Tag Archives: Puzzle to solve

Puzzle Romance!

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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?

Heck, one of my favorite posts last year was about a puzzly proposal that our friends at Penny Dell Puzzles helped orchestrate.

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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.

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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:

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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.

matchmaker

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Puzzles for Kids?

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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.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

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!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: View a Clue Animals 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 today, we’ve got answers to last week’s View a Clue game!

If you recall, we selected ten animals that commonly show up in crossword grids — some have become crosswordese at this point — to see if the PuzzleNation audience could identify them from pictures.

Without further ado, let’s get to the answers!

#1 (5 letters)

Answer: ELAND, an African antelope

#2 (3 letters)

Answer: KEA, a New Zealand parrot

#3 (3 letters)

Answer: EMU, a flightless Australian bird

#4 (5 letters)

Answer: COATI, a tropical raccoon-like animal

#5 (4 letters)

Answer: NENE, a Hawaiian goose

#6 (3 or 4 letters)

Answer: ERN or ERNE, a sea eagle

#7 (4 letters)

Answer: IBEX, a horned mountain goat

#8 (3 letters)

Answer: SEI, a large whale

#9 (5 letters)

Answer: OKAPI, an African animal and kin to the giraffe

#10 (4 letters)

Answer: ANOA, an Indonesian buffalo

How many did you get? Let me know in the comments below! And if you have ideas for another View a Clue game, tell us below!

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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!

View a Clue: Crossword Animals

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Welcome to the third edition of PuzzleNation Blog’s newest feature: the View a Clue game!

I’ve selected ten animals that commonly show up in crossword grids — some have become crosswordese at this point — and I want to see if the PuzzleNation audience can identify them from pictures. It’s a visual puzzle I call View a Clue!

Without further ado, let’s give it a shot!

#1 (5 letters)

#2 (3 letters)

#3 (3 letters)

#4 (5 letters)

#5 (4 letters)

#6 (3 or 4 letters)

#7 (4 letters)

#8 (3 letters)

#9 (5 letters)

#10 (4 letters)

How many did you get? Let me know in the comments below! And if you have ideas for another View a Clue game, tell us below!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

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!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Pixel Puzzle 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 today, I’d like to return to the subject of puzzle art!

I stumbled across this terrific art print from 30 Squared a while back, and I thought it would make a fun puzzly challenge for the PuzzleNation readership.

We’ve got twelve famous vehicles from movies and television, presented in pixelated form.

Can you identify the TV shows or movies that featured these iconic vehicles? Let’s put your pop culture knowledge to the test!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

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!

A crossword like you’ve never seen before

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When someone sends me a link, claiming they’ve uncovered the most difficult crossword they’ve ever seen, I’m usually skeptical.

I mean, I’ve seen some diabolical crosswords in my day. From puzzle 5 at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament and the meta-puzzles lurking in Matt Gaffney‘s Weekly Crossword Contests to the Diagramless and Double Trouble crosswords offered by our friends at Penny Dell Puzzles, it’s hardly tough to find challenging crosswords these days.

But this puzzle, originally created for the 2013 MIT Mystery Puzzle Hunt and made solvable (and rotatable!) online by Greg Grothaus, might just take the cake:

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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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!