Tag Archives: Geeking Out

Word Mastery for the Holidays

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This has been floating around the Internet for years — I can remember my English teacher challenging us with it in my sophomore year of high school, back in the Mesozoic Era — but I can’t think of a more delightfully seasonal puzzle for the blog’s loyal solvers and verbivores.

See if you can figure out these reworded holiday song titles! Enjoy!

1.) Move hitherward the entire assembly of those who are loyal in their belief.

2.) Listen, the celestial messengers produce harmonious sounds.

3.) Proceed forth declaring upon a specific geological alpine formation.

4.) Nocturnal timespan of unbroken quietness.

5.) Embellish the interior passageways.

6.) An emotion excited by the acquisition or expectation of good given to the terrestial sphere.

7.) Twelve o’clock on a clement night witnessed its arrival.

8.) The Christmas preceding all others.

9.) Small municipality in Judea southeast of Jerusalem.

10.) In a distant location the existence of an improvised unit of newborn children’s slumber furnishings.

11.) Tintinnabulation of vacillating pendulums in inverted, metallic, resonant cups.

12.) The first person nominative plural of a triumvirate of far eastern heads of state.

13.) Geographic state of fantasy during the season of Mother Nature’s dormancy.

14.) In awe of the nocturnal timespan characterized by religiosity.

15.) Natal celebration devoid of color, rather albino, as an hallucinatory phenomenon for me.

16.) Expectation of arrival to populated areas by mythical, masculine perennial gift-giver.

17.) Obese personification fabricated of compressed mounds of frozen minute crystals.

18.) Tranquility upon the terrestial sphere.

19.) Omnipotent supreme being who elicits respite to ecstatic distinguished males.

20.) Diminutive masculine master of skin-covered percussionistic cylinders.

21.) Jovial Yuletide desired for the second person singular or plural by us.

PuzzleNation Book Review: Ready Player One

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Welcome to the first installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews!

All of the books discussed and/or reviewed in PNBR (PBR?) articles are either directly or indirectly related to the world of puzzling, and hopefully you’ll find something to tickle your literary fancy in this entry or the entries to come.

Let’s get started!

Our inaugural book review blog post features Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One.

Set in a world not too far in the future, Ready Player One introduces the OASIS, the next generation of videogaming and virtual interactivity. The OASIS allows you to go to school, escape from reality, and go on gaming quests, all from the comfort of home. The impoverished and generally frustrated Wade is just one of the OASIS’s many users, but his lack of funds keeps him from indulging in many of the more lavish adventures and activities available to others in the OASIS.

But things change when James Halliday, the co-creator of the OASIS, dies, leaving a challenge in his will for his fans and followers: find three keys hidden within the OASIS. Whomever finds these Easter Eggs will be granted total control of Halliday’s fortune AND company.

Wade and many of his fellow gamers know that finding the three keys might be the only way to avert a corporate attempt to monetize and economically subjugate the OASIS. Can Wade or one of his fellow gamers find the keys and save the OASIS?

Ready Player One is an outstanding debut novel, capturing the excitement and spirit of both RPGs and videogames, as well as the curious nature of Internet-bred friendships, all wrapped up in a terrifically fun adventure tale.

Both utopian and dystopian in spirit, Ready Player One is confident enough to invest time in the backstory of both Halliday and the world at large, giving the reader plenty of time to acclimate and become invested in Wade’s quest. I was quickly hooked by the intriguing world-building both inside and outside the OASIS.

But amidst the videogame trappings and ’80s pop culture references — cleverly employed as an obsession of the players, allowing them to feel vintage, rather than dated — there is an undeniable puzzly spirit at the heart of the novel: solving riddles.

Halliday leaves a riddle as the clue to unravel in order to locate the first key. Riddles continue to pop up, daring both the characters and the readers to find the solution. (Not only that, but the book itself offered a challenge for sharp-eyed readers, and one skilled puzzler won a DeLorean after solving the embedded puzzle.)

