Tag Archives: Puzzle to solve

Real or Fake Game: TV Shows!

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Truth is often stranger than fiction, as they say, and as someone who regularly creates quizzes, games, and puzzles for friends to unravel, that’s a core tenet of one of my favorite game styles: Real or Fake Games.

Real or Fake Games are quite simple. I present the player(s) with something — a headline, an animal, a fortune cookie fortune, the plot synopsis of an episode of The Simpsons — and they have to tell me if it’s real or fake.

So today, I’ve crafted a Real or Fake Game for you, fellow puzzler. Below are titles of TV shows, accompanied by a brief description. Can you sort the genuine article from the ones I made up?

Let’s find out!

1: Something Rotten in Denny’s

In this short-lived translation of Hamlet into an American restaurant, Ham tries to endure the mistreatment of management and find happiness while serving big ol’ stacks of pancakes.

2: Small & Frye

Nick Small and Chip Frye are a private-eye team with a twist. Frye has the ability to shrink to six inches in height, which gives him a slight advantage in investigating cases.

3: The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer

A black English nobleman is chased out of England due to gambling debts and becomes President Abraham Lincoln’s valet during the civil war. Oh, and it’s a comedy. About slavery.

4: Byrds of Pray

A comedy about all the shenanigans involved in running a small-town church that’s ALL about the fundraisers, this stars George Gaynes as Reverend Nehemiah Byrd, a bumbling priest who means to do good… but does it badly.

5: Occasional Wife

When his boss won’t promote unmarried men, Peter strikes a deal with a pretty young woman named Greta Patterson. If Greta pretends to be Peter’s wife, in return Peter will pay for her art lessons and set her up in an apartment two floors above his. (All their scampering up and down the fire escape gave the unnamed man who lived in the apartment between them — credited as Man-in-Middle — quite a bit to watch!)

6: Dial S for Santa

Yeah, this one has Santa Claus helping his detective daughter solve crimes in his off-time during the year. By checking the naughty list, sneaking into houses through the chimney, and occasionally throwing coal to distract bad guys, Santa (played by Ed Asner) and a young Teri Polo give this one socks.

7: The Second Hundred Years

A 33-year-old prospector in 1900 is buried in a freak Alaskan avalanche. 67 years later another avalanche thawed him out and he was returned alive to his astonished 67-year-old son and 33-year-old grandson. Although chronologically Luke was 101 years old, physically he was still 33 years old, just like his grandson. The two looked nearly identical but acted nothing alike.

8: The Vidocq Society

Appearing on TV two decades before true crime conquered the world, this short-run pseudo-documentary follows volunteer detectives and off-duty law enforcement solving cold cases. Too gritty for the time, people would be ALL over this one nowadays.

9: The Same Deep Waters as You

In the heyday of the soap opera boom, a harbor town is a haven for smuggling, betrayal, and sexy PG trysts. Featuring a little-seen cameo from young Tom Hanks, as well as soap opera powerhouses Eric Braeden and Deidre Hall, this late ’70s offering only lasted two seasons.

10: Mr. Smith

A top secret formula bestows upon an orangutan the power of speech and an IQ of 256. Now smarter than most humans, the orangutan formerly known as Cha Cha was given the name Mr. Smith and a job with the United States government as a consultant, advising top-level politicians on the most classified of subjects. He dressed in suits and wore glasses.

11: Woops!

An ensemble comedy about the six least likely survivors of a nuclear accident. The series was set in the aftermath of accidental global nuclear war, started when two boys playing with a toy at a parade accidentally set off a nuclear missile, which soon led to a nuclear apocalypse.

12: The Carolina

A sinister drama about a hotel frequented by celebrities (based on the Dakota), The Carolina jammed drug abuse, murder, and satanic rituals into only eight episodes, ending on a completely bonkers note when a secret spiral staircase in the basement leads directly to Hell!

