Tag Archives: logic puzzle

Demystifying Role-Playing Games

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When you hear the words “role-playing game,” what comes to mind? A bunch of nerds in a basement, hunched around a table debating weird and esoteric rules? Practitioners of the black arts, thumbing their noses at God and all that is natural? Or nothing at all?

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Some TV shows, like Community and Freaks & Geeks, have displayed role-playing games in a positive light, but for the most part, role-playing games in general, and Dungeons & Dragons in particular, have gotten a bad rap over the last few decades, maligned as (at best) a game for lonely friendless types and (at worst) a tool to corrupt children.

(This might sound ridiculous to many of you, but folks like Pat Robertson continue to talk about role-playing games as if they’re synonymous with demon worship.)

But in reality, role-playing games are simply a way for a group to tell one collaborative story.

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There are two major elements to this storytelling. The first is managed by a single person who oversees that particular game or gaming session. In Dungeons & Dragons, this person is called the Dungeon Master, or DM; in other games, this person is the Game Master, the Storyteller, or bears some other title tied to the game or setting. For the sake of simplicity, from this point on, I’ll refer to this person as the DM.

So, the DM manages the setting and sets up the adventure. In this role, the DM will describe what the player characters (or PCs) see and explain the results of their actions. The DM also plays any characters the players interact with. (These are known as NPCs, or non-player characters.) Essentially, the DM creates the sandbox in which the other players play.

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Which brings us to the second element in role-playing storytelling: the players. Each player assumes a role, a character, and plays that character for the length of the session, or the game, if there are multiple sessions. (Some games last months or years, so these characters evolve and grow; players often become quite attached to their characters.)

The PCs navigate the world created by the DM, but their actions and decisions shape the narrative. No matter how prepared a DM is or how carefully he or she has plotted out a given scene or adventure, the PCs determine much of what happens. They might follow the breadcrumbs exactly as the DM laid them out, or they might head off in an unexpected direction, forcing the DM to think on the fly in order to continue the adventure.

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That’s what makes role-playing games so amazing: you never quite know what you’re going to get. The PCs usually don’t know what the DM has in store, and no DM can predict with perfect clarity what the PCs will do. You’re all crafting a story together and none of you knows what exactly will happen or how it all ends.

For instance, I run a role-playing game for several friends that is set in the universe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and my PCs routinely come up with solutions to problems and puzzles that I didn’t expect, but that nonetheless would work. They constantly keep me on my toes as a DM, and it’s one of my favorite aspects of the game.

Oftentimes, major events and key moments are determined by dice rolls, adding an element of chance to the story. (In some games, players have replaced dice rolls with a Jenga-style block tower, and they must remove pieces from it to achieve certain goals. That adds a marvelous sense of real-world tension to the narrative tension already present!)

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And while I’ve talked quite a bit about the game aspect, some of you might be wondering where the puzzly aspect comes in.

Some of the best, most satisfying puzzle-solving experiences of my life have come from role-playing games.

These puzzles can be as simple as figuring out how to open a locked door or as complicated as unraveling a villain’s dastardly plot for world domination. It can be a poem to be parsed and understood or a trap to be escaped.

There are riddles of goblins and sphinxes, or the three questions of trolls, or even the brain teasers and logic problems concocted by devious fey hoping to snare me with clever wordplay. I’ve encountered all sorts of puzzles in role-playing games, and some of them were fiendish indeed.

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One time, during a LARP session (Live-Action Role-Playing, meaning you actually act out the adventure and storytelling), I thought I’d unraveled the meaning of a certain bit of scripture (regarding a key that would allow me to escape the room) and acquired a sword as my prize, only to realize much much later that the key I’d spent the entire session searching for was the sword itself, which unlocked the door and released me.

And designing puzzles for my players to unravel is often as much fun as solving the puzzles myself. Especially when they’re tailored to specific storytelling universes or particular player characters.

(Trust me, it doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with a Jedi or a paladin; riddles stop pretty much everybody in their tracks.)

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Whether it’s Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder, Legend of the Five Rings or Star Wars, GURPS or Ninja Burger, there’s a role-playing game out there for everyone, if you’re just willing to look.

This post was meant as a brief overview of role-playing games as a whole. If you’d like me to get more in depth on the subject, or if you have specific questions about role-playing games, please let me know! I’d be happy to revisit this topic in the future.

