That’s right, it’s a bonus blog post today because we’ve got some exciting news!
Our latest puzzle set for the Penny Dell Crosswords App just launched in the App Store, and it’s one of our best yet!
Say hello to Collection 11! Our first collection of 2016!
Collection 11 offers 150 puzzles for your solving pleasure!
Get the Value bundle, including all 150 puzzles at a special low price, or choose from 5 30-puzzle packs — Penny Press Easy, Penny Press Medium, Penny Press Hard, Dell Easy, and Dell Medium!
Five flavors of crosswords in one package! Start your year off right with some terrific puzzles! How can you go wrong?
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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!
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The best card games are simple. People love War and Poker and Hearts and Go Fish because, at their core, they’re games you can learn quickly and play endlessly. There are no long tutorials or play-throughs, so you can learn all the complexities and rules with ease.
It’s difficult to find puzzly card games that are as accessible and replayable. Scrimish, a card game created by Danny Zondervan and recently funded through Kickstarter, fits the bill nicely. The rules are simple, but the strategy in the actual game is what gives Scrimish major replay value.
[On a very festive battlefield, I’ve finished setting up my cards
(bottom of the frame), while my opponent is still working on hers.]
Scrimish is an elegant mix of War, Chess, and Memory.
Each player gets a set of 25 cards, arranging them into five piles of five cards each, face down. The goal? Find your opponent’s crown card before they find yours.
Then you take turns drawing a card from the top of one of your piles and attacking the top card of one of your opponent’s piles in a one-on-one battle. Here’s where the War aspects begin. You see, each card has a number value, and the higher number wins. The losing card is discarded, and the winning card goes back to whatever pile it came from.
So in every encounter, both players learn something, because even if you lost that attack, you’ve learned the value of one of the cards on top of one of your opponent’s piles.
That’s where the Memory aspect comes in, because you have to remember what cards of your opponent’s you’ve seen. (You can check your top cards or your piles as often as you and your opponent see fit.) Then you can plan other moves and try to uncover their crown card.
You’ve got shield cards to defend with, archer cards to attack with, numbered weapon cards to battle with, and one crown card to defend. So, essentially, you’re playing a miniature game of chess with your opponent, except your pieces are hidden from them.
And that’s what makes for such a satisfying playing experience. You’ve got all sorts of strategy going on, plus chances for misdirection in both your attacks and your placement of cards at the beginning of the game. Do you go out heavy with high numbered cards early, or do you test their defenses with low cards? Do you arrange attack stacks and defensive stacks, or do your spread your resources out across all five stacks?
Plus, every card you attack with is one less you have in your stacks. So you’ve got a resource management aspect as well. All of this gameplay and puzzly potential, with fewer cards than your standard poker deck.
It takes only a few minutes to learn, but all the thought that goes into it makes every game of Scrimishfeel fresh and new.
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Most of the time when I write about puzzles, I write about humans solving them, because we are, by a long shot, the biggest consumers of puzzles and games in the world.
But, from time to time, I learn about other species that also have a knack for solving puzzles, and I welcome them to the puzzle-solving community. In the past, we’ve talked about crows, cockatoos, and octopuses solving various mechanical puzzles.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. After all, one of my dogs has a knack for getting his tennis ball stuck in the strangest corners and beneath furniture that shouldn’t allow a tennis ball at all!
So I did a little research, and it turns out, there’s an entire puzzle-solving industry devoted entirely to dogs. They’re almost exclusively mechanical puzzles with food rewards, just like the puzzles we’ve seen birds and octopuses solve, but they involve the same sort of step-by-step chain puzzle-solving. And some of it gets pretty complicated!
There are one-step devices, like the Trixie Dog Activity Poker Box, which involves four boxes that open in different ways.
There are two-step devices, like the Jigsaw Glider, which requires the dog to open pieces on either side and then shift the center piece back and forth in order to nab every treat inside.
In a similar vein, there’s the Doggy Brain Train 2-in-1, a food-centric version of a sliding tile puzzle, where the dog must deduce that there’s food beneath each disk, and slide the disks aside to acquire the treats beneath.
And the puzzles only grow more complex from there. In the Dog Activity Gambling Tower, the dog has to pull away three floor pieces in order to make the treats drop, like a snacky version of Ker-Plunk.
Various companies produce each of these products. But the queen of puppy puzzles is clearly Nina Ottosson, who has a fleet of food-puzzle products to put your puppy to the test.
It’s the second difficulty level in a series of toys, where the dog has to rotate the center piece, push out one of the cones (with treats inside), rotate the piece again, and finally free the cone and the treats. That is a LOT of work for a few treats.
She also has ones where the dog has to remove one element to unlock a little drawer containing a treat. In this video, a dog named Amos solves the Dog Casino, a Nina Ottosson food-puzzle toy that uses this puzzle style:
We can officially add dogs to the elite puzzle-solving ranks of crows, cockatoos, octopuses, and humans, though I must admit, it’s a little embarrassing to realize that those other four species are all smart enough to do their own puzzle-solving for treats. No one ever gives me a treat for solving a puzzle.
Hmmm. Maybe they’re even smarter than we thought.
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The GCHQ — Government Communications Headquarters — provides security and intelligence services for the British government. Back when they were known as GC&CS — Government Code and Cypher School — they were responsible for funding the Bletchley Park successes cracking the German “Enigma” code during World War II.
And for Christmas this year, they’ve released a puzzly Christmas card that’s sure to challenge even the staunchest puzzlers.
Step 1 of the puzzle is a logic art puzzle where you have to deduce where to place black squares on an open grid in order to form a picture.
Each column and row has a series of numbers in it. These numbers represent runs of black squares in a row, so a 1 means there’s one black square followed by a blank square on either side and a 7 means 7 black squares together with a blank square on either side.
Once you’ve solved this puzzle, you can use it to unlock the next puzzle in the chain.
Once all stages have been unlocked and completed successfully, players are invited to submit their answer via a given GCHQ email address by 31 January 2016. The winner will then be drawn from all the successful entries and notified soon after.
Players are invited to make a donation to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, if they have enjoyed the puzzle.
This is one majorly challenging Christmas card. After you’ve conquered the logic art puzzle, you’ll confront brain teasers, palindromes, pattern-matching, deduction, number progressions, codebreaking, cryptic crossword-style cluing, and more.
I would highly recommend teaming up with another puzzle-minded friend (or more) and trying your luck. Let us know how far you get! (And you can hit up this article from the Telegraph for aid as well.)
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It’s the holiday season, a time for giving. So, what better way is there to celebrate the holidays than to link you to some great puzzles and give you a chance to keep your brain busy?
And while I’m recommending timely crosswords to solve, there’s also a terrific holiday-fueled crossword from constructor George Barany and friends titled “Giving T.Hanks for the Holidays!”
But if crosswords aren’t your puzzly cup of tea, how about a brain teaser?
Give me the next letter in this pattern: D, D, P, V, C, C, D, ?
I borrowed this puzzle from our Thursday post, but there’s nothing wrong with Christmas Eve coming a little early, is there? =)
Enjoy, fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers!
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