13: West Virginia, MD

Three years before Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., we got a funny frontier doctor with a cowboy twist in West Virginia, MD. This gun-toting doctor was screwed out of his reputation and ventured west to help out during the gold rush. Kind to Indians and women (SHOCKER), this show only lasted one season.

14: Flockstars

A group of eight celebrities engage in sheepherding. The stars, which included actresses, a rapper, and a Paralympic athlete, were mentored by sheepherding experts. Its one saving grace was how attractive the shepherds who mentored the celebrities were.

15: Poochinski

The touching story of a police officer whose soul is absorbed into a flatulent bulldog’s body after he is killed in the line of duty. Voiced by Peter Boyle, Stanley Poochinski is easily the weirdest crime show character in history.

16: Dead at 29

One of the first edgy cable dramas, this one-season wonder features a young woman on the run from the government after escaping a lab after being experimented on. When a plague causes half the population to die the day before their 30th birthday, Callie Sparrow discovers that she and other subjects were helping the government CREATE the plague, not cure it.

17: Pour One Out

A middle-aged bartender (played by James Cromwell) has a knack for getting people to admit their secrets, and he teams up with (you guessed it!) a police detective to solve mysteries in a gritty Gotham-esque New York City neighborhood. But when they discover a mob boss is immune to his powers, they must go on the run to protect themselves and take Big Vinnie down.

18: Manimal

This single-season NBC sci-fi show followed Dr. Jonathan Chase, who inexplicably had the power to turn into any animal at will, and used his power to solve crime.

19: The Cuddlebugs!

What if bed bugs, but cute? This failed kids show featured the weird world between your mattress and the boxspring, and for some reason was populated with brightly colored bugs. For totally understandable reasons, this one only lasted 30 episodes.

20: Oh Sit!

The original title of this series was Extreme Musical Chairs. Basically, contestants compete in ridiculous obstacle courses while a live band plays in the background, and their performance determines how much money they win.

Were you able to tell the real TV shows from the figments of my imagination? Did you remember some of these short-lived television disasters? Let me know in the comments section below, I’d love to hear from you!

Twin Films Film Festival Test!

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Are you familiar with the concept of twin films, fellow puzzlers?

The basic idea involves the commercial release of two films with extremely similar plots or concepts being released in proximity to each other.

For example, if I described a 1998 global disaster film centered around an impending impact event that threatens to end most or all life on Earth, what film would you name?

You could answer Deep Impact or Armageddon and be correct either way. These are quintessential twin films.

Wait, no, not this kind of Twins film…

So if I give you the year of release and a description, can you name the twin films that fit the clue?

Let’s find out, shall we?

Twin Films Film Festival Test!

  1. 1997: disaster films centered around volcanic eruptions
  2. 2012: loose adaptations of the fairy tale Snow White
  3. 2024: fourth installments of action-comedy franchises centered around African-American cops
  4. 2004: romantic comedy films about the rebellious daughter of the President of the United States
  5. 1999: supernatural horror films with a man and his relatives, experiencing a series of frightening visions and having the ability to interact with ghosts.
  6. 2017: films prominently feature the planning of the evacuation of Dunkirk.
  7. 1998: computer-animated films about insects, starring a non-conformist ant who falls in love with an ant princess, leaves the mound, eventually returns, and is hailed as a hero
  8. 2018/2019: computer-animated films about abominable snowmen making first contact with humans, both set in the Himalayas.
  9. 2006: films about 19th-century magicians
  10. 2022/2023: adolescent girls who transform into larger creatures under certain conditions.
  11. 1994/1995: films with drag queens going on a road trip across their country (in one case Australia, in the other, the United States) in a journey of self-discovery. Both have eight-word titles.
  12. 2023: films based on Dracula released by Universal Pictures
  13. 1999: caper films focused on the relationship between an attractive female insurance investigator and a male thief who steals an expensive painting by a famous artist. (Coincidentally, the male lead in both films is also played by an actor who has portrayed James Bond.)
  14. 2010: films featuring a stereotypical villain as the protagonist
  15. 1996: alien invasion films where the earth is rapidly and suddenly overwhelmed, only to be defeated by a ragtag group with borrowed technology
  16. 2005/2006: computer-animated films involving similar animal characters from New York’s Central Park Zoo being introduced to the wild.

