Tag Archives: Puzzle to solve

Can you solve BuzzFeed’s 14 Trickiest Crossword Clues?

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Last week, a fellow puzzler passed along this link, which had an intriguing premise. The folks at BuzzFeed asked prominent crossword constructors to contribute their favorite tricky or misleading crossword clues, challenging the audience to puzzle out as many of them as possible.

The constructors involved are a who’s who of top puzzlers, including Ben Tausig, Peter Gordon, Elizabeth C. Gorski, Brendan Emmett Quigley, Matt Gaffney, and several of the puzzlers involved in the Indie 500 tournament: Erik Agard, Neville Fogarty, Andy Kravis, and Evan Birnholz.

There are 14 tricky clues, each with either some crafty wordplay or some delightfully wicked humor attached.

Now, fair warning, some of these are a bit risque (one drops the f-bomb), but they will all put your puzzly skills to the test.

[I wonder how Nancy Drew would do…]

My personal favorites were “Journey accompanier, often [9 letters]” and “Michigan county I promise never to use in a crossword again [6 letters],” both of which involve a level of honesty and pop culture awareness that transcends standard crossing cluing.

I managed to riddle out 10 of the 14 clues. Some of them were vague enough to allow for multiple answers — you don’t have a grid or crossing entries to help you limit options, after all — so I gave myself credit if the correct answer was one of several that came to mind.

How did you do on this crafty BuzzFeed challenge, PuzzleNationers? Let me know! I’d love to hear from you!

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!

Crossing swords with crosswordese!

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In the past, I’ve written about crosswordese, nemesis and irritant to many crossword solvers and constructors. For the uninitiated, crosswordese is shorthand for any and all obscure or curious words that you only encounter in crossword grids. From EPEE and OONA to Greek letters (ETA, RHO) and French rivers (AARE), these killer crossings are the bane of any solver’s existence.

And wouldn’t you know it, I encountered some crosswordese in a most unexpected place.

I was reading Patricia Marx’s book Let’s Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties, a humorous look at the common fear that our mental acuity declines as we get older. In the book, Marx references numerous ways she’s noted her brain working less efficiently than it used to, and she hilariously chronicles her attempts to combat this and keep her wits sharp.

As part of her ongoing efforts, she even created a crossword grid utilizing only tough crossword entries.

Her puzzle featured some truly great, funny clues, like “The side of the ship you want to be on if you don’t want your hair to get messed up” for ALEE and “No matter how bad your memory is, this is something to remember” for ALAMO.

While I wouldn’t count every entry in her grid as crosswordese, there were plenty of major offenders on her list. (You can check out the full puzzle in her book!)

And this gave me an idea. I would try my hand at creating my own 9×9 grid, composed entirely of crosswordese, utilizing some of the words from her list and some from lists submitted by fellow puzzlers.

[Forgive my nonstandard grid. I tried to go for the same homemade charm as Marx’s grid. Feel free to print out this post and try it out!]

ACROSS

1. Toward shelter, to salty types
3. Arrow poison OR how a child might describe their belly button in writing
5. Flightless bird OR Zeus’s mother
6. Hireling or slave
8. “Kentucky Jones” actor OR response akin to “Duh”
9. Compass dir. OR inhabitant’s suffix
12. Wide-shoe width OR sound of an excited squeal
15. No longer working, for short OR soak flax or hemp
16. Like a feeble old woman OR anagram of a UFO pilot
17. Actress Balin OR Pig ____ poke

DOWN

1. Mean alternate spelling for an eagle’s nest
2. Old-timey exclamation
3. Unnecessarily obscure French river or part of the Rhone-Alpes region
4. Supplement OR misspelling of a popular cat from a FOX Saturday morning cartoon
7. Maui goose
10. An abbreviated adjective covering school K through 12 OR how you might greet a Chicago railway
11. My least favorite example of crosswordese OR good and mad
12. Ornamental needlecase
13. Movie feline OR “Frozen” character
14. Shooting marble OR abbreviation for this missing phrase: “truth, justice, and ____”

Did you conquer this crosswordese-riddled grid? And what’s your least favorite example of crosswordese? Let me know! I’d love to hear from you!

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!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Sharknado 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, we’re returning to the subject of holidays.

I like to talk about puzzly holidays, but this week has marked more of a cinematic holiday.

Yes, for the third summer in a row, a Sharknado movie has rampaged across our screens, bringing ridiculous action and inexplicable acts of shark-fighting heroism to millions of viewers.

And I thought to myself, what better way is there to mark the occasion than to create a Sharknado-themed deduction puzzle?

So that’s exactly what I did! Enjoy!

Sharknados are terrorizing cities across America! Every day, one of our heroes (April, Claudia, Fin, Gilbert, or Nova) has bravely ventured into a sharknado-afflicted city, armed with a weapon (baseball bat, chainsaw, grenade, laser, or rifle.)

