One of the most exciting developments for PuzzleNation has been our move into the mobile puzzle-game market with our apps and iBooks. You can take PuzzleNation puzzles with you wherever you go!
Featuring 150 all-new crosswords, Penny/Dell Jumbo Crosswords has several difficulty levels and all the topnotch features in the original Penny/Dell Crossword app!
There’s also the original Penny/Dell Crossword App, available for iPad and iPhone. It features smart navigation to move you to partially filled-in entries and an alternate-clue option to help you solve!
And of course, we have our marvelous Classic Word Search iBooks! Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3 are all available for the iPad! With plenty of puzzles to keep you busy, Classic Word Search is a terrific way to pass the time!
Welcome to the latest edition of PuzzleNation Reviews! Today will be the first installment of a new review series: PuzzleNation App Reviews! That’s right, we’re delving into the world of games and apps for your tablet or smartphone!
Not only that, but we’re also introducing a new member of the PuzzleNation Crew. Please welcome our resident App player and puzzle fiend, Sherri!
Sherri will be giving you the lowdown on puzzle games and apps of all sorts, including both new and well-known games. So, without further ado, let’s explore Sherri’s first PuzzleNation App Review: Glyph Quest!
Glyph Quest is an iOS game app that combines elements of a fantasy role-playing game with a simple matching game.
I am a big RPG fan, so this game sounded right up my alley. I found it to be really very enjoyable, a terrific way to pass the time and much more than simply matching items. The simple 2D animation is cute and has a retro feel to it. You are able to choose your own character, a male or female spellcaster, and as that character, you go on quests to defeat monsters simply by matching 2 or more glyphs.
However, the game isn’t quite that easy. The glyphs represent six elements: earth, air, fire, water, dark, and light. There is some strategy involved. Making chains of matches, i.e. matching earth glyphs more than two times in a row, increases the power of the earth spell, but if you cast an air spell (its opposite) after an earth chain, that air spell is much more powerful! You also have to pay attention to the monsters you fight, as some are resistant to certain types of spells but weakened by others.
Beyond the matching element is the RPG element. Your character levels up as he or she defeats monsters and completes quests. You also have a health meter that you need to keep an eye on. Your spells get upgraded the more you use them, and you can use the money you earn from the quests to make upgrades to your knapsack, among other things. With the sack you have the ability to carry health potions and some offensive weapons.
This is a really cute and fun game. It is a great way to pass time when you want something that will engage your brain but won’t overtax it.
Ratings for Glyph Quest:
Enjoyability: 4/5
How well puzzles are incorporated: 4/5
Graphics: 2/5 (for the retro feel; the graphics aren’t great but fit the retro feel)
Gameplay: 3/5 (it can get a bit repetitive but there is enough variety with the monsters to keep it fresh)
The newest tool in the arsenal of big thinkers and big dreamers is crowdfunding, wherein creators take their ideas directly to the people in the hopes that a lot of small donations will add up into capital to make their ideas reality.
Websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have literally made dreams come true, and that’s as true for puzzle entrepreneurs as anyone else. Many top-tier constructors are going straight to the fanbase with their puzzles, and with marvelous results. Constructors like Trip Payne, Eric Berlin, and Matt Gaffney have all had success on Kickstarter and Indiegogo with previous campaigns.
And I wanted to spread the world about some other puzzly endeavors that might interest the PuzzleNation readership.
This marvelous musical duo has not only written songs about numerous nerdy subjects — board games, Dungeons & Dragons, and dinosaurs among them — but they’re also champions of self-expression and self-confidence, especially among the geek girl community. (Their song “Nothing to Prove” served as the buoyant soundtrack of a video decrying “fake geek girl” nonsense.)
Pairs, a card game for two to eight players, was just launched yesterday by the folks at Cheapass Games. A 5-minute card game where the goal is to NOT gain points, Pairs is designed to be easy to learn and easy to play.
[Click here to check out our session of 5 Questions with Cheapass Games president and game designer James Ernest.]
Apps and online games have also gotten into crowdfunding. There’s Colorino, a color-matching strategy app that would appeal to the Candy Crush crowd, as well as Puzzle Nuts 2. A sequel to the physics-based puzzle game Puzzle Nuts, Puzzle Nuts 2 challenges players to negotiate different contraptions and figure out how to transport all of their acorns from one end of the screen to the other. Fans of Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, and other mechanical-style puzzles could find plenty to enjoy here.
