Tag Archives: games

It’s Follow-Up Friday: And a One And a Clue edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

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’m posting the results of our #PennyDellPuzzleBands hashtag game!

You may be familiar with the board game Schmovie, hashtag games on Twitter, or @midnight’s Hashtag Wars segment on Comedy Central.

For the last few months, we’ve been collaborating on puzzle-themed hashtag games with our pals at Penny Dell Puzzles, and this month’s hook was Penny Dell Puzzle Bands, mashing up Penny Dell puzzles and favorite bands or musicians!

Examples might be The Beat-the-Clock-les, Brick by Brick Astley, or Kris Krossword.

So, without further ado, check out what the puzzlers at PuzzleNation and Penny Dell Puzzles came up with!

The Rolling Stepping Stones / Stepping Stones Temple Pilots / Steppin’ Stones Wolf

Fill-In Collins (singing Su-Su-Sudoku) / Fill-In Sync

Spinwheel Doctors

The Who’s Calling? / The Guess Who’s Calling? / The Who’s Who

Radioheadings

Men at Framework

Kenkenny Rogers (or Loggins or G) / KenKen Chesney

Kenny Chess Words

Paul Simon Says / Simon Le Bon Says / Simon Says Garfunkel

Paul Simon and Art Garfield’s Word Seeks

ZZ Top to Bottom / Top to Soggy Bottom Boys

Zigzag Top / Jay Zig Zag / Zigzag Marley

Missing Persons List / Missing Persons Trios

Cryptogram Parsons / Patchwork QuotaGram Parsons

Letterboxes Zeppelin / Letterboxes to Cleo

Led Zeppelin and Around

Tina Turnabout / Tina Turn a Phrase / Tossing and Tina Turner

U2 of a Kind / U2 by Two / U2 for One

Three Doors Down of a Kind / 3 Doors Ups and Downs

Three Doors Across and Down / Across and Three Doors Down

Big Brother and the Three’s Company

Three from Nine Inch Nails

Third Bull’s-Eye Blind

Never Mind the Bull’s-Eye Spiral…Here Come the Sex Pistols!

The Four-Most Tops / The Four Tops to Bottom

Four Square Blondes / Tears Four Square

Gang of Foursomes

The Crackerjackson 5

The Jackson Fancy Fives / Maroon Fancy Five / The Fancy Dave Clark Fives

Black 47-Up

Seven Mary Three’s Company

The Jesus and Mary Chain Words

Alice in Chain Words

Square North of Nines

Thirteenth Floor Escalators

Mix and Matchbox Twenty / Match-Up Twenty

Talking Heads & Tails / Radioheads and Tails (singing Creepto-Families)

Florida Georgia Line ‘Em Up / End of the Florida Georgia Line

Drop-outs Kick Murphys

NickelThrowbacks

Wall Flower Powers / The Flower Power Kings

ColdWordPlay

ColdPlaces, Please / The Black Eyed Places Please

Jefferson Starspellship / Ringo Starrspell

Ringo Starr Words / Mazzy Star Words

Thompson Twin Crosswords

Pairs in LeAnn Rimes

Eric Clapboard

New Kids on the Blockbuilders / New Kids on the Crossblocks

Around the New Kids on the Block / New Kids Around the Block

ABBAcus (singing Take a Letter Chance On Me and Waterloose Tile)

Bobby Vee-Words

The Partridge Family Ties

Missing Fats Dominoes

Morris Day & the Rhyme Time

Right of Waylon Jennings

KC and the Sum-Doku band / K.C. and the Sunrays Band

Sunrays & Cher-A-Letter

Motley Crueptograms

Janis Joplinkwords

Alphaville Soup / Bowling for Alphabet Soup

The Smashing Pumpkin-Patchwords

Junior Walker & the All Stars and Arrows

Stars and Aerosmith

Sudoku & the Banshees

Sudokool & the Gang / Kool and the Changelings

Mirror Imagine Dragons

Kelly Picker-Upper

Blackout Sabbath

They Might Be Puzzler’s Giants

Sweet Honeycomb in the Rock

Busta Rhyme Time

A to Z Maze featuring Frankie Beverly / A to Jay-Z Maze

Beat the Strawberry Alarm Clock

Foreigner ‘n’ Aft

Metallicancelations

Frank Zip It

Patsy Cline ‘Em Up

Golden Earringmaster

Add One Direction

Jethro Full Circle / Jethro Tiles

The Point the Way Sisters

Santanagrams

Marcy Word Playground

Mariah Carey-Overs / Carry-Overs Underwood

The Black Keywords

Neil Diamond Mine / Nine of Neil Diamonds / Neil Diamond Rings

What’s Left Eye Lopes

Face to Faces / The Small Face to Faces

Split and Splice Girls

Word Player

Quotefall Out Boy

Word Mazey Gray

B-U-S METRO STATION

Simply Grand Funk Railroad!

