Tag Archives: games

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Broadway Puzzles 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 #PennyDellBroadwayPuzzles hashtag game!

[Sir Ian McKellen, exhausted from coming up with puns all night.]

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’re been collaborating on puzzle-themed hashtag games with our pals at Penny/Dell Puzzles, and this month’s hook was Penny/Dell Broadway Puzzles!

Examples of shows might be “Oooooooooooooklahoma Runs!” and examples of songs might be “(I Am) Sixteen Going on Seven-Ups” or “Give and Take My Regards to Broadway.”

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

Shows!

Figgerits on the Roof / Fiddler’s Frame on the Roof (featuring the smash song Matchmaker)

Keep On Movin’ Out

Les MiséraBubbles

The Bookworms of Mormon / The Book of Bricks and Mortar

La Cage aux Fill-Ins

Lucky Starlight Express

Jesus Christ Superstarspell / Jesus Christ Superscore

The Mystery Word of Edwin Drood / The Mystery Person of Edwin Drood

A Chorus Line ‘em Up / Draw the Chorus Line / End of the Chorus Line / A Crostic Line

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Foursomes / Four(-um) Corners / Four Square

How to Succeed in Boxes Without Really Trying

A Little Puzzler Night Music

The Fan Words of the Opera / The Shadow of the Opera

Sunrays Boulevard

Oh! (Quote) Cal-cu(la)ta!

Hair-A-Letter

The Best Little Scoreboard in Texas / The Best Little “Score”house in T(ripl)ex-as

Annie-gram

Annie-gram Get Your Gun

Fill-Into the Woods / Drop-In to the Woods

Avenue (Q)uotagrams

Kiss Me, Kate-gories

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Timed Framework

Godspell(down) / Godspellbound / God Spell it out

Can-Can Cancellations

Les Miz(sing Vowels)

The WIZard Words

Wizard Words of Oz, featuring the song “Follow the Yellow Brick By Brick Road”

Bowl Mame

The Pajama Bowl Game

Cactus Flower Power

The 25th Annual Putnam County Starspelling Bee

Odds and Evens Couple by Neil Simon Says

The Merry Window Boxes

A Balancing Act of God

Kiss of the Spider’s Web

Drummerman of La Mancha

Songs!

“Ya Got Double Trouble” (The Music Man)

“Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Quick Quote” (Guys and Dolls)

“There’s a Places, Please for Us” (West Side Story)

“The Circle Sums of Life” (The Lion King)

“Dance: Ten, Looks: Three from Nine” / “Dance a Perfect Ten, Looks Three of a Kind” (A Chorus Line)

“I Don’t Need Anything But You Know the Odds” (Annie)

“Scoremaster of the House” (Les Miserables)

“Getting to Know You Know the Odds” (The King & I)

“Mamma Mia needs some Alphabet Soup!!” (Mamma Mia)

“Surrey with the Fringe On Top to Bottom” (Oklahoma!)

“Ease on Down the Crossroads” (The Wiz)

“Cell Blockbuilders Tango” (Chicago)

“I Don’t Know How To Solve This” (and I’ve solved so many puzzles before…) (Jesus Christ Superstar)

“No Places, Please Like London” (Sweeney Todd)

“No Good Deal” (Wicked)

“Grease Is the Codeword” (Grease)

“A Whole New Word Trails” (Aladdin)

“I’m Still Here & There” (Follies)

Some of our Twitter followers also got in on the fun, with @MicMcCracken tweeting “Les Misery Loves Company!”

And, naturally, it wouldn’t be a PuzzleNation game unless someone went above and beyond the call of duty. This time around, fellow PuzzleNationer Debra created a puzzly version of the opening stanza of “My Favorite Things”!

Crosswords and Word Seeks and Sudoku
Fill-Ins and Ken-Kens and Logic Problems too
Codewords and Crostics and Diamond Rings
These are a few of my favorite things!

All in all, the game was great fun!

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

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!

Letter rip! It’s lipogram time!

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[Building words and phrases, one letter at a time.]

This week I did something a little different in the preview for today’s blog. Usually on Mondays, I post a brief preview of the week’s blog posts, Facebook and Twitter content, et cetera.

But instead of a short teaser about the entry, I posted the following clue:

How quickly can you find out what is unusual about this paragraph? It looks so ordinary that you would think that nothing was wrong with it at all and, in fact, nothing is. But it is unusual. Why? If you study it and think about it you may find out, but I am not going to assist you in any way. You must do it without coaching. No doubt, if you work at it for long, it will dawn on you. Who knows? Go to work and try your skill. Par is about half an hour.

