Valentine’s Day is only a few days away, and a friend who knows I write a weekly puzzle blog asked if I’d be penning anything in particular for the blog regarding the holiday.
I replied that I was working on a post about puzzly ideas for Valentine’s Day gifts and experiences, similar to the post I did last year. And he laughed at the very idea of puzzle romance, the poor fool.
“Sir, how dare you doubt the power of puzzles to sway the heart of someone special!” I bellowed back, caught up in the moment.
I mean, seriously. Does this guy not realize that we’ve featured several wonderful stories of puzzle romance in this blog alone?
You can get the full story here, but in short, a puzzler in love reached out to PDP for their assistance in hiding his proposal within one of his girlfriend’s favorite puzzles, Escalators. They even did a small print run just for him to camouflage the proposal in a puzzle book!
It was a marvelous team effort, brilliantly executed…oh, and she said yes.
Plus there’s this terrific story about a friend of mine who composed some cryptic-crossword-style clues as part of a gift for his longtime girlfriend. When she solved all of the clues, they spelled out the message “Truly happy being yours.”
There are all sorts of thoughtful and romantic puzzle ideas out there, from a relationship scavenger hunt like the one from Parks and Recreation to this video of a Rubik’s Cube-themed proposal at a speed-solving event:
With a little ingenuity — and maybe some puzzly friends — you can create a unique and wonderful experience for someone you love. Puzzle romance is real, my friends. Just look at this happy couple, united by their mutual love of puzzles:
I wanted to close this post out with a little something for all the puzzlers and PuzzleNationers out there. And with Valentine’s Day coming up, it seemed appropriate to whip up a Matchmaker puzzle for you to solve. Enjoy!
Fill in the missing first letter of each word in the column on the left. Next, look for a related word in the group at the right and put it in the blank in the second column. When the puzzle is completed, read the first letters of both columns in order, from top to bottom, to reveal a romantic song lyric.
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Puzzling is a terrific activity for people of all ages. But most puzzles are designed with adults in mind, crafted with challenging vocabulary, misleading or tricky cluing, and devious designs meant to test your puzzly mettle.
Kids are often left behind. Why? Because, quite honestly, it’s hard to make quality puzzles with appropriate vocabulary and difficulty levels. Most kids’ puzzles are mind-numbingly easy, almost to the point of being patronizing. Where can you find quality puzzles designed with kids in mind?
Wonder no more! Puzzle constructor, author, and friend of the blog Eric Berlin has recently launched Puzzle Your Kids, a subscription puzzle series featuring topnotch puzzles for ages 9 and up!
Available in three-month, six-month, and one-year increments, each subscription guarantees two puzzles a week emailed right to you and designed with younger solvers in mind. And we’re not talking just crosswords! Based on the sample puzzles on the website, kids can expect some terrific puzzly variations on familiar shapes and styles to keep them on their toes.
[Check out this spiral grid design from one of the sample
puzzles on the website. Click here to see the full puzzle.]
As the author of the thoroughly enjoyable Winston Breen series of YA puzzle novels, Eric has a terrific sense of how to build puzzles that will challenge young minds without frustrating them.
I suspect Puzzle Your Kids will be the perfect gateway for new solvers, and just the fix young, established solvers need to foster a lifelong love of puzzles.
For more details on Puzzle Your Kids, click here to check out the full website.
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That’s right, it’s a bonus blog post today because we’ve got some exciting news!
We’ve got new puzzle sets available for both the Android AND iOS versions of the Penny Dell Crossword App!
For our iPhone and iPad users, we just launched Deluxe Fun Set 1, a collection of 30 easy, medium, and hard puzzles to test your puzzly mettle, plus 5 bonus puzzles you can unlock!
Not only that, but just in time for that most romantic of holidays, we’ve got our Valentine’s Day 2016 Deluxe Set! You get 30 easy, medium, and hard puzzles, plus 5 unlockable bonus puzzles with a Valentine’s theme!
And there’s more!
For our Android users, the Penny Dell Crosswords App now offers THREE full collections of crosswords. Each collection offers easy, medium, and hard puzzles for your enjoyment! And be sure to check out the in-app Puzzle Store for special discount offers!
It’s a veritable puzzle bonanza!
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Members of the PuzzleNation community have been asking for more details on the puzzle fort I built in celebration of International Puzzle Day, so today I happily share my documentation of our celebratory puzzle fort’s construction, brief moments of glory, and demolition. Enjoy.