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A Puzzle in Honor of Leonard Nimoy

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Late last week, news went out that actor, sci-fi luminary, and respected advocate for science Leonard Nimoy had passed away. As a fan of much of his work — not just Star Trek, but Fringe, In Search Of…, and numerous other shows made better by his presence — I was sad to say goodbye to such a terrific and influential figure.

And so, I thought it was only appropriate to honor him in true PuzzleNation fashion: with a Star Trek-themed brain teaser.

This puzzle was created by a University of Kentucky mathematician and puzzler named Raphael Finkel, and came to my attention thanks to a post on IO9.com. It’s a logic puzzle that will really test your deduction skills, perfect to honor pop culture’s most famous Vulcan and their great tradition of logic and reason.

Six Fearsome Heroes

Grobly Grizik is planning to write a novel fashioned after Star Trek: The Next Generation. In this novel, six of the crew members compete both at Fizzbin and at Tri-Dimensional chess. Each crew member gets two independent rankings for proficiency at these games (one ranking for each game), with “1” ranked lowest and “6” highest.

Every crew member has a personal hero among the crew, and every crew member is afraid of some crew member. Everyone is the hero of somebody, and everyone is feared by somebody. Nobody either fears him/herself nor counts him/herself as a hero. Nobody fears his/her own hero.

From the given clues, discover every crew member’s ranking at Fizzbin and at Tri-D chess, as well as whom he/she fears and whom he/she counts as a hero:

  • Geordi ranks 2 at Tri-D Chess.
  • Picard ranks two positions behind Troi at Fizzbin.
  • Troi is feared by the person Geordi fears.
  • Worf’s hero ranks 3 times lower at Tri-D Chess than the crew member who is best at Fizzbin.
  • Picard’s hero fears Geordi.
  • Data’s hero is not Geordi.
  • Data is the hero of Riker’s hero.
  • The person who is worst at Fizzbin is better than Troi at Tri-D Chess.
  • The person ranked number 3 at Tri-D Chess is ranked 4 positions higher than Data at Fizzbin.
  • Riker is feared by the person Picard fears and is the hero of Worf’s hero.
  • Riker is ranked 2 lower at Tri-D Chess than the crew member ranked 2 at Fizzbin.

Let us know if you solve this diabolical puzzle. And please share your favorite Nimoy roles and memories. He was a remarkable talent and will be missed.

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 logic puzzle with an artistic twist!

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Puzzles are truly a worldwide phenomenon. So many different cultures and groups have created fantastic, long-lasting puzzle styles that continue to resonate across decades and even centuries.

In the past I’ve endeavored to make PuzzleNation Blog a bit more PuzzleInternational by sharing overseas puzzle flavors from German and Spanish puzzle books that’ve been passed to me by fellow puzzlers.

And I’m so excited that another friend of the blog has shared an absolute treasure trove of international puzzle books with me, ensuring that our puzzly world tour will continue!

So today, instead of examining a single puzzle book and getting a glimpse into a particular culture’s brand of puzzles, I’ve picked a particular type of puzzle and we’ll be exploring magazines from several different countries dedicated to that puzzle!

Let’s take a global look at Logic Art!

Logic Art puzzles (also known as Pixel Puzzles, Pic-a-Pix, Illust-Logic, Griddlers, Hanjie, and Picture Puzzles) are a wonderfully artistic take on deduction-style logic puzzles.

Essentially, you’re given an empty grid with numbers along the top and left-hand side. These numbers indicate black squares to color in and white squares to leave alone. By deducing where to place the black squares and white squares, a pixelated picture will emerge!

(For more complete rules and solving tips, check out this helpful guide from our friends at Penny/Dell Puzzles.)

So, the difficulty of the solve and creativity of the solution image are only limited by the puzzle constructor’s imagination and your own puzzle savvy.

Some magazines, like these German puzzle books, stick to the simple black square/white square mechanic…

… while others, like this Cyrillic magazine with several colors and this Hungarian magazine with splashes of red, encourage greater use of color in your Logic Artwork.

These smaller, digest-sized Cyrillic magazines offer multiple grids per page with simpler solution images.

But look at the level of detail some of the larger grids offer!

