Tag Archives: DIY puzzling

“I have the solution,” Tom answered.

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As promised, here are the answers to Friday’s PuzzleNation live game, a.k.a. the Tom Swifties challenge! Thank you to everyone who gave it a shot. I look forward to doing another live puzzle game soon!

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1.) “This is all from memory,” Tom… wrote.

2.) “That just doesn’t add up,” said Tom… nonplussed.

3.) “There’s no need for silence,” Tom… allowed.

4.) “Little devils don’t always tell the truth,” Tom… implied.

5.) “You don’t see the point, do you?” asked Tom… stabbing in the dark.

6.) “No test throw,” thought Tom… triflingly.

7.) “The exit is right there,” Tom… pointed out.

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1.) “I can take photographs if I want to!” Tom… snapped.

2.) “That’s already been taken care of,” Tom… pretended.

3.) “She’s repeating an SOS message,” said Tom… remorsefully.

4.) “I only have diamonds, clubs and spades,” said Tom… heartlessly.

5.) “I’m covering the neighborhood with heavy cotton cloth,” said Tom… canvassing the area.

6.) “I’ve deduced that this is the right way,” said Tom… pathologically.

7.) “I have a split personality,” said Tom… being frank.

And if there’s some kind of live game puzzle challenge you’d like to see, be sure to let us know! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or contact us here!

Three posts, five rings, endless possibilities…

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I’ve always been a big fan of DIY puzzling. With seven nieces and nephews to keep engaged and entertained at family gatherings, I often find myself cobbling together new games and puzzles for them from whatever I can find around me.

(For instance, you’d be surprised how many board games are spiced up a bit by the addition of dinosaur figurines.)

So last weekend, I discovered my youngest nieces have three of those ring-stacking toys with the colored rings, the ones I think every kid has played with at some point or another.

And I realized I had all the tools necessary to whip up a challenge for the kids and adults alike… a Tower of Hanoi puzzle.

The Tower of Hanoi puzzle and its many variants look simple, but can be fiendishly puzzling. The rules are simple: move the stack of rings from the first post to the third. You move one ring at a time, and at no point can you place a larger ring atop a smaller ring.

(The standard puzzle is five rings, but variants can go as high as 10.)

I gave the adults first crack at it, and after laughing it off as childishly simple, it took them far longer than expected to solve the puzzle, especially in the later stages as you try to place the largest ring. There was plenty of pointing and strategy and “No, no, not there! THERE!”

The kids, on the other hand, worked together, and managed to solve the puzzle in about fifteen minutes, each taking turns moving colored rings here and there (and for my youngest niece, occasionally biting them, as you do). Their sense of accomplishment was a joy to watch, and each crowed to their parents about their victory.

As a placement puzzle, the Tower of Hanoi is much like a sudoku puzzle, a combination of strategy — where to place a number or a ring — and deduction — determining which moves you can’t make based on the information provided. It’s one of those universal puzzle-solving skills that will serve a puzzle fiend well for decades to come.

(To try the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, check out this online version I found.)

A hallmark of puzzles to come…

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Cleverness abounds in the puzzle community, both in those who create puzzles and those who solve them. But the advent of the Internet has truly raised the bar in what you can accomplish with a puzzly mindset and some serious ingenuity.

From Easter Eggs concealed in DVD menus (like the blooper reel hidden in the silver box DVD release of the original Star Wars trilogy) to viral marketing campaigns that conceal plot details and exclusive scenes for industrious fans (as Christopher Nolan’s Batman films frequently employed), there are delightful little entertainment nuggets secreted away in all sorts of media these days.

But only a select few of these hidden puzzles reach the level of complexity and elegance embodied by a series of puzzles lurking within the game Portal (which eventually unlocked details regarding the upcoming sequel).

Portal, itself widely regarded as a masterpiece of outside-the-box puzzle-solving wizardry and gameplay, demands a great deal from its players, so any hidden game designed for these players would have to be something special.

Adam Foster did a thorough and fascinating write-up on both the hidden puzzle game itself (known as the Portal ARG) and the process behind creating this dastardly electronic scavenger hunt, and you can read the full details here.

What’s particularly brilliant about this particular multitiered puzzle is that it incorporated rewards for both mid-level gamers — collecting all the radios in the game and locating where they received broadcasts — as well as the stunningly devoted fans who were willing to chase the puzzle farther down the rabbit hole, delving into top-tier decryption and deduction puzzle-solving.

This sort of chain-reaction puzzle-solving is becoming more and more commonplace. For a simpler example, you need go no further than PuzzleNation’s own Guessworks game. You start with a Hangman-style guessing and deduction game, which leads to clues to be solved, which then lead to a quotation to be unraveled.