The initial spark for the fort came from when I stumbled upon this treasure trove of puzzle magazines at the Penny Dell Puzzles offices. They often donate puzzle books to hospitals, troops overseas, and to other worthy causes, and these books were the latest batch to be set aside for such service.
And when I saw these raw materials available, naturally my first thought was…I could build a fort out of these.
So, Friday morning, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.
I started with a simple brick wall layout for the base of the main wall, alternating magazine positions at the corners Lincoln Logs-style, both for aesthetics and to allow for details like the window feature you can see in progress here, providing much-needed ventilation and light.
Here are the primary support columns flanking the entrance to the fort. Since I was using the actual wall as part of the fort, there was no need for the alternating pattern of the other columns, so I originally went for a straight stack of puzzle books.
At this point, I’d run out of the thicker puzzle books and began working with thinner monthly puzzle titles, raising the columns to accommodate a person’s seated height.
You can also see a new patterning to the column on the left, thanks to some volumes of an old encyclopedia allowing for extra stability and support. The column on the right also shifts slightly as it rises, to compensate for the switch from alternating puzzle book placement to straight stacking.
Here are the completed flourishes beneath the window, allowing for air flow and a bit of visual style, breaking up the pattern of puzzle book spines and text.
I started in on the roof next with the aid of puzzler and friend of the blog Keith Yarbrough. (As you can see on the left side, I also redesigned the main columns to redistribute thicker magazines to the freestanding column for better support.) A few broken-down cardboard boxes made for a fine skeleton for the tiled roof, which you can see the first “shingles” of over to the left.
A close-up of our “shingles,” adding a bit of color and flair to the fort.
Our patchwork roof takes shape nicely here, anchored along the columns by more puzzle books, and providing both style and a touch of extravagance to the whole affair.
This picture offers a sense of how much coverage the roof actually provides, allowing for some suitable shadowing and privacy for fort dwellers (that the flash on my camera obscures in most pictures).
And here is your humble fortsmith, posing inside his creation. All in all, not a bad hour’s work.
It was a big hit around the office, with many fellow puzzlers coming by to admire its magnificence and get photos of themselves inside.
People also asked if I needed to acquire permits to build such a magnificent structure, but since it was built of natural materials sourced from the area itself, I believe it’s technically classified as an igloo, and therefore outside the strictures of building code formalities.
Alas, all good things must come to an end, and I was told the puzzle fort had to be gone before the end of the workday. Forts, much like snowmen, are not meant to last. We must simply appreciate them to the utmost while they are there.
So, with great reluctance, I began disassembling my beloved creation.
But then, disaster struck!
Yes, I was buried by an avalanche of puzzle delightfulness! In that moment, I knew what it felt like to be Corbin the puzzle bear on International Tabletop Day after that fateful round of Jenga.
I dug myself out and resumed demolishing the puzzle fort, endeavoring, as I always do, to leave the place a little better than I found it.
Mission accomplished. And a new International Puzzle Day tradition was born.
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As you can see, there are clues across three sides of the hexagonal grid: the across clues, the down-to-the-left clues, and the up-to-the-left clues.
But these clues are unlike anything I’ve seen before.
It turns out that these are regexps, or regular expressions, sequences of characters and symbols that represent search commands in computer science.
Now, anyone who has used graphing features in Excel or crossword-solving aids on websites like XWordInfo, Crossword Tracker, or OneLook is probably familiar with simple versions of regexp. For instance, if you search C?S?B?, you’ll probably end up with CASABA as the likely top answer.
Of course, the ones in this puzzle are far more complicated, but the overlapping clues in three directions make this something of a logic puzzle as well, since you’ll be able to disregard certain answers because they won’t fit the other clues (as you do in crosswords with the across and down crossings in the grid).
But if, like me, you don’t know much about reading regexp, well then, you’ve got yourself a grid full of Naticks.
If anyone out there is savvy with regexp, let me know how taxing this puzzle is. Because, for me right now, it’s like doing a crossword in a foreign language.
But I’m not the only one who feels this way. When I first checked out the post on Gizmodo, they titled it “Can You Solve This Beautifully Nerdy Crossword Puzzle?” and I laughed out loud when the very first comment simply read “Nope.”
Glad to see I’m not alone here.
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One of the most amazing things about the world today is how interconnected we all are. The Internet has made it easily to not only keep in touch with far-flung friends, but to forge new, meaningful friendships and connections with staggering ease.