Did you figure out what’s curious about it? It’s missing the letter E!

[A keyboard displaying the most commonly used letters in the language in delightful bar-graph form. It should come as no surprise which letter appears most frequently.]

That paragraph is a terrific example of a lipogram, a written work that purposely avoids or leaves out a given letter. Lipograms are part writing challenge and part puzzle, taxing your vocabulary and your creativity.

(Removing any letter can make things tougher. I remember when my friend’s L key on his keyboard stopped working. “I think it will do well” became “I think it wi do we” until he started using the 1 key as a substitute L.)

And if you think writing a paragraph without the letter E is tough, imagine writing an entire novel without it. Ernest Vincent Wright did just that in 1939 with his 50,000 word novel Gadsby. He even went so far as to rephrase famous lines by William Congreve and John Keats in order to keep the letter E away.

Gadsby partially inspired a French author named Georges Perec to do the same, and his novel La Disparition (also known as A Void) doesn’t feature a single E over the course of three hundred pages.

There are numerous other lipogrammatic works and puzzles, but I think my favorite is the novel Ella Minnow Pea by author Mark Dunn.

Not only is the novel told through letters or notes shared by several characters, but the narrative grows increasingly lipogrammatic as the story progresses.

Check out this summary from Wikipedia:

The novel is set on the fictitious island of Nollop, off the coast of South Carolina, which is home to Nevin Nollop, the supposed creator of the well-known pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” This sentence is preserved on a memorial statue to its creator on the island and is taken very seriously by the government of the island.

Throughout the book, tiles containing the letters fall from the inscription beneath the statue, and as each one does, the island’s government bans the contained letter’s use from written or spoken communication. A penalty system is enforced for using the forbidden characters, with public censure for a first offense, lashing or stocks (violator’s choice) upon a second offense and banishment from the island nation upon the third.

So as the book progresses, fewer and fewer letters are used! It’s both an impressive linguistic feat and a wonderful work of totalitarian satire. (And how can you not love a character’s name sounding like LMNOP?)

[In a Christmas episode of the ’90s cartoon Animaniacs, Wakko keeps spelling Santa “Santla,” inspiring a rousing, punny version of “Noel” to correct Wakko’s spelling.]

Our friends at Penny/Dell Puzzles have a lipogram puzzle: Dittos. In Dittos, you’re given a series of letters, and then told to spell five common words using those letters AND a given letter. You can repeat the given letter as many times as necessary.

For example, if you were given the letters AAENRY and then told to make 2 five-letter words, using D as many times as necessary, you might come up with DREAD and DANDY.

But what about the flip side? What if you decided you were only going to use one vowel? Well then, my ambitious friend, you’ve accepted the challenge of creating a univocalic.

I’m not familiar with any longer works that are univocalic. You usually see them in paragraph form or, occasionally, palindrome form. “A man, a plan, a canal… Panama!” is probably the most famous univocalic in history.

(Univocalics are not to be confused with supervocalics, which are words that include all five vowels, like sequoia or abstemious.)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at a curious subset of puzzles and wordplay. One of my fellow puzzlers suggested I pursue lipograms as a follow-up to my post a little while back about single-letter puzzles, and I couldn’t resist.

Have you ever tried to write a lipogram or univocalic, PuzzleNationers? Let me know! I’d love to see them!

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!

A “Tolkien” Bit of Puzzly Wordplay

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[A simple rebus, courtesy of mentalfloss.com.]

We’ve explored lots of puzzles in the time I’ve been writing for PuzzleNation Blog. Sudoku, crosswords, riddles, logic problems, anagrams, brain teasers, all sorts of coded puzzles and cryptograms… the list is seemingly endless.

But in all that time, we haven’t really covered one of the most accessible, visual puzzles still popular today: the rebus.

In a rebus puzzle, pictures (often with single letters added or subtracted) represent words and phrases, spelling out a message hidden in plain sight.

For instance, in the above rebus, you have an urn, a nest, then a hem, some ink, and someone being weighed. Put it all together, and you get… Ernest Hemingway.

Anyone who watched the game show Concentration or the later edition Classic Concentration probably remembers the rebus puzzles that featured prominently in the show.

As the players randomly chose numbered tiles two at a time, they revealed various prizes beneath the tiles. If they managed to find a match — uncovering the same prize with both guesses on a given turn — they banked that prize. Those tiles then went away, revealing part of the rebus beneath. If a player solved the rebus, he or she won all of the prizes they matched earlier.

