Tag Archives: Pop culture

No Prep Road Trip Games!

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Summer is nearly upon us, and with the arrival of summer, one cannot help but think of road trips with friends and ways to pass the time in the car.

While singalongs, I Spy, and the License Plate Game are all well and good, perhaps you would like a little more challenge with your road trip games.

Well, you’ve come to the right place. Here’s a few suggestions for road trip games that require no preparation, save for a little imagination!

The Movie Game

I learned this game while stuck on a long train ride, and it certainly made the delays go faster.

Someone starts with a film, and the next player names an actor in that film. The next person names ANOTHER film that actor has appeared in, and the next person names ANOTHER actor from that film. And you keep going until someone can’t continue the game.

(If you present an actor or film in the chain that the next player can’t continue, you can only eliminate them by offering another answer, showing that the chain can continue. If you give them a chain link you can’t continue either, you’re out!)

It’s surprisingly difficult, because the more you play, the more devious you try to get. You want to lure other players down garden paths, but you have to make sure you don’t go so obscure that you can’t find your way out as well.

Playlist

Friend of the blog Jen Cunningham created a music-themed version of The Movie Game: Playlist.

In this version, you start with a song and an artist, and the next player either names another song by that artist OR another song using one of the key words in the song.

So, for instance, if you say “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” by the Beatles and you need to match the song, you could do “Owner of the Lonely Heart” by Yes or “Only the Lonely” by Roy Orbison. Then someone needs to name another Yes song or another Roy Orbison song, and then the chain continues.

I find this game slightly more challenging than The Movie Game because of both the musical knowledge (which isn’t as strong as my movie knowledge) and the associative nature of the song title aspect. But many hours have been wiled away with this game!

My Friend Is An Expert… / Conspiracy Theory

In this game, the first player picks two random subjects, and then prompts the next player with them, and it’s the next player’s job to explain in entertaining fashion something fascinating about them that only an expert would know.

For instance, the first player would go “My friend is an expert in ancient archaeology and polka music” and the next player has to riff on those subjects for a bit. Other players can ask questions to continue the silliness.

The game continues with different topics and additional nonsense.

There’s a similar game to this called Conspiracy Theory where someone has to rant about the grand conspiracy behind two seemingly unrelated topics provided by the other players.

Both of these are great fun with a group of improvisers or snake oil salesman during a long road trip.

Alien Ambassador

(I haven’t played this one yet, but a friend recommended it, so I’m happily including it.)

In this game, one player is selected to be the alien ambassador, an alien visiting Earth for the very first time. The other players must answer the alien’s questions and explaining simple concepts to them. (It’s sorta like that comic strip with the aliens.)

As the alien ambassador asks more questions about this, the players will invariably scramble to explain the very weird things we accept as normal, everyday life, and laughter will ensue.

Hastur Horta Hodor Mordor

Inspired by a Dork Tower comic, Hastur Horta Hodor Mordor is a road trip game that actually became a real card game. But let’s focus on the road trip version.

This is a memory game where one player says a word — preferably one related to fandom, geek culture, etc. — in order to begin a nerdy tongue twister. The next player says that word AND another word. The next player says the two previous words AND another word, and the chain continues.

If you can’t complete the chain or you hesitate too long, you get a Hodor point, and a new chain begins.

If you get 3 Hodor points, you can only say “Hodor” for the rest of the car ride. (That’s a reference for the Game of Thrones fans in the audience, if there are any of you left after those dismal final seasons.)

Do you have any favorite no prep road trip games, fellow puzzlers? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.

Antonym TV Shows!

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In today’s post, I’ve got a silly little puzzly challenge for you. I’m going to give you the antonym of a television show’s title, and you need to give me the show.

For example, “Not at All Justified” would mean “Justified” or “Lawlessness and Chaos” would be “Law and Order.”

And yes, they do get wackier, more specious, and more elaborate as we go.

So, without further ado, let’s play!

ANTONYM TV SHOWS

  1. Enemies
  2. Found
  3. The Idle Alive
  4. Less Peculiar Nothings
  5. Misery
  6. Before Twelve
  7. Southern Obscurity
  8. Me
  9. Saving Adam
  10. White Non-Reflective Surface
  11. The First of Them
  12. Ugly Large Honest People
  13. Heaven’s Dining Room
  14. The Small Pop Certainty
  15. Very Vulnerable
  16. The Basses
  17. Unfettered Lack of Progress
  18. Water Walk
  19. Near Stay
  20. Many Whole
  21. Unseriousness Rises
  22. Truth Angel
  23. Attachment
  24. Drives and Work
  25. Minor Childless Man
  26. Keep a Potato in Pristine Condition
  27. Bullgirl Classical
  28. Legal Disobeys
  29. Uncertain Key
  30. Jeers

How many did you get, fellow solver? And how many did you groan at when you figured them out? Let me know in the comment section below!

New Rubik’s Speed-Solving Record: Blink and You’ll Miss It!

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Clever, quick-fingered solvers are constantly pushing the boundaries of what can be accomplished with a Rubik’s Cube.

