Tag Archives: DIY puzzling

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!

Think outside the house…

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[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!

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!

Zip your zipper the Rube Goldberg way!

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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:

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!