Although rebuses tend to be simpler than most other puzzles, the difficulty can depend on the cleverness of the puzzler creating it. After all, the celebrated author of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien, was known to create rebus letters in his youth and send them to family members and friends.

Can you unravel this message from the future creator of Middle-Earth?

If you’re stuck, I can break down the first line for you. You have the number 1000, an eye, a deer, several Y’s, an owl, the country of France with “Fr.” written on it, and a snake hissing.

1000 equals M in Roman numerals, so paired with the eye, you have “my.” Y’s is a soundalike for “wise.” The rest are pretty clear. So put them all together and you have “My dear wise owl Fr. Francis.” Tolkien was pretty clever even back then!

Unfortunately, this is only the front page of the rebus, so the solved message is incomplete. To see the back page, you need to look up the original letter in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. (And, sadly, the PuzzleNation Blog travel budget only covers trips to the diner and back.)

But, if you’d like to check out another Tolkien rebus puzzle, one written when he was 11 years old, click here!

As visual wordplay and puzzling in one of its purest forms, the rebus has been around for centuries, and with the advent of emojis in texting, I doubt they’re going away anytime soon.

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 App Review: Shuttle Shuffle

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Welcome to the another edition of PuzzleNation App Reviews! Today we continue our quest to explore the world of puzzly games and apps for your tablet or smartphone!

Our resident app player and puzzle fiend Sherri has a new game for us today, so let’s get down to business and dive into her review of Shuttle Shuffle for iPhone and Android!

Shuttle Shuffle is a game where the goal is to return stranded aliens to their spaceships, so they can go home.

Hello, humans, your goal is to help the aliens get back to their ships! They need to leave the planet at once. Won’t you please guide them?

This is really cute twist on a clear-the-board type game. Your goal is to clear the aliens from the board by matching them to spaceships of the same color as the aliens. To move them, simply touch an alien and move up, down, left, or right.

However, it isn’t quite that simple, as a column of aliens will move up or down together, and a row of aliens will move left or right together. This can make earning the medals and stars tricky.

There is also a social aspect to the game. When you earn medals, you have a choice of earning a tickets to challenge another player or a ticket to make your own board with which to challenge another player. This adds a nice twist to the game.

This is a really enjoyable game. For fans of this type of game, it is highly recommended. This will keep you puzzling for ages.

Ratings for Shuttle Shuffle:

  • Enjoyability: 3/5 — This is really fun and quite challenging! Trying to earn the medals and stars really takes thought.
  • Puzzle incorporation: 3/5 — In each level, you have to puzzle out how to get the aliens to their ships, each level with its own layout of aliens, which often provides a chain-solving challenge.
  • Graphics: 4/5 — Except for the blinking eyeball, the graphics are static, but they are very bright and colorful. You move the aliens along a standard grid, and the background of the first world, Terra, features clouds and spaceships launching.
  • Gameplay: 4/5 — This is a really cute twist on a clear-the-board game. The aliens are adorable, and the levels get increasingly more difficult, so you really have to think to earn the medals and stars. Plus, the social aspect of designing your own levels adds an extra dimension to the game.

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: Tournament 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’d like to return to the subject of crossword tournaments!

This has been a great year for crossword tournaments so far. The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament featured a new solving record — under 2 minutes for Puzzle #1! — as well as a nailbiter of a finale between Dan Feyer and Tyler Hinman.

Not only that, but the first Indie 500 tournament has now come and gone, and I’ve heard nothing but good things from competitors and organizers alike. (I’m looking forward to tackling the competition puzzles myself this weekend and seeing how I do!)

And constructor and friend of the blog George Barany informed me that another tournament looms quite close!

The Fourth Annual Minnesota Crossword Tournament is next weekend in St. Paul, Minnesota, and while the competition is open mostly to locals, there is a downloadable puzzle pack for stay-at-home solvers to enjoy!

Local tournaments like the Minnesota Crossword Tournament are not only great ways to meet fellow solvers and test your puzzle mettle, but they often also serve as fundraisers for good causes. For instance, proceeds from the Minnesota tournament will benefit The Friends of the St. Paul Public Library.

I’ll try to keep you apprised of any and all tournaments,  my fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers, so you can participate, enjoy the company of other solvers, and contribute to the greater puzzle community as a whole. So be sure to let me know if a tournament is taking place near you! (And whether you’re competing!)