As you build upon these earlier steps, you not only challenge yourself in new ways, but you develop multiple puzzle-conquering skills at once. Tackling a puzzle as wily as the Portal ARG is some serious mental exercise.

By pushing the boundaries of what form puzzles and games can take, people like Adam Foster are redefining and rejuvenating the puzzle-solving experience for a new generation of savvier solvers.

Puzzle News… comin’ at ya!

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PuzzleNation is just one part of a much greater puzzle community — our Diggin’ Words dog Copernicus up there is always surfing the Internet for puzzle news — so in today’s blog post, I’d like to turn the spotlight toward some of our fellow puzzlers.

First off, let’s give some hale and hearty congratulations to crossword puzzler Matt Gaffney, who recently celebrated his Weekly Crossword Contest’s five-year anniversary! (His metapuzzles are a real treat!)

In other crossword news, there are only three days left to pitch in on Peter Gordon’s kickstarter!

Infamous for the difficulty of his Fireball Crosswords, Gordon is looking to expand into a weekly series called Fireball Newsweekly Crosswords, which he promises will be timely, well-constructed, and challenging (but not demoralizingly so). Here’s hoping he meets his goal!

And finally, a magazine produced by our pals at PennyDellPuzzles made a surprising cameo in a recent Twitter post by comedian Bo Burnham. (Vine videos allow for quick loops of a few seconds, and they’re a recent addition to the arsenal of many celebrities and comedians on Twitter.)

If there’s anything puzzle-noteworthy going on in your neck of the Internet woods, please let us know so we can spread the word!

Not in so many words…

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A British reader and friend of the blog passed along this link to me this morning. It’s from the UK publication The Guardian, interviewing filmmaking Steve Simmons about his newest production, Crosswords.

The seven-minute short film takes us into the thoughts of a man puzzling out various crossword clues, even as he’s distracted by an attractive woman who shares his park bench.

Most of the clues are fairly straightforward instead of the more wordplay-based British cluing — “Not right (4)”, for example — but others could give you as much pause as the protagonist. (I admit, “The more you take, the more you leave behind (9)” had my gears turning.)

Seeing synonyms and red herrings pass before the solver’s eyes (and settling onto the screen) was a marvelous touch, reminiscent of some of the visual panache of BBC’s Sherlock.

The silent film style adds a touch of tongue-in-cheek flair and melodrama to the whole affair, making for a thoroughly enjoyable short.

Hmmm. Makes me wonder if PuzzleNation should get into the short film game. Exploring space with the intrepid crew of Starspell Command, or heading into dusty puzzle catacombs in search of treasure with the Crossword Raider…

On second thought, maybe I’ll leave it to pros like Simmons.

Check this out, mate.

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DIY puzzling is only limited by your imagination and inventiveness. After all, pencil and paper is all you need for most improvised puzzle games (hangman comes to mind, for instance).

But if you require a bit more inspiration for some down-home puzzling, look no further than a chess or checkerboard.

I’ve written about knight’s tours before, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to chess-based puzzles and brain-teasers.

You could challenge yourself with an Eight Queens puzzle. It sounds easy but it’s deceptively difficult. Place eight queens on a chessboard so that no queen is attacking (or capable of attacking) another.

This means that no queen shares a row, column, or diagonal with another queen.

There are only 12 distinct solutions, though each one can be rotated 90, 180, and 270 degrees, as well as mirrored on the board, leading to a much larger number of acceptable solutions. Numerous variations on this theme are available to test your wits and spacial reasoning, including placing 32 knights on the board without conflict, or nine queens and a pawn.

If that’s not your cup of tea, and you’ve got paper and scissors handy, you could whip up a quick game of pentominoes.

A pentominoes game consists of placing all of the above pieces into a given space without overlapping. You can play this on your own as a mental challenge, or add a bit of competition and strategy to it by alternating turns with other players and seeing who is the last person to place a piece on the board.

While you can use any size square or rectangle for your game board, a chessboard works well, especially since you can fit every piece on the board (leaving only a 2×2 space of uncovered squares). By setting or moving around this 2×2 space, you’ve instantly created a new challenge for yourself.

Personally, I’ve found them to be excellent palate cleansers after a few mentally-exhausting rounds of chess (though there are always variants on the game itself, like Pardu Ponnapalli’s TrimChess (image 2) and Jose Raul Capablanca’s expanded chess, if you’re looking for fresh ways to play.)

In any case, these are wonderful challenges with a minimum of set-up time, perfect for puzzlers looking for a new challenge without a lot of fuss. I hope you enjoy.