Tag Archives: Puzzle to solve

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Riddled and Tippled 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 riddles and brain teasers!

We’ve featured plenty of them on the blog over the years, from this Parking Lot puzzler to Lewis Carroll’s most infamous riddle. But it never occurred to us to test our riddle-solving and brain-teasing skills under the influence of a few glasses of wine.

Thankfully, Sudoku enthusiast and YouTuber Hannah Hart (of My Drunk Kitchen fame) took it upon herself to ask her fans to submit riddles for her to unravel while tipsy.

Did you figure them out faster than Hannah? Do you think a glass of wine would help your puzzling? (Or perhaps I should ask “do puzzles drive you to drink?” *laughs*)

Since people were submitting more riddles for her to solve, I couldn’t resist tossing in one of my own:

Four jolly men sat down to play,
And played all night till break of day.
They played for cash and not for fun,
With a separate score for every one.
When it came time to square accounts,
they all had made quite fair amounts.
Now, not one has lost and all have gained –
Tell me now, this can you explain?

A little something to keep you busy on this lovely Friday. Enjoy.

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PuzzleNation Book Review: Tic Tac Tome

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Welcome to the tenth installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews!

All of the books discussed and/or reviewed in PNBR articles are either directly or indirectly related to the world of puzzling, and hopefully you’ll find something to tickle your literary fancy in this entry or the entries to come.

Let’s get started!

Our book review this time around features an interactive challenge, as we match wits with Willy Yonkers’ Tic Tac Tome: The Book That Will Beat You at Tic Tac Toe.

Plenty of books can make you feel stupid, but it’s far more rare for a book to actually defeat the reader in one-on-one combat. Tic Tac Tome pits the player against the endless permutations of Tic-Tac-Toe, challenging you to avoid losses and draws and seek out the lone path that means victory against the diabolical book.

Playing is pretty simple. You choose where to place your X and turn to the page number indicated. On that page you’ll see your mark, as well as the book’s countering move. You then select your next move, and turn to that page number. And repeat until you’ve won, lost, or reached a draw.

[Both pictures courtesy of Winkbooks.net.]

This is an immensely clever idea, especially since the book offers you the chance to either go first or take the much more challenging route of letting the book make the crucial first move. (The richly smug and snarky introductory section, ostensibly written by the book itself as it taunts the reader, only adds to the charm.)

Unfortunately, I did encounter at least one error in the book (two pages had been misassigned or swapped), so be aware: there could be more errors lurking within the fourteen-hundred-plus pages of the book.

That being said, I enjoyed sparring with Tic Tac Tome, and I suspect most puzzle fans and Tic-Tac-Toe enthusiasts would also enjoy. This is prime coffee table book material.

[To check out all of our PuzzleNation Book Review posts, click here!]

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: Parking Lot edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

For those new to PuzzleNation Blog, Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and update the PuzzleNation audience on how these projects are doing and what these people have been up to in the meantime.

And today, in the spirit of yesterday’s post about The Riddler, I’d like to post a brain teaser for you to solve!

Can you explain the numbering system in this parking lot?

Also, do you have any favorite riddles or brain teasers? Let us know and we might feature them in a future post!

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!

Wait a Minute, Mr. Postman…

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With subscriptions to puzzle magazines like Will Shortz’s WordPlay and GAMES Magazine, as well as puzzle-by-mail services like The Uptown Puzzle Club and The Crosswords Club, there are plenty of ways to get puzzles by mail.

But one particular puzzler in the UK has put an intriguing twist on the idea of puzzles-by-mail: he’s challenged the carriers of the Royal Mail postal service to solve puzzles in order to deliver his mail.

A graphic designer by trade, James Addison was impressed by the diligence of the postmen of the Royal Mail, and he playfully decided to test their mettle with different challenges, including maps, word searches, pictograms, and other befuddling methods to conceal the intended destination of the letter.

From an article on The Telegraph website:

Although he enjoys solving puzzles himself, he said his hobby was fuelled by a desire partly to test the Royal Mail’s ingenuity and partly to honour old-fashioned letter-writing, following his mother’s advice that a handwritten thank-you note showed you had made an effort.