How many did you get? 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!

A Rhyming Puzzle For You!

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One of my favorite memes is “You’ve heard of Elf on a Shelf, now…”

Inspired by the family-friendly surveillance toy that took the world by storm, this meme (which dates back to 2016!) gives you the format of “elf on a shelf” and sets you up with a little visual puzzle to solve.

The image above, for instance, gives you Shrek on a deck!

Image courtesy of Joe-_-King on Reddit.

And this one gives us Grogu on a snowshoe!

Now, my Photoshop skills are pretty much nonexistent, but my cluing skills are fairly sharp, so I’ve opted to create a bunch of clues for you.

All you have to do is come up with an “elf on a shelf”-style rhyme that fits the clue.

Ready? Here we go!

Grumpy person on a sofa

Golf helper in a rice field

Magical boy atop an aquatic mammal

Tucker or Turner on an award

Female scientist on a panel

Mythical creature on a pitcher

Alcoholic drink poured over Mr. Morris or Mr. Levi

Public defender on an excursion

Chewy candy at a steak/lobster restaurant

Food storage atop a crane

Ruse involving a pastry store

Greater attention to detail regarding a coup asea

Prodigious author atop a candy egg

Infectious agent atop an old thin writing surface

Distress call regarding a check

Building material atop a musician or a whale

Camel located in cafeteria

Ball of air atop a device in space

Plants growing on industrial devices

Guide to freedom atop a horse-drawn ride

A Gibb brother on a cleaning device

Famed magician atop a sandwich

Autocratic rule in the Iberian peninsula

Arthropod atop a city transport terminal

Sports official atop an ape

These last few are a little tougher, good luck!

French poet using federal health insurance

Correction for a stitch

My French brother atop ceramics

“The Wolf of Wall Street” star in Arab city

Old-fashioned person in a gory home office

How many did you get? Did any stump you? Let me know in the comments below!

Let’s Talk Puzzle Codes!

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Puzzly information is concealed in all sorts of ways. Rephrasings, anagrams, riddles, puns… these are all ways to challenge solvers by hiding information in plain sight.

But puzzle codes are one of the most prominent techniques… and one of the most ways to do so.

Codes in puzzles come in all shapes and sizes. And if you’re venturing beyond the confines of crossword-style puzzling, you’re bound to encounter a coded puzzle from time to time.

So, to better equip you for your puzzly sojourns in the future, today we’ll be breaking down a few common ways puzzles get encoded!

Letter Replacement

This is what you’ll see in your standard Cryptogram puzzle. Each letter in a quotation has been replaced with a different letter, and you need to notice utilize patterns, punctuation clues, and context in order to unravel what the letters in front of you truly represent.

For example:

Guvf vf n frperg zrffntr. Jryy, yrff frperg guna vg hfrq gb or, fvapr lbh’er nyzbfg svavfurq qrpbqvat vg.

Now, the order of letter replacement is usually randomized, but sometimes, a letter shift cipher has been applied. A letter shift cipher (like ROT13) means that there is a pattern to the letter replacement, rather than the randomness of traditional Cryptograms.

For example, A is actually M, B is actually N, and so on. Once you recognize the pattern, filling in the rest of the quote is easy.

Alphanumeric

After Letter Replacement, this is the most common style of coded puzzle. And like Letter Replacement codes, Alphanumeric puzzles can either be randomized or have a pattern.

