy app that would appeal to the Candy Crush crowd, as well as Puzzle Nuts 2. A sequel to the physics-based puzzle game Puzzle Nuts, Puzzle Nuts 2 challenges players to negotiate different contraptions and figure out how to transport all of their acorns from one end of the screen to the other. Fans of Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, and other mechanical-style puzzles could find plenty to enjoy here.
A master maze designer with several successful Kickstarter campaigns under his belt has already reached his primary goal, and is now striving to reach a major stretch goal. (Stretch goals are additional finish lines that creators can make available if their initial goal is met. Stretch goals often include more puzzles, finer artwork, additional game pieces, and other details that allow for a richer play experience.)
And then there’s Steam-Donkey, a card game where you try to attract visitors to your steampunk beachside resort. With ne’er-do-wells all around, it’s a game with emphasis on art and characters with a curiously distinct flair all its own.
High Heavens is a combination board game/card game/miniatures game that places the player in a battle between the gods. Right now, creator Ryan Lesser is on his second Kickstarter campaign, an expansion that will offer new gameplay options, miniatures, and characters to the original High Heavens set. (The original High Heavens was also funded through Kickstarter contributions.)
Sweet Escape is a platformer strategy app where you try to lead walking bits of candy to safety while dealing with all sorts of obstacles and threats inside a bizarre factory.
Finally, over on indiegogo, we have PuzzleFix, a photo jigsaw puzzle game actually encourages people to submit their own photographs to become new puzzles.
The amazing thing about all of these projects is that the audience, the potential fans, have an enormous role to play in not only sharing their thoughts with game and puzzle creators, but they can show their support for designers and projects they believe in, and do so in a meaningful way.
I’ve contributed to several of these campaigns with high hopes, and I can’t wait to see how they turn out.
PuzzCulture 