Tag Archives: Geeking Out

A PuzzleNation First Look: Will Sudoku

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Sudoku puzzles haven’t been around all that long, especially when compared to the hundred-plus years of longevity that the crossword puzzle brings to the table. Nonetheless, Sudoku puzzles remain one of the most popular puzzles these days, whether solved with pen and paper or in app form.

I’ve written about some of the many Sudoku variants before, but today’s post is something different. It’s the debut of a brand-new type of Sudoku. That’s right! I have the distinct pleasure of introducing you to Will Sudoku, the creation of topnotch puzzler Bassey Godwin.

This is a standard Will Sudoku grid. (Not to be confused with the Will Shortz’s Sudoku magazine.)

Named in honor of puzzle master and New York Times Crossword editor Will Shortz, Will Sudoku offers a challenge that your average Sudoku puzzle cannot match.

Instead of placing the numbers 1-9 in a 9×9 grid so that each row, column, and 3×3 box features all nine numbers without repeats, Will Sudoku tasks you with filling in the grid in such a way that the numbers 1-8 appear only once in each of the rows and columns as well as the 4×4 boxes.

As you can see, each row and column is split into two tracks, inside and outside. Horizontal lines are indicated by the similar triangular cells in the corresponding boxes in a row. For instance, horizontal line 1 contains 45238761; horizontal line 2 contains 23816457, as shown above.

The vertical lines work the same way, with outside and inside tracks within each column. This tight arrangement means a LOT of information is available to a keen-eyed solver, but there are also more spots to place your numbers.

There are numerous variations included in this puzzle bundle:

  • Will Triangular Box Sudoku: Instead of 4×4 squares, the grid is divided into large triangles that contain all 8 numbers
  • Will Horizontal Bar Sudoku and Will Vertical Bar Sudoku: Instead of the 4×4 squares, the grid is divided into vertical or horizontal bars that contain all 8 numbers
  • Will Variable Boxes Sudoku: A mix of 4×4 squares, vertical and horizontal bars, and triangles appear in a single grid

In addition to these variations, Bassey experiments with the form and offers a few new twists on his established template.

  • Will Sudoku Word Search: Instead of the numbers 1-8, eight letters appear in a grid, and once you’ve finished placing them all, you search the grid Word Seek-style to find an 8-letter word reading out in some direction
  • Will Trigonal Sudoku: A Will Sudoku grid is divided diagonally, leaving you half a grid to solve. Cleverly enough, each of the three sides of the triangle also adhere to standard Will Sudoku rules, with all 8 digits appearing once each.
  • Finally, and most challengingly, there is Will Samurai Sudoku, where you confront five interconnected Will Sudoku grids in one monster puzzle.

This debut collection of Will Sudoku offers 150 puzzles for $10!

As a solver, I was very impressed with how many different solving styles emerged from the Will Sudoku template. And going from nine numbers to eight certainly didn’t decrease the puzzle’s difficulty! (The new inside and outside tracks in each column and row certainly took a little getting used to.)

The puzzles marked “average” will keep you on your toes, and some of the ones marked “tough” will really test your deduction and logic skills. But for the price, you simply can’t go wrong.

Thank you to Bassey Godwin for giving PuzzleNation Blog the exclusive first look at Will Sudoku and allowing us to share this clever new Sudoku variant with our fellow PuzzleNationers and the online puzzle community at large!

But before I go, I want to leave you with one last surprise: a video of Bassey himself solving a Sudoku puzzle blindfolded! It’s mind-blowing stuff, and the perfect sendoff for this post. Take it away, Bassey!

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A pickle of a puzzler!

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A little touch of absurdity never hurts when it comes to a good logic problem or brain teaser.

There’s the classic river-crossing puzzle (with either a fox, a goose, and a bag of beans and or a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage) that challenges you to get all three across without one eating one of the others, but it never explains why you have a wolf or a fox in the first place!

We never really question why we need to know the weights of castaways or why knowing the color of your hat might save your life; we just accept the parameters and forge onward.

Some brain teasers, curiously enough, seem intentionally nonsensical by design. Many claim that Lewis Carroll’s famous Alice in Wonderland riddle “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” was created without a solution. Of course, that hasn’t stopped many (myself included) from posing solutions to the riddle anyway.

And that brings us to today’s brain teaser — “Pickled Walnuts” by Hubert Phillips — which I discovered on io9.com:

You are given a series of statements which may seem to you more or less absurd. But, on the assumption that these statements are factually correct, what conclusion (if any) can be drawn?

1. Pickled walnuts are always provided at Professor Piltdown’s parties.
2. No animal that does not prefer Beethoven to Mozart ever takes a taxi in Bond Street
3. All armadillos can speak the Basque dialect.
4. No animal can be registered as a philatelist who does not carry a collapsible umbrella.
5. Any animal that can speak Basque is eligible for the Tintinnabulum Club.
6. Only animals that are registered philatelists are invited to Professor Piltdown’s parties.
7. All animals eligible for the Tintinnabulum Club prefer Mozart to Beethoven.
8. The only animals that enjoy pickled walnuts are those who get them at Professor Piltdown’s.
9. Only animals that take taxis in Bond Street carry collapsible umbrellas.

I will tell you, as a starter, that a conclusion CAN definitively be drawn from these statements. (Honestly, if there wasn’t some solution, I wouldn’t waste your time with it.)

So, what conclusion can be drawn from these statements?

…

…

…

…

…

…

Armadillos do not enjoy pickled walnuts!

How do I know this for sure? Allow me to walk you through my deductive process.

We know that all armadillos speak Basque, according to statement 3. Therefore, according to statement 5, armadillos are eligible for the Tintinnabulum Club.

Now, according to statement 7, armadillos prefer Mozart to Beethoven. But, in statement 2, we’re told that no animal that does not prefer Beethoven to Mozart ever takes a taxi in Bond Street, which means that armadillos do NOT take taxis in Bond Street.

Therefore, according to statement 9, armadillos do not carry collapsible umbrellas, which also disqualifies them from being registered as philatelists, according to statement 4. And since only registered philatelists are invited to Professor Piltdown’s parties (according to statement 6), armadillos are not invited to the Professor’s parties.

Finally, statement 8 tells us that the only animals that enjoy pickled walnuts are those who get them at Professor Piltdown’s, which means armadillos do not enjoy pickled walnuts!

Honestly, I didn’t find this brain teaser particularly difficult because you can find those middle links very quickly, and by linking more and more statements, you eventually find the two ends — armadillos and pickled walnuts — and your conclusion is waiting for you.

This would’ve been a more difficult puzzle if some red-herring statements were thrown in that didn’t connect to the rest, like “All squirrels on Beaumont Avenue have Tuesdays off” or “The birdbaths on Bond Street were designed by a German sculptor who enjoyed hot dogs.”

Nonetheless, this is a terrific exercise in finding order in what at first appears to be chaos. It’s what puzzlers do: we make sense of the universe, one puzzle at a time.

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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!