For the former, each letter has been randomly assigned a number, and you need to figure out which number represents which letter. Our friends at Penny Dell Puzzles have a puzzle called Codewords that employs this code quite effectively:

By using a crossword-style or cryptic crossword-style grid, you can use letter repetition, placement, and frequency to figure out which letters go where.

But there are also alphanumeric puzzles that are not randomized. In these, each letter is replaced by the number that represents its order in the alphabet. A is 1, B is 2, all the way to Z is 26.

You can create a devious little puzzle by writing out a message, replacing each letter with its alphanumeric counterpart, and then jamming all the numbers together without spacing. Now the solver must figure out if that’s a 12 OR a 1 and a 2 next to each other.

For example:

25152118575202091477151541203154541621262612519225208919161591420

or, for a slightly easier version:

251521185 7520209147 715154 120 315454 1621262612519 225 208919 161591420

There are also puzzles that rely on older telephone keypads, where each digit represented several letters of the alphabet. 2 is ABC, 3 is DEF, all the way to 9 is WXYZ.

So each number in the sequence can represent three or four possible letters, and you need to puzzle out the message.

Coded Math

Letter Replacement can also work in reverse, where numbers in an equation have been replaced with letters, and you need to figure out which letter represents what number. Sometimes you’ll see this with a long-division problem (often employing 10 different letters to represent the digits 0-9).

Other times, it’s more of a logic puzzle where several equations are listed in sequence, like A + C = 10 and C – B = 4, and you must use the relationships provided to figure out what letters represent what numbers.

Another variation is combining Cryptogram-style letter replacement with logic puzzles. Imagine a 3×3 grid with equations overlapping, and all of the missing numbers are two, three, or four digits, but replaced with letters instead. This is called a Cross Arithmetic. Could you solve it?

Letter Blanks

Excluding letters from a word is also an effective way to create a puzzly code for someone.

There can be a pattern, like each word missing its center letter. (And then all the missing letters spell out a message).

Or perhaps there’s a pattern to the letters missing from several words (like a letter pair or a smaller word that’s been extracted from each incomplete word).

Or maybe there are multiple blanks in a word, and you need to figure out which letter fills every blank.

These are some of the codes and methods of obfuscation you’ll encounter in variety crosswords. How did you do? Did you unravel them all?

(Originally I was going to conclude this entry with Cryptic Crossword-style cluing, which is written in a coded language all its own, but I think that topic deserves a full blog post of its own.)

Happy puzzling, everyone!

A Puzzle for Christmas and the First Night of Hanukkah!

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Hello fellow puzzlers!

Christmas has come and gone, but Hanukkah has only just begun, and thanks to the creative minds of George Barany and Michael Hanko, I’m delighted to have an additional puzzle to share with you all at this festive time!

George and Michael have titled their puzzle December 25, 2024 (clued to midweek difficulty), and they’ve provided the following preface:

This holiday puzzle, with its dual time options and its two sets of clues, offers you the gift of choice. To accentuate your experience of your holiday–whether you celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah–choose the clue set that corresponds to your personal tradition. Or, to ramp up your puzzle’s level of difficulty, choose a clue set that is outside your personal tradition. However you choose to approach our puzzle, we wish you a happy and/or merry solve!

George and Michael have playfully called the Christmas version of the puzzle HO and the Hanukkah version, OY. (You can download PDF versions of each by clicking the links provided.)

And for on-line solving with full “check” and “reveal” functionality, you can click on the links:

HO version

OY version

Reminder, a SINGLE answer grid is produced by solving from either clue set.  George and Michael are grateful to Noam Elkies, Charles Flaster, Theresa Horan, and Markand Thakar for taking time from each of their busy holiday leadups to test solve both versions and make helpful suggestions that improved it.

By request of the constructors, if you like the puzzle, please spread the cheer to your own circle.

Oh, and if you’re looking for other seasonal puzzles, check out this rectangular one created by Noam Elkies!

Thank you to George, Michael, and Noam for letting us share these puzzles with you all. Happy solving everyone!