“C” the Spice Girls and “C” the Beastie Boys

Little Mix at a Time

Anagram Magic! Square

The Associations

Fats Domino Theory

The Washington Jigsaw Squares

Linkwords Park

Stevie Ray Vaughn and Double Occupancy

Scoremaster Flash

ABeeGee’s

John Mayall’s Codebreakers

Nat King Collective Crossword

Dave Match-Up’s Band

Jane’s Letter Addition

Counting Cross Sums

Fleetwood Mac & Logic Problems / Flinkwords Mac

Crostics Stills & Nash

Maxi-Score Priest

Drummerman-heim Steamroller / Drummerman-fred Mann

A Trigons Called Quest

Sir Mixmaster-A-Lot

Weird Al Wacky Words Yankovic

Uncle Crackers

The Marshall Mind Tickler Band

Banana Word-A Rama

Ashford & Simpson Says

The CultureWords Club

Earth Wind and Fill-Ins

The Mamas and the Papas Grand Tour

Ringer’s Eleven

Public Double Trouble Enemy

Guns ‘n’ Rows Garden

Those bands would be sure to win plenty of AnaGrammy and QuotaGrammy Awards!

Our fellow puzzlers on Twitter also offered up some terrific entries themselves!

@EmilBurp was “torn between the obvious ‘A-Dell’ or the semi-obvious ‘Anacro-Styx'” — two very clever entries! And @_PaulSurf offered up several choice entries, including “Panic at the DisCodewords,” “ZZ Top Choice Sudoku,” and “CryptoGraham Parker and the Rumour.”

Have you come up with any Penny Dell Puzzle Bands of your own? Let us know! We’d love to see them!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

A brand-new puzzle set for the Penny Dell Crosswords app!

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Just in time for all the spooks, tricks, and treats for Halloween, we’re back with a new puzzle set for Penny Dell Crosswords App.

Yup, just weeks after launching Dell Collection Nine, our latest 150-puzzle pack, we’re excited to announce our newest downloadable content for the Penny Dell Crosswords app, the October Deluxe set, is now available through the App Store!

That’s right, it’s almost All Hallows Eve, and our October Deluxe set offers 35 terrific themed puzzles. Not only do you get 30 easy, medium, and hard puzzles, but there are 5 bonus puzzles you can unlock as you solve!

We are dedicated to providing PuzzleNationers with the best puzzle games on the market today, and with this new deluxe set of puzzles, we’ve continued that proud tradition. Terrific crosswords right in your pocket! What more could you ask for?

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

Well, that escalated quickly.

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I talk a lot in this blog about the role puzzles have played in history, in our culture, and as touchstones for particular individuals. But it’s far more rare for me to talk about one puzzle in particular that changed someone’s life.

Today, I have the privilege of doing precisely that, because a puzzle crafted by our friends at Penny Dell Puzzles has changed two lives for the better.

One day, a gentleman named Bryan reached out to Penny Dell Puzzles with an audacious proposition: his girlfriend is a big fan of their puzzles and he wanted their help in crafting a special puzzly proposal of marriage!

He supplied ideas for clues and entry words, and a topnotch editor accepted the challenge of crafting a page of Escalators puzzles specially tailored for the occasion.

(For the uninitiated, an Escalators puzzle involves clued entries where a 6-letter word loses a letter and anagrams into a 5-letter word, then loses another letter and is anagrammed into a 4-letter word. Those lost letters end up spelling out words and phrases reading down when each grid is complete.)

So this singular puzzle featured his girlfriend’s name, then his name, and then the fateful question: will you marry me?

And to really cap off the presentation, the puzzle was inserted into an actual puzzle magazine (in a special limited run at the printers), so that our hero could deftly guide her toward the puzzle with her being none the wiser.

It’s an absolutely awesome idea, a testament to puzzly ingenuity, and honestly, just about the cutest proposal story I’ve ever heard.

I’ll let Bryan take it from here, in an email to his fellow collaborators at Penny Dell Puzzles:

I wanted to let you know that I proposed to Erin today with the puzzle and she said yes! It went perfectly. The puzzle looked great in the book and Erin thought nothing of it, thinking it was just another Escalators puzzle.

Once we got about halfway through the puzzle and she saw my name, it became kind of obvious, and once I knew that she knew, I got down on one knee and popped the question.

She was so surprised and blown away she even forgot to say yes and was just asking how I made it happen! She did eventually say yes after a lot of hugging, kissing, and tears, and then we continued to solve the puzzle before making calls to the rest of our family and friends.

Congratulations to Bryan and Erin! I wish them nothing but the best on their journeys to come.

And kudos to our friends at Penny Dell Puzzles for truly going the extra mile for puzzle fans and romantics alike.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Puzzlesaurus Kickstarterus edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

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 in today’s post, I’m returning to the subject of puzzly crowdfunding campaigns!

I’ve covered various campaigns for board games, card games, and puzzle projects across the Kickstarter and Indiegogo crowdfunding platforms over the years, and today I’d like to share a few more that deserve your attention.

These are some of the cards for Scrimish, a card game so simple and elegant that I cannot believe I haven’t seen this game mechanic before.