With plenty to keep puzzle fans, gamers, and pop culture aficionados engaged, Ready Player One is a terrific read. One of my favorites from the past year.

Well, I hope you enjoyed the first installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews, and I look forward to more book discussions in the future. In the meantime, keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you later.

Puzzled what to get someone for Christmas?

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The holiday season is upon us, and with Black Friday and Cyber Monday already making way for Thoroughly-Frustrated Shopper Thursday, I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer up some puzzly suggestions for holiday gifts.

As you might expect, I come from a puzzly family. So Christmas has always featured brain-teasing toys, 3-D puzzles, and whatever else parents and other relatives could find to keep us busy and baffled. My younger sister has passed this tradition on to the next generation with puzzle boxes for my nephews, ensuring that any holiday money is well earned by mid-afternoon.

Here are a few ideas for the puzzle lovers in your life.

For any Rubik’s Cube masters in your household, Eric suggests a marvelous variation with The Brain Cube. Instead of matching colors, you’re matching the geography of the brain, ensuring that each fold and wrinkle lines up with its neighbors. This is a real brain-teaser, available at Marbles — The Brain Store.

We’ve featured ThinkFun products on the blog before — most notably their puzzly day-to-day calendar — but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. They’ve got puzzle games and brain-teasers galore, suitable for all ages and levels of difficulty. (This hexagon one caught my eye while I was browsing.)

The folks at Hammacher Schlemmer offer all sorts of gadgetry and products, and two of them caught my eye as I perused their catalog for gift ideas.

The first was the maze bank pictured above, The Labyrinthine Piggy Bank. Any coins that fall off the track are safe and secure, but only someone with the patience and dexterity to navigate the ten feet of track within will be able to gain access!

The second piqued my interest as a lover of words and wordplay. It’s The Lexicographer’s Extended Scrabble game, a 21×21 grid with more tiles and squares than the original, allowing for more flexibility and more elaborate words. Perfect for the verbivore Scrabble enthusiast in your life.

If you’re looking for pen-and-paper puzzle goodness, our pals at PennyPress and Dell Magazines offer perfect stocking stuffers, as well as digest-sized and full-sized puzzle books. Whether it’s logic, crosswords, word seeks, fill-ins, sudoku, variety puzzles, or the Brain Boosters shown above, they’ve got you covered.

And, of course, you can’t go wrong with a one-year PuzzleNation gift subscription! With access to ten different puzzle games, as well as score tracking and two-player mode to solve with friends,  hours of puzzle-solving fun await.

This is just a small sampling of the puzzle-wonderful delights available this holiday season, but hopefully these suggestions will help you trim down your shopping list this year. So good luck, keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you next time.

Puzzle Tech Support, how may I help you?

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All of the best operatives have tech support. Bond has Moneypenny and Q. Batman has Oracle. Punisher has Microchip.

My older sister has me, your friendly neighborhood puzzlin’ fool.

Allow me to explain.

For a few years now, my older sister has competed in various rounds of the Great Urban Race, a city-centric version of The Amazing Race that combines trivia, puzzle-solving, and physical challenges. And an outrageous amount of running around.

(I understand there is a similar event in Canada known as the City Chase. And, of course, there’s the supremely puzzle-focused BAPHL, which Eric covered earlier this year.)

Since it’s damn near impossible to do research on the run, competitors are allowed to have someone as remote tech support to do the electronic legwork while the team is on the move. As a puzzle fiend and a world-class Googler, I was her first and only choice.

So last weekend, for the third time, I found myself hunkered down in front of my laptop with several Google windows prepped, waiting for text messages or emails to roll in.

The first time, she was in Philadelphia.

Where is the only digital printing studio in Philly with IRIS 3047 printer? Where is the Class of ’49 Bridge? What is the river that the St. James Brewery in Dublin is situated on?

And then the kicker. Where is this statue?

I hit Google Image Search immediately, but the dimensions on the picture simply didn’t match up with anything I could find in the Philadelphia area.