Well, Mr. Addison is certainly taking his mother’s words to heart. And it seems the postmen of the Royal Mail quite enjoy the spirited challenges his letters offer.

[To try your hand at solving some of Jim’s letters, including those pictured in this post, click here!]

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 our library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

On the hunt… for treasure!

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We’re well into summer, and you’re probably looking for great puzzly summer activities to share with the kids. And I have just the thing for you. Have you considered a treasure hunt? (And I’m not talking about spotting a chest at the bottom of your fish tank.)

You could organize one yourself! My friend told me a story about a treasure hunt her uncle masterminded for her and her siblings one year. He went out at low tide with a small chest of fake jewels (plus her mother’s actual pearl necklace, which she tossed in for fun), and buried it, prepared to bring the kids back a day or two later with a treasure map and let them “discover” it.

Naturally, a storm came through the next day, so they couldn’t dig it up. It was a few days before they could organize the treasure hunt, and when low tide came, the storm had so changed the landmarks and sandbars that they never found the treasure chest.

I don’t want to discourage you from embarking on your own treasure hunt adventures… just make sure it’s a place you have maximum control over.

Of course, you could always pursue one of the real-life treasure hunts lurking out there for the industrious amateur adventurer. We’ve written about a few of them in the past, but they’re hardly the only examples. For an aspiring Indiana Jones or lost member of the Goonies, real treasure awaits you.

One, surrounding a bronze statue of an owl, requires a trip to France, though. A man named Max Valentin buried it, and whomever unravels eleven clues and finds it can exchange it for a second statue valued at one million francs. (As long as you don’t get too overzealous and blow up a chapel in your quest to find it, as one amateur treasure hunter did.)

For one with an American twist, you could try to solve the mystery of the Beale ciphers. Three encrypted texts from the 1800s detail the location of a hidden cache of gold, silver, and jewels, and astonishingly enough, The Declaration of Independence is supposed to be the key to cracking the code!

While the ciphers and the story might be a hoax, you could still be the one to solve the mystery! (One group of treasure hunters stumbled upon Civil War artifacts while digging in the wrong place.)

Whether it’s a Dead Sea Scroll or the last missing treasure from a brilliant tie-in to a book, treasure could be yours this summer, even in your own backyard.

[Thanks to IO9 for inspiring this post.]

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 our library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

Puzzles from Across the Sea

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A fellow puzzler passed me a copy of a Spanish puzzle book, and I thought I would share its intriguing visual and linguistic stylings with the PuzzleNation audience. (I’ve done this once before with a German puzzle book, and I hope to obtain more from other countries to really give PuzzleNation a PuzzleInternational flavor!)

Now, my Spanish isn’t as sharp as it used to be — any facility I once had with the language, I credit to years spent selling hot dogs outside a Home Depot, rather than six years of classes across middle school and high school — but I should be able to muddle through enough to explain the variations in these puzzles from ones you might be more familiar with.

In any case, let’s get to the puzzles! [Click on each for a larger version.]

The first thing you notice about these clued grids is that there’s none of the diagonal symmetry that defines traditional crosswords. Instead, there’s a curious singlet-letter arrangement along the top and left side. (It’s almost like a kakuro puzzle, with shared clue boxes offering across and down hints.)

Here the across and down clues offer hints for overlapping letters, like a Brick by Brick mixed with a Camouflage puzzle.

This puzzle works by isolating syllables in each hexagon cell, and creating words by reading these syllables in the direction indicated by the arrows next to each clue.

In this “sopa de letras” — a word search, but literally translated as “soup of letters” — the solver must identify each of the 12 drawings around the grid and find those words in the grid.

This one is pretty self-explanatory, as the solver places letters to form five-letter words according to the set letters and the arrows provided. (Interestingly enough, the title translates as “Noughts and Crosses.”)

Ah, here’s something familar! A logic puzzle is a logic puzzle no matter where you travel.

This wonderful spread of variety puzzles offers an array of challenges, with puzzles involving encryption, letter-shifting, deduction, and brain teasers!

It’s always a treat to explore puzzles from another culture’s perspective. Thanks for taking this journey with us today.

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!