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!

Puzzles in Pop Culture: The Big Bang Theory

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Puzzles in Pop Culture is all about chronicling those moments in TV, film, literature, art, and elsewhere in which puzzles play a key role. In previous installments, we’ve tackled everything from The West Wing, The Simpsons, and M*A*S*H, to MacGyver, Gilmore Girls, and various incarnations of Sherlock Holmes.

And in today’s edition, we’re delving into the world of The Big Bang Theory, CBS’s runaway hit about four nerdy scientists — Leonard, Sheldon, Howard, and Raj — bumbling their way through social interactions of all sorts.

Although the show covers all sorts of activities often deemed “nerdy” — roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, The Lord of the Rings, comic books, cosplay, conventions, obsessive fandom, etc. — they rarely play puzzles. Usually, the closest they get are board games and card games, whether real ones like 3-D chess or fictional ones like Mystic Warlords of Ka’a.

But in episode 3 of season 7, The Scavenger Vortex, the boys and their girlfriends embarked on one of my favorite puzzly pursuits: the scavenger hunt.

Here, hunt organizer Raj lays down the rules with plenty of style:

The teams end up being the odd couples of Leonard and Bernadette (Howard’s girlfriend), Sheldon and Penny (Leonard’s girlfriend), and Howard and Amy (Sheldon’s girlfriend), allowing some new pairings for the writers to have fun with.

For instance, we’re treated to this exchange between Howard and Amy, where Amy references her unpopularity growing up:

Howard Wolowitz: Wow, you’re really good at puzzles.
Amy Farrah Fowler: I did them all the time as a kid. As my mom used to say: when you’re doing a puzzle, it’s like having a thousand friends. She was full of fun lies like that.

The game starts with a jigsaw puzzle, which quickly reveals the location of the next clue: the comic book store. (Although Sheldon forces Penny to wait while he completes the entire puzzle.)

When the competitors arrive at the comic book store, a cardboard cutout of the Riddler holds their next clue.

Riddle me this:
Arrah, Arrah, and gather ’round,
this hero is legion-bound,
He multiplies N by the number of He,
and in this room the thing you’ll see.

Sheldon instantly solves the riddle, followed by Howard and Amy, then finally by Bernadette and Leonard, highlighting how well the three teams are working together. (Either Sheldon or Penny takes the lead, depending on the task, while Howard and Amy collaborate well, and overcompetitive Bernadette basically yells at Leonard the entire time.)

Arriving at the geology lab at the university, Penny and Sheldon reveal the next puzzle: To continue on your quest, leave no stone unturned.

While they turn over various rock samples in the lab, Sheldon explains how he solved the riddle.

Arrah pointed to Jan Arrah, a member of the DC Comics superhero team The Legion of Super-Heroes, who goes by the name Element Lad. This pointed Sheldon to the Periodic Table of Elements, where he multiplied the atomic number of N, Nitrogen (7) by the atomic number of He, Helium (2), getting 14, the atomic number of Silica, which pointed him to either the geology lab or the chemistry lab.

And the final line of the riddle — “and in this room, the thing you’ll see” — pointed toward the Marvel superhero The Thing, who is made entirely of rock.

As Sheldon is showing off his impressive riddle-cracking skills, underdog Penny actually solves the current puzzle, realizing that “no stone unturned” didn’t mean the samples in the lab. It meant the Rolling Stones poster hung on the door, which she lifts to reveal map coordinates.

This sends them to a bowling alley, and then to the disused elevator shaft in Leonard, Sheldon, and Penny’s apartment building. A montage mentions further puzzles at the planetarium and the tar pits (and plans to attend a Neil Diamond concert for new chums Howard and Amy), before ending up in the laundry room at Leonard, Sheldon, and Penny’s apartment building.

Three bags of laundry await the players, and they quickly realize each bag contains only pants, except for a single shirt of Sheldon’s. A shirt with a spot on it.

Fans of the show, of course, know where their final destination — and the coin — awaits them. But when they tear apart the couch, there’s no coin.

In the end, we discover the final clue was a red herring, and Raj had slipped gold coins into everyone’s pockets earlier in the day. (Which is some pretty impressive sleight-of-hand, I must say.)

And although Raj’s big lesson — it’s getting together and playing that’s important, not the prize at the end — is lost on his fellow castmates, it really does encapsulate the best in group puzzling and gaming… the experience.

Maybe The Big Bang Theory gets puzzles after all.

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!