No two heroes were in the same city on the same day, and no hero used any weapon more than once. No weapon was used more than once in the same day, nor was any weapon used more than once in the same city. Can you complete the schedule chart below?

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!

It takes two to puzzle…

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I’m always on the lookout for new and different puzzle styles to discuss here, because there’s a seemingly endless supply of puzzly inventiveness in the world, and I endeavor to share as much of it as possible with my fellow PuzzleNationers.

A few days ago, I was reminded of a brain teaser variation that’s a little different from our usual fare, and I thought I’d put it in the spotlight.

Today, we’re talking about guided lateral thinking puzzles!

Let me start you off with a standard lateral thinking puzzle (which is a fancy way of saying “brain teaser”). This one is an all-time favorite of mine:

A man is found murdered on the floor with 53 bicycles scattered around the room. How did he die?

Now, this may sound like a particularly violent end at a local bike shop, but the lateral thinkers and brain teaser proficient types out there have probably already sussed out the true answer.

The man cheated at cards and was killed for it. Bicycle is a famous brand of playing cards, and with 52 cards in your standard deck, 53 implies cheating.

That’s a pretty simple one.

The difference between regular brain teasers like that one and guided lateral thinking puzzles is that a guided lateral thinking puzzle requires two people: one to ask questions in the hopes of solving it, and the other to know the solution and answer the other player’s questions with only yes or no responses.

The scenarios are often more involved than your usual brain teaser, but you’re only given a brief story to start with. These are not rigid brain teasers like the seesaw one we tackled earlier this year. These puzzles depend on your ability to narrow down the possibilities with strategically worded questions.

Here’s an example of a guided lateral thinking puzzle:

Ann, Ben, and Chris are siblings who were conceived on the same day. This year, Ann will be attending third grade while Ben and Chris attend kindergarten. Why?

While you could try to come up with a solution with just this information, guided lateral thinking puzzles encourage you to talk through your suspicions as you ask questions and uncover the truth.

So, what would you ask? What’s your starting theory? (My first instinct was to go straight to imagining how Leap Day was involved, before quickly realizing that was a ridiculous supposition.)

But maybe you have a better theory. Were they conceived by different people? Was it the same day, but different years?

Posing these questions to your partner in puzzly crime could help you find the answer.

The folks at I09 posted a link to six guided lateral thinking puzzles (including the Ann/Ben/Chris one I mentioned above). Give it a listen and try cracking these puzzles alongside the podcasters!

And let me know how you did! Did you solve any of them right away? Did any of them thoroughly stump you? And would you like to see more puzzles like this on PuzzleNation Blog in the future?

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!

Puzzles in Plain Sight: Coded Puzzles!

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Given the nature of my line of work, I think about puzzles a lot. But, as it turns out, even when I’m not thinking about puzzles, puzzles seem to find me anyway.

As followers of our Instagram account know, last night I was reading a collection of supernatural short stories, Dark Detectives, edited by Stephen Jones. Partway through a story titled “Vultures Gather,” I encountered the following passage:

That’s right, an encrypted passage smack dab in the middle of my supernatural mystery story!

As it turns out, our investigators uncover a message left behind by the deceased, indicating that he was murdered! Not only that, but he makes a cagey reference to one of my favorite horror movies in order to provide a method for both exposing and punishing his duplicitous attackers.

It all starts with a letter and two pieces of parchment with Greek lettering. The letter entrusts the paper and their secret contents to the two men, in case anything suspicious should happen. (Fortuitous!)

The investigators, with the help of two of their friend’s books — The Boy’s Book of General Knowledge and The Boy’s Book of Puzzles and Brain Teasers — try to crack it with a simple transposition code, meaning one letter or number represents another. This is the basis of standard cryptograms and many other crypto-puzzles.

[Leela tackling an alien code in Futurama.]

But this only yields gibberish. That is, until they remember something from the letter he left them: “The locks are my favorite books, the key is seven.”

The seventh letter is G, meaning that should be the starting letter of their transposition pattern.

Unraveling the encryption reveals some sinister-sounding magical incantations, which they put aside for the moment.

Then they turn their attention to the remaining bits of code in the letter: the strings (5,2,2,5) and 831214926142252425798. Assuming their friend would want these codes cracked quickly, they employ a simple alphanumeric cipher.

Now, alphanumerics can work several ways.

  • Sometimes, the numbers coincide with those of a push-button telephone, meaning 5 can be J, K, or L.
  • Other times, the numbers represent that letter’s position in the alphabet. A is 1, B is 2, Z is 26, etc.
  • They can also be transposition codes, where each letter corresponds to a random number. This is the case in Codewords.