I’ve seen the world’s most complex Rubik’s-style cube being solved, a building turned into a solvable Rubik’s Cube, and a Rubik’s Cube solved one move at a time by strangers across the globe.

I’ve even seen a Rubik’s Cube solved during a skydive.

But, amidst all those amazing achievements, there has been something lurking in the background. Over the years, there has been an escalating cold war in the world of Rubik’s Cubes.

The two sides? Human and machine.

The battlefield? Speed-solving.

Human speed-solvers often count their records in seconds, not minutes. The current record for a 3×3 cube solve is 3.05 seconds!

But speed-solving devices are often so fast that they end up ripping the cube to pieces instead of completing the solve. So puzzly designers must carefully walk a tightrope between speed and power in order to challenge speed records for mechanical solvers.

The record for an automated solve is an astonishing 0.305 seconds – ten times faster than the fastest human solve! — set by Mitsubishi Electric engineers in Japan in May 2024.

Or it was, until a few days ago.

The new Guinness World Record for “Fastest robot to solve a puzzle cube” belongs to Purdubik’s Cube, the robot created by Junpei Ota, Aden Hurd, Matthew Patrohay, and Alex Berta, a team of students from Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The new record? 0.103 seconds.

It’s hard to fathom how quick that is. Thankfully, one of Purdubik’s Cube’s creators has an apt analogy:

“We solve in 103 milliseconds,” Patrohay said. “A human blink takes about 200 to 300 milliseconds. So, before you even realize it’s moving, we’ve solved it.”

Utilizing a combination of color recognition and finely-tuned industrial-grade motion-control hardware — guided by algorithms written by the students themselves — Purdubik’s Cube carefully accelerates and decelerates its movements faster than the eye can see.

And despite the fact that a team of four college students smashed a record previously held by a billion-dollar corporation, they’re not done yet.

They aspire to solve a Rubik’s Cube with Purdubik’s Cube in less than a tenth of a second! I don’t know how they expect to shave a few milliseconds off their time to achieve their goal, but you know what? I fully believe they can do it. In less than a year, they set their goal of a new Guinness World Record and achieved it.

Who knows what they’ll achieve next?

[You can read the full story of their journey from the initial goal to their world record success on the Purdue Engineering website. I highly recommend it!]

The RPG and Board Game Community Reaches Out!

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One of the best parts of being a puzzle and board game guy is the amazing community of fellow players, puzzlers, and game designers that surrounds you. Yes, puzzles and games are a business, obviously, but every week I see examples of creators and companies giving back, doing charitable acts, and participating in fundraisers for good causes.

Today, I’d like to highlight a few and hopefully bring more attention to these worthwhile endeavors.

Accessible Games: Global Accessibility Awareness Day

Accessible Games understands that every person is different, and that there are many people who don’t feel represented in modern roleplaying games. To that end, they created Survival of the Able, an RPG with disabled protagonists set in medieval Europe during a zombie plague. It shows the challenges people face every day, but also shows that those people are capable of accomplishing extraordinary things. (They even published a special edition of the game that is designed to be more accessible for dyslexic players.)

Between Survival of the Able, their zine Accessible Gaming Quarterly, and their guide to more inclusive tabletop creation — Accessible Guide to RPG Layout — they’re doing a lot of advance the cause of gaming for everybody.

In honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (which is Thursday May 15th), they’re offering a 30% discount on their entire accessibility-focused library. You can get your discounted copies between May 15th and May 22nd at this link. Please consider participating.

Kids in the Attic: Hershey Family Recovery Bundle

Kids in the Attic is a roleplaying game company that likes to highlight the weird and whimsical in their fantasy, space, and horror games, but this week, they’re turning their attention to bringing light and kindness to a horrible situation.

They’re currently organizing the Hershey Family Recovery Bundle to support the family of Rick Hershey, a prolific artist in the tabletop roleplaying game community. All of his children were involved in a devastating car accident caused by another driver. Thankfully, they all survived, but the road ahead will be long, and everyone knows the burden that medical bills can impose.

You can click this link to see everything included in the Hershey Family Recovery Bundle and to learn more about Rick. Please consider donating to help Rick’s family get back on their feet.

Tycoon Games: The Box of Giving

Tycoon Games has been an industry leader in charitable work and outreach for years, donating to Toys for Tots, the Boys and Girls Club, and many other worthy organizations.

Their latest endeavor is The Box of Giving, a collection of games intended to help underserved communities, schools, libraries, gaming conventions, and local non-profits experience the joy and camaraderie that comes with playing games. For the cost of shipping alone, each organization receives $500 worth of games!

Please click this link to apply for the Box of Giving program and share the link for any groups that you think would benefit from this wonderful endeavor.

Are there any charitable efforts in the board game or roleplaying world that you’d like to shout-out? Let us know in the comments below! We’d love to hear from you.

Happy gaming, everyone!

A Secret Egyptian Code Hiding in Plain Sight?