I must admit, though, I’m partial to these Japanese puzzle books, if only for this particular solution image:

Logic Art is obviously a puzzle with global appeal. Although not as universal as Sudoku (or as intuitively easy to solve), it clearly strikes a chord with solvers across the world.

It’s always a treat to explore puzzles from another culture’s perspective. Thanks for taking this journey with me today.

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!

Happy Thanksgiving, puzzlers and PuzzleNationers!

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To celebrate this most festive and familial of days, we couldn’t help but cook up a little puzzle for you and yours today. Please enjoy this Thanksgiving puzzle, and have a safe and happy holiday!

Five Houses, One Big Meal

This Thanksgiving, five families (the Corbins, the Johnsons, the McDashes, the Whittons, and the Edgertons) agreed to each bring one part of Thanksgiving dinner to five other households in the neighborhood. The options were Turkey, Stuffing, Sweet potato, Turnip, and Rolls.

Each family dropped off a different food at each house at a different time (9 AM, 10 AM, 11 AM, Noon, and 1 PM). No two families gave the same food to the same house, or showed up to the same house at the same time.

The table below displays each family’s name, each household they visited, what food they dropped off, and what time they dropped off the food. Some of the boxes have been filled in already. Can you complete the chart and figure out what time each family dropped off each food?

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Hold on, let’s be logical about this…

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A few weeks ago, I did a blog post exploring the history of paper puzzles, comparing relatively new puzzle innovations like crosswords and Sudoku — crosswords are nearing their 100th anniversary, and Sudoku has only been around a few decades in its current form — to a much older style of puzzling, the riddle.

But it occurs to me that another branch of puzzles, logic puzzles, can trace their formative roots nearly as far back.

Logic puzzles are a curious breed of puzzles, since they rely less on grids and trivia and more on deductive reasoning. (Yes, many solving styles utilize grids, like this one from our friends at Penny/Dell Puzzles, but they’re not strictly necessary.)

If I was to chart the evolution of puzzles like that of animals or plants, riddles and logic puzzles would be offshoots of the same ancestor. Riddles are actually very simplistic logic puzzles, since they often rely on a single twist or turn of phrase.

For example, there’s the riddle “what gets wetter as it dries?”

The answer is “a towel.” The riddle relies on logical misdirection. The structure implies a passive voice (something becoming dry) but its actual structure is active voice (something actually drying another object).

This is known as a garden path sentence, and a terrific example is this quotation often attributed to Groucho Marx: “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.”

The main difference between the two is the complexity of logic puzzles as they’ve developed. Riddles are a one-and-done trick of wordplay, while logic puzzles are multilayered exercises in deduction.

So, from riddles, it’s easy to imagine mystery stories and whodunits as the next precursor in the development of logic puzzles. From the early days of the genre’s creation at the hands of Edgar Allan Poe to its explosion in popularity under the quick and clever pens of Agatha Christie and her fellow authors, the plot of virtually every mystery story is a logic puzzle in itself.

The arrangement is similar. You’re given your setting and the circumstances that gathered the players together. Then you’re given the pertinent information on who was where at a given time, and it’s left to you (and the ubiquitous detective) to unravel the truth from a convoluted mishmash of information.

Except for the detective, that’s the modern day logic puzzle exactly.

(I snagged this helpful image from www.logic-puzzles.org.)

Heck, there are even some mystery stories that are considered unsolved, practically waiting for an enterprising logic puzzle fan to find the key piece of evidence that will unlock the entire story.

Frank Stockton’s story “The Lady, or the Tiger?” comes to mind, as does Stanley Ellin’s “Unreasonable Doubt”. (I encountered these stories in Otto Penzler’s collection Uncertain Endings: The World’s Greatest Unsolved Mystery Stories.)

And in case you’re curious as to why I’m rambling about riddles and Poe and how they directly or indirectly influenced the evolution of logic puzzles as we know them… the answer is simple.

With the hundredth anniversary of the crossword fast approaching, it’s made me wonder just how long the spirit of puzzle-solving has been with us as a civilization.

And when you can trace logic puzzles back hundreds of years and riddles back thousands of years, it’s hard not to smile and imagine that we’re enjoying the same mental and puzzly challenges generations and generations of others have tackled in the past.

It’s a humbling and heartening thought.

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