8312149261422524225798 uses the second style of alphanumeric code. So 8 would be H, 3 would be C…

Wait, that doesn’t work! Unless you remember that “the key is seven,” as mentioned above. Which means that G would be 1, H would be 2, etc.

So now, with some trial and error, 831214926142252425798 becomes 8/3/1/2/14/9/26/14/2/25/24/25/7/9/8, or NIGHTOFTHEDEMON. As it turns out, (5,2,2,5) is a hint to breaking up your answer into words, like the indicator of word length that follows a British-style crossword clue or cryptic crossword clue. This makes the answer NIGHT OF THE DEMON.

[Unfortunately, no one in the story seems to notice that THE is 3 letters, and the clue should’ve read (5,2,3,5). Oops.]

So, in the end, not only did I get a great supernatural detective story (with mystical revenge to boot!), I got a brief refresher on some of the most popular encryption styles employed by puzzlers today.

Not too shabby at all.

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!

HUGE App Announcement! (Plus Fred!)

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Hello puzzlers and PuzzleNationers! We’re doing things a little differently today!

You see, we’ve released an exciting new update for the Penny Dell Crosswords App, and I’ve invited PuzzleNation‘s Director of Digital Games Fred Galpern to discuss what the latest version of the app brings to the table.

Fred, welcome to PuzzleNation Blog! Before we get to the big announcement, I’d like our fellow PuzzleNationers to get to know you a bit. What’s your background in puzzles and games?

Thanks, Glenn. I’m excited to share more about the new app update. My background is varied. I studied illustration at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and have studied digital art & graphic design on my own ever since.

A few years after graduating, a close friend invited me to interview at the video game company where she worked. This was the start of a fun and engaging career mixing technology and art.

Prior to PuzzleNation, I worked on several video games including System Shock 2, Thief, Zoo Tycoon and Scratch: The Ultimate DJ. I also spent some time working on really fun game hardware such as the Drum Rocker and the iCade iOS controller series.

When I joined PuzzleNation, my exposure to traditional print puzzles was limited to the occasional newspaper or magazine. This opportunity to bring those classic print experiences to digital solvers has been a thrilling ride!

And when you’re not leading our crackerjack team of app designers and puzzlers, how do you spend your free time?

I get the “crackerjack” joke but it’s really true! The PuzzleNation team is very small and we’re only successful because each person is an expert in their field. Without this team we’d be nowhere.

Most of my free time is spent with my family. Fortunately, we’re all proud geeks. We enjoy the usual mix of films, TV, and reading but recently, we’ve become deeply engrossed with board games.

Not the usual fare, though — our love is the modern flood of games that mix strategy, skills and just a little luck. Our favorites are Ascension, Star Realms, Legendary, Dice Masters, Machi Koro, Sushi Go!, Splendor, Coup…and so on.

I also love to draw, play guitar & ukulele, and hope to get back to a regular running routine in the near future.

Okay, I think everyone is primed and ready for this big announcement! Let’s talk about what’s new with the Penny Dell Crosswords App!

This update is very exciting. As some of your readers know, the Penny Dell Crosswords app is consistently one of the top apps in the App Store. We receive thousands of reader comments telling us that they love the puzzles but wish there were more free ones.

We struggled with the best way to give our solvers free puzzles, and it wasn’t easy. What your readers may not know is each puzzle is created by the expert puzzle editors at Penny Press & Dell Magazines. Those folks deserve a fair wage, and so the challenge is to find a balance between giving solvers what they want and keeping our team employed.

That’s a long explanation for this announcement…

FREE DAILY CROSSWORD PUZZLES!

That’s right, every day there is a new, free crossword puzzle available in the Penny Dell Crosswords app. To cover editorial costs, each puzzle starts with a short ad. These ads are commonplace in free-to-play apps, especially competing crossword apps.

We think our puzzles and ad-supported free puzzle experience are the best available, and look forward to feedback from our app users.

Is that weekdays or every single day?

Every single day!

Now, can solvers stockpile these free puzzles for a rainy day?

Users can take as long as they like to solve a free daily puzzle. Once a solver completes their current puzzle, they simply tap to get today’s free puzzle! It’s fun and a bit challenging to complete a puzzle every day. If they need more time on a particular puzzle they simply continue solving. The current puzzle will remain on their device until they request a new puzzle.

Also, if solvers dislike the ads before the free puzzles, they can choose from over 1,000 puzzles in our Puzzle Store.

Fred, thanks for taking the time out to share such awesome news with the PuzzleNation audience. I can’t wait to check out these new puzzles! Any parting thoughts for your fellow PuzzleNationers?

Happy solving!

Download the latest version of the Penny Dell Crosswords App by clicking here, and check out all things PuzzleNation by clicking here for our homepage!

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