Which meant either the photo was compressed or otherwise distorted, or it was taken from a weird angle.

So I went with that, looking for any gargoyles with potential, or at least a similar shape. That’s when I stumbled upon an image from Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary.

They have two gargoyles that are put up on the main gateway in early September, since they do a special Halloween tour every year. They’d gone up on the ninth.

It turns out the picture was of the second gargoyle — the first, with an outstretched claw, was the one that kept turning up on Google Image Search — as shot from below.

Crafty, crafty.

The second GUR was New York City.

Find a certain restaurant. (No sweat.) Track down the business or organization behind a certain slogan. (Took a lot longer, because she gave me the wrong slogan.) Track down a business on a given street. (Nailed it quickly.) Find a theater under former names. (Again, no sweat.) Locate the largest rare goods shop. (Got it.) Unscramble a phrase to find a business’s name. (Anagrammed it in my head.)

But again, an image-search question was the most time-consuming. I had a cellphone-quality picture of a photocopy of a picture of a cigar store Indian statue, and I had to find the exact statue in Manhattan AND its location.

THAT was tedious. But I was eventually successful in tracking him down.

This time around, she was in Las Vegas (which I believe she and her partner qualified for after performing well in the New York City round).

There weren’t any tough Image Searches this time around — or if there were, she didn’t need my assistance with it — but my trivia and puzzle skills did come in handy again.

In one instance, a phone number was translated into another language, and I had to identify and decode the number. (It was Tagalog.)

My anagramming skills again came into play, but this time in a list of comic book titles and characters that had been scrambled. I was stumped by the last one, GECRSOSN MPRIRE, for a while, because while CONGRESS PRIMER immediately jumped to mind, that was total nonsense to me as a comic book fan. Googling that phrase did me no good, either.

It was a while before I started playing around with GECRSOSN again and remembered a defunct comic brand, CROSSGEN. CrossGen Primer. I excitedly texted her back with that.

The first puzzle she sent me, though, was easily the most puzzly of their challenges.

In this zero-ten numbered puzzle, complete this chain:
8 5 4 _ _ 7 _ 10 3 2 0

Did you get it? I’m sure you have by now. From there, it was a quick Google search for the address of a certain wedding chapel where their next challenge awaited them.

I’m sure she’ll participate again at some point, and when she does, I will be there, puzzle skills at the ready.

But in the meantime, let’s all keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you next time.

I hereby dub thee Sir Cuitous.

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Have you ever been jonesing for a puzzly challenge, but your phone’s dead and you don’t have any puzzle books with you and nobody wants to play 20 Questions or Hangman?

What is a desperate, puzzle-hungry person to do in a situation like this?

Well, if you’ve got a chessboard and a knight (or just some graph paper and a pencil, if you want to go bare-bones with it), you’ve got a puzzle waiting to happen.

It’s called a knight’s tour, and the challenge is to place the knight anywhere on the board and, moving the piece as you would in a regular game of chess, you hit every square on the board once.

It’s tougher than you’d think, and if you desire an even greater challenge, you could go for a closed tour, where the knight touches every square just once AND returns to the starting square.

Knight’s tours are common mathematical problems for computer science and programming students to this day, with the endgame being to write an algorithm that will find a knight’s tour for a given grid.

A variation on the knight’s tour is the uncrossed knight’s tour, where the goal is the same but you’ve got the added wrinkle of not being able to cross your knight’s path at any point.

But you don’t have to stick to an 8×8 grid by any means. Any square or rectangular grid can offer a suitable challenge to the aspiring knight’s tour hunter.

There’s nothing quite like a DIY brain teaser to keep your wits sharp. So no matter where you are, remember to keep calm and puzzle on. I’ll catch you next time.

A 9-letter word for candy and costume-fueled fun.

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Greetings, fellow puzzle solvers and enigma enthusiasts! Happy Halloween to you and yours!