And I confess, I am a total sucker for those heartwarming clickbait videos that spread the message that we are all the same. (The one of that guy doing the same dance in countries across the world comes to mind.) So seeing people from all over the world solve a Rubik’s Cube one move at a time…what can I say? It got me.
Every year, one of my favorite activities is putting together our Holiday Puzzly Gift Guide. I get to include the best products sent to me for review by top puzzle and game companies, mix in some of my own favorites, and draw attention to terrific constructors, game designers, and friends of the blog, all in the hopes of introducing solvers (and families of solvers) to quality puzzles and games.
Talking about how puzzles are relevant to daily life is one of my favorite subjects for blog posts. Brain health, stress relief, the long-term benefits of puzzle solving…we’ve discussed all these topics and more during my time as lead blogger.
This year I continued that tradition with this post about how listening to music can make you a more effective solver. It’s always interesting for me to do some research and really delve into a topic — especially scientific ones because they’re often so drastically misreported or misinterpreted by mainstream outlets — and give the PuzzleNation audience the straight story.
One of the most bizarre moments of 2015 was when someone shoved their iPhone in my face and asked me what color a dress was. It wasn’t until a few moments later that I found out this was a big thing on the Internet that people were vociferously debating.
The chance to explain exactly what was going on in the photo through one of my favorite puzzly mediums — the optical illusion — was too much fun to resist, and it resulted in one of the year’s most popular, most shared blog posts.
Although it’s a highlight of the puzzly calendar every year, this year’s ACPT was extra special for me because it was the first I attended in person.
Not only did I get to meet a lot of top names in crosswords — in many cases, finally getting a chance to put names to faces after many emails and tweets exchanged — but I got to enjoy the Big Fight feel of seeing so many friends and puzzlers test their mettle against some great puzzles.
Our friends at Penny Dell Puzzles pulled off one heck of a puzzly coup when an intrepid fellow puzzler asked them for help proposing to his girlfriend with a special Escalators puzzle.
I reached out to the lucky fiancé and got his permission to share the story with the PuzzleNation readership, and as I learned more about who was involved and how they’d managed to make it happen, I just became more and more enamored with the story. I have no doubt that years from now, this will still be one of my favorite blog posts.
Guest bloggers are nothing new to PuzzleNation Blog, as Sherri regularly pops in with her app reviews, but Max Galpern pushed things to another level with his appearances throughout the year. Not only did he pioneer our first video review (with assistance from Fred), but he took over the blog for an entire day with his review of the Boston Festival of Indie Games.
Here’s hoping we can get Max back for 2016 a few times, though I suspect he’ll be in high demand.
We do a lot of reviews (board game and card game reviews, puzzle reviews, tournament reviews, app reviews, etc.) and I thoroughly enjoy introducing new puzzly products and events to my fellow PuzzleNationers and sharing my thoughts on them.
But it’s rare that we get the first shot at introducing a brand-new never-before-seen puzzle or product, and that’s what separates the Will Sudoku post from many others. Serving as the debut outlet for a new puzzle was great fun and very exciting, one of those rarities that made 2015 such a terrific year.
Brain teasers were a big part of 2015 for the blog, since several challenging ones went viral this year. But I don’t think any of them taxed my brain — both to solve AND to explain how to solve — like the island seesaw brain teaser from an episode of Fox’s sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine did.
It is an epic-length blog post — one I needed a mathematician friend of mine to help me write — but it broke down a tough puzzle bit-by-bit and explained every step. In a year of brain-melting puzzle posts, it still stands out.
I almost put announcing the Android release for the App here instead — because so many people had been asking about it for so long — but in the end, the free daily puzzle announcement won out, and not simply because it was a terrific new feature for the App, one that I feel would draw a lot of new eyes to the product.
Getting to interview Fred and talk about not just what we’ve been working on for years, but where we were headed in the future, made it feel like a special event for the PuzzleNation Team as a whole. Plus it was a chance to introduce all of you to another member of the team, something I hope to do more of in 2016.
It may sound self-serving or schlocky to talk about our flagship product as #1 in the countdown, but it’s something that we’re all extremely proud of, something that we’re constantly working to improve, because we want to make it the absolute best it can be for the PuzzleNation audience. That’s what you deserve.
Thanks for spending 2015 with us, through logic problems and love stories, through dresses and debuts, through Rubik’s Cubes and revelations. We’ll see you in 2016.
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PuzzCulture 