Essentially, it’s a chess match with cards. You set up your five piles of cards face down in front of you, hiding a crown card in one of your piles. Then, you play cards against your opponent’s piles in the hopes of revealing his crown card. So strategy, rather than luck, is the name of the game here.

There’s only a day or two left in this campaign, and it’s already blown past its initial goal, so if you donate, at the very least, you’re guaranteed a copy or two of the game. (Sometimes, this is one of the advantages of jumping onto a Kickstarter bandwagon at the eleventh hour.)

Did you know that more dinosaur skeletons were discovered by just two scientists — Cope and Marsh — than by anyone else in history? And did you know that they got so competitive with one another that they actually began damaging dig sites and blowing up fossils in order to sabotage each other?

This ridiculous and amazing period in history is the source material for The Great Dinosaur Rush, a game where you attempt to build a complete dinosaur skeleton while stealthily (and sometimes, not-so-stealthily) combating your opponents’ efforts to do the same.

I’ve been waiting months for this Kickstarter to launch, ever since I first heard about the game, and now it’s well on its way to being funded. Why not take history into your own hands and mess with your friends and fellow scientists while you’re at it?

There are so many more I could cover, all with varying degrees of puzzliness. There’s the card game Master Thief (where you compete with fellow players to rob a museum), the magnetic jigsaw-style Enigma Orbs, a Cards Against Humanity-inspired bounty hunting card game called Skiptrace, and Covalence, a board game where you race to figure out molecular structures!

Heck, there’s even a collection of drinking glasses that link together (called, appropriately enough, Cupzzle)!

I highly recommend taking a little time to surf the puzzle and game pages of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, because you never know what terrific and unexpected products you might help bring to life.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

PuzzleNation Product Review: Retro Loonacy

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retroloonacy-box-3d

It has been a banner year for the folks at Looney Labs. They’ve already released Just Desserts, Fluxx Dice, Batman Fluxx, and Adventure Time Fluxx, all to excellent reviews, as well as announcing the upcoming Nature Fluxx (a redesign of their environmentally conscious Eco Fluxx) and Firefly Fluxx (for all the Browncoats in the puzzle/game audience).

But, somehow, that’s not all. They’ve also launched a companion game to their pattern-matching game Loonacy, which brings us to the subject of today’s product review. Let’s take a closer look at Retro Loonacy!

retroloon1

Retro Loonacy replaces the wacky, more cartoonish illustrations of the original with a more subdued assortment of images, evoking sentimental stirrings for trappings and technology of the past (Polaroid cameras, rocketships and rayguns from Golden Age science fiction films, etc.).

It almost feels like looking through one of those old issues of Popular Mechanics that purported to predict the future. Everything is hard angles and earth tones, carefully repackaged nostalgia given form.

Now, I am focusing quite a bit on the art instead of the gameplay, and there’s a reason for that. Unlike each new version of Fluxx, which seems to bring something new to the table — whether it’s a new type of card like the creeper or simply a few clever innovations in the rules tailored to that specific brand — Retro Loonacy is played exactly the same as Loonacy. You’re still trying to empty your hand of cards as quickly as possible by matching one of the two images on your card with one on the board. There are no new wrinkles or variations. This is a repackaging, plain and simple.

retroloon2

[Retro Loonacy side-by-side with the original Loonacy.]

And, quite honestly, it’s for the better. Retro Loonacy‘s artwork is charming in the extreme, and the game feels more suitable for adults than the bright, silly, madcap images you must match in Loonacy. It presents itself as a game for adults, even if the frenetic gameplay might appeal more to younger players.

The style and execution elevate Retro Loonacy above many contemporary card games, placing it in the same aesthetic upper echelon as 12 Days (which features the most beautiful cards I’ve ever seen in a card game) and some of the more ambitious decks of Pairs offered by our friends at Cheapass Games.

retroloon3

In short, Retro Loonacy is a strong pattern-matching game with oodles of style. Another terrific offering by the game masters at Looney Labs.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

View a Clue: Common Crossword Words!

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Welcome to a brand-new feature on PuzzleNation Blog: the View a Clue game!

I talk about crosswords a lot here, and rightfully so. Crosswords are the most famous pen-and-paper puzzles in the world, and here at PuzzleNation, you can always find terrific, fresh puzzle content for our Penny Dell Crosswords App!

And although I love running our daily Crossword Clue Challenge on Facebook and Twitter, I wanted to try something different today.

I’ve selected ten words that commonly show up in crossword grids — some crosswordese, some not — and I want to see if the PuzzleNation readership can identify them from pictures. It’s a visual puzzle I call View a Clue!

Let’s give it a shot!

#1 (4 letters)

#2 (4 letters)

#3 (4 letters)

#4 (4 letters)

#5 (4 letters)

#6 (4 letters)

#7 (3 letters)

#8 (4 letters)

#9 (4 letters)

#10 (4 letters)

How many did you get? Let me know in the comments below! And if you’d like to see another View a Clue game (maybe about common names in crosswords or crosswordy animals!), tell us below!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!