I had a lot of fun a few weeks ago scouring the Internet for pictures of puzzle-centric tattoos, and with today being the most costume-y of holidays (unless you dress up for Bastille Day or the Fourth of July or something), I thought I’d wander back out into the wilds of the Internet and see what kind of puzzly costumes are out there.

Naturally, I would be remiss if I didn’t post at least one picture of the most famous of the puzzly supervillains from pop culture, so here is your prescribed dose of Batman villain The Riddler, nabbed from deviantart.com’s Dubya87.

Now, when you’re doing any sort of puzzle-focused image searching on the Internet, you’re bound to get jigsaws as well as pen-and-paper puzzles.

There were numerous examples of couples, pairs, and groups going as interlocking jigsaw puzzle pieces, but that’s not really the sort of puzzle costume I was going for. Nonetheless, this jigsaw puzzle costume rendition of Van Gogh’s Starry Night is really impressive, so I’ll share it with the puzzle world at large anyway.

But let’s get down to business. Puzzle costume business, which I daresay is the best kind of business, outside of being paid to eat ice cream.

Astonishingly, there’s simply not a lot of crossword-themed costume play going on. I know! I was surprised too! I did, however, find these crossword grid-patterned pajamas, which could easily double as a costume, or examwear for a tardy college student.

From crosswords, it’s a quick hop to Scrabble costumes, which seem to be much more popular!

This was my favorite of the “replicating the board” costumes I found.

And, naturally, there’s an awkward mass-produced costume along the same lines, which looks both uncomfortable and a bit too pillowy for my tastes.

From there, we get into the more creative interpretations. This woman seems inordinately proud of her Scrabble board dress.

This homemade dress is absolutely adorable. I only wish I’d been able to find a better picture.

And, as above, there’s a “sassy” mass-produced version of the Scrabble dress.

(There’s a more scandalous variation on that costume as well, but for propriety’s sake, let’s ignore that and move onward.)

Sudoku! While not as popular a costume choice as Scrabble, I still had little trouble tracking down several choice examples of sudokuriffic costumes. (Though I really doubt that’s a puzzle of three-star difficulty.)

I’m not sure how racially sensitive this guy’s Sudoku accoutrements are, but it certainly adds some flair to his interactive Sudoku board.

And then there’s this guy! Kudos on finding an appropriately-scaled giant pencil for your Sudoku board. (In case you’re trying to solve his costume, as far as I can tell his forehead is 8, and his mouth 4 or 5. Good luck!)

And, as before, here’s the weird mass-produced costume version for Sudoku. I respect that they kept it to a 4×4 grid, but I still can’t imagine anyone wearing it.

Now, when it comes to puzzles and puzzly games, it’s hard to imagine a more visual one than the Rubik’s Cube. Simple shape, great colors, and instantly recognizable. Somewhere, there are photos of my oldest sister in a Rubik’s Cube costume. (Had I been able to locate them, I would absolutely have posted them here.)

But do not fear. There are plenty of marvelous Rubik’s Cube costume pics on the Internet, and I’m happy to post a few of my favorites.

This one is outstanding. Not only is the center row offset, but I’m pretty sure you can actually spin those rows!

(I imagine it’s quite difficult getting him in and out of the car. I had a similarly boxy Optimus Prime costume as a child and got wedged in the backseat for at least ten minutes.)

This one is undoubtedly an improvised dorm room costume, but it’s still terrific.

I think the young lady’s expression is what really sells this one. She’s obviously proud of getting three yellow squares on a single side.

Okay, I promise that this is the last weird mass-produced costume. But it’s so bizarre and mod that I couldn’t NOT post it. I mean, look at that hat!

I’ve saved the best two for last. The first will instantly ring bells for anyone who has played the puzzletastic Professor Layton video game series. It’s the Professor himself, alongside Luke and Flora!

And, in conclusion, here’s my favorite puzzle-themed costume, and the one that actually inspired the entry.

Yup, two Tetris pieces. Hilarious and very sweet all at once.

Happy Halloween, puzzle fiends of all ages! Keep calm, puzzle on, enjoy your candy, and I’ll catch you next time.