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Thirty-three hundred years ago, an obelisk was carved in ancient Egypt. It stood at the entrance of the Luxor temple as part of a pair.

Almost two hundred years ago, the obelisk was given to France by Egypt’s ruler. It stands at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, thousands of miles from its sibling in Egypt.

Two centuries of students and tourists and philosophers and photographers and scholars gazing at the obelisk, reading the intricately carved hieroglyphs.

Hieroglyphs were traditionally written in columns reading downward. But there are also left and right directional markers, marking the beginning of a sentence, often indicated by which direction a human or animal figure is facing.

As you can see, the placement of different symbols allows them to combine with others, both vertically and horizontally, to create different words or concepts.

And whomever did the inscriptions on the obelisk used the multidirectionality of the language to conceal messages in plain sight.

Even after centuries of study, it took a keen eye and some lucky conditions for Egyptologist Jean-Guillaume Olette-Pelletier to uncover the hidden messages.

You see, the obelisk was surrounded by scaffolding as part of its renovations, and this allowed Olette-Pelletier to get up close to the highest point of the obelisk and observe the inscriptions rarely seen by casual observers.

The hidden messages required him to read the hieroglyphs horizontally rather than vertically, and at a particular angle as well. This three-dimensional study of the inscriptions, known as crypto-hieroglyphs, allowed the creator to conceal messages that didn’t simply sing the praises of Pharaoh Ramses II, but actually point to his rulership as divine right, claiming his power came directly from the gods themselves.

It was propaganda, intended to reinforce the pharaoh’s status in the eyes of the elites of Egypt, cloaked in messages for the common people. (One of the messages, for instance, could only be seen by those arriving by boat, a privilege available only to the elite.)

For example, from an article in EuroWeekly News:

“People had not noticed that under [one of the drawings] of the god Amun, there is an offering table. This allows us to discover a sentence where no element is missing: an offering that the king gives to the god Amun,” Olette-Pelletier told BFMTV. Combinations of the newly identified inscriptions produce additional meanings in what’s called three-dimensional cryptography. In total, the Egyptologist identified seven encrypted messages across the obelisk’s various facades. He explained that the enigmatic text can only be understood by walking around the monument.

Imagine the creator of the obelisk, carving with specific angles and readers in mind, an iconic gift to the pharaoh… only for the code to be cracked thousands of miles away, thousands of years in the future, by a different kind of elite.

The puzzly kind.

That’s amazing.

Optical Illusions Made of Wood!

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Learning about the science behind optical illusions has been one of my favorite parts of this job. More and more, scientists are figuring out WHY optical illusions work on us, utilizing combinations of color, shadow, perspective, and how we process information to create impossible images, illusions of movement, and visual wonders to challenge how we interpret the world.

And I love seeing how people have responded by pushing the boundaries of what we can do with optical illusions. Earlier this year, I wrote about the glitch quilt, a fascinating and eye-wobbling work of brain-melting color play and meticulous execution.

In a world increasingly reliant on computer assistance and push-button AI-fueled shortcuts, there’s something both comforting and immensely charming about glitch quilts being handmade.

So it should come as no surprise to you, fellow puzzler, that I was overjoyed to discover another example of handmade optical illusion crafting… this time, made of wood.

This is the end grain optical illusion cutting board. It appears to bend and swirl and warp as you stare at it, despite being made of straight lines and alternating colors.

Although I discovered it through Obsessed Woodworking, this particular piece is the handiwork of Ryan Hawkins, who has a woodworking YouTube channel where he detailed the elaborate step-by-step process involved in creating this sturdy perspective-twisting delight:

Ryan, to his credit, pointed to another woodworking content creator who supplied the design plans for the cutting board: mtmwood.

mtmwood has numerous examples of handcrafted visual tricky, employing tessellations and tricks of perspective to fool the eye into following intricately laid patterns, and my favorite is easily one that they call the butterfly board:

Employing a similar technique to the optical illusion cutting board, but managing to shape four twisting patterns, is truly impressive and a testament to the hard work, skill, and technique required to bring these stunning pieces to life.

And, as you might expect, this sent me down a YouTube rabbit hole looking for other wooden optical illusions, and there are plenty to choose from.

This is a nicely executed attempt at showing dimension and depth to get us started.

Whereas this one walks us through all the stages of preparing to take a familiar optical illusion from a drawing to a three-dimension form:

I confess, I watched this next one three times in a row, trying to spot the seams:

I could go on and on, but honestly, instead of closing out on the illusions, I’d like to end this celebration of creativity and artisanship with a simple photo showing the preparation and painstaking work it takes to bring these pieces to life.

This is the optical illusion cutting board in its embryonic stage, a lineup of different pieces and thicknesses of wood. All marked and cut with precision, waiting for the next step in assembly. I stare at this picture, and consider every mark, every cut, every spin of the table saw’s blade as the creator runs piece after piece after piece through those whirling metal teeth, each of them perfect and crisp.

It’s a remarkable thing to ponder, and a joy to watch in both progress and in final realization. I’m glad I could share that with you today.

Happy puzzling, everyone!