A master maze designer with several successful Kickstarter campaigns under his belt has already reached his primary goal, and is now striving to reach a major stretch goal. (Stretch goals are additional finish lines that creators can make available if their initial goal is met. Stretch goals often include more puzzles, finer artwork, additional game pieces, and other details that allow for a richer play experience.)
And then there’s Steam-Donkey, a card game where you try to attract visitors to your steampunk beachside resort. With ne’er-do-wells all around, it’s a game with emphasis on art and characters with a curiously distinct flair all its own.
High Heavens is a combination board game/card game/miniatures game that places the player in a battle between the gods. Right now, creator Ryan Lesser is on his second Kickstarter campaign, an expansion that will offer new gameplay options, miniatures, and characters to the original High Heavens set. (The original High Heavens was also funded through Kickstarter contributions.)
Sweet Escape is a platformer strategy app where you try to lead walking bits of candy to safety while dealing with all sorts of obstacles and threats inside a bizarre factory.
Finally, over on indiegogo, we have PuzzleFix, a photo jigsaw puzzle game actually encourages people to submit their own photographs to become new puzzles.
The amazing thing about all of these projects is that the audience, the potential fans, have an enormous role to play in not only sharing their thoughts with game and puzzle creators, but they can show their support for designers and projects they believe in, and do so in a meaningful way.
I’ve contributed to several of these campaigns with high hopes, and I can’t wait to see how they turn out.
Welcome to another edition of PuzzleNation Blog’s interview feature, 5 Questions!
We’re reaching out to puzzle constructors, video game writers and designers, writers, filmmakers, and puzzle enthusiasts from all walks of life, talking to people who make puzzles and people who enjoy them in the hopes of exploring the puzzle community as a whole.
And I’m overjoyed to have Whitney Avalon as our latest 5 Questions interviewee!
Whitney is a quadruple threat, splitting her time between acting, music, comedy, and puzzles, leaving her distinctive mark on each field. You may have seen her on The Big Bang Theory, in the Cheerios commercial during this year’s Super Bowl, or in the delightful viral video series IKEA Heights (which was secretly shot in an IKEA during working hours).
Then again, you might have seen one of her songs or parodies on YouTube, or solved one of her puzzles in GAMES Magazine. When you’re dealing with someone as creative and prolific as Whitney Avalon, you’re bound to have stumbled across her work somewhere.
Whitney was gracious enough to take some time out to talk to us, so without further ado, let’s get to the interview!
5 Questions for Whitney Avalon
1.) How did you first get into puzzles?
That I can blame, with great joy and gratitude, on my parents. My dad has worked in computers since before most people really knew what computers were, and he started me as a toddler on simple graphical puzzles (“One of these shapes is not like the other” springs to mind) and programming languages. Growing up in a family of thinkers meant I got to fall in love with wordplay, logic, and eureka moments. Lucky me!
[Whitney’s vocal chops are on display in this marvelous song about
spending too much time on the Internet, “Going Down the Rabbit Hole.”]
2.) You’re an actress, writer, comedian, and singer, but you’ve also had puzzles published in GAMES Magazine and other outlets. Do you have a particular favorite creative activity or one you wish you could devote more of your time to?
I’m one of those people fortunate enough to have always had one overriding passion (creating) who then gets to make a living pursuing that passion every day. So while the tide ebbs and flows – after all, I don’t get to choose when a TV show casts me, but I’m happy to drop everything else for a while every time one does – I love all the different ways I can make stuff that others might enjoy. I try to dedicate myself wholeheartedly to the next creative project in front of me, even and especially if it’s nothing like the one just completed!
3.) Has constructing puzzles influenced how you approach putting together videos, songs, or other visual media? Or has working in so many creative fields influenced your puzzling style?
I think spending a lot of time solving and/or crafting puzzles has, perhaps, made me more likely to strive for innovation, in that the repetitiveness of certain traditional forms might mean I’d seek more out-there options when it’s my turn to make the rules. Or maybe having a vivid imagination makes me drawn to interesting, elaborate puzzles.
I’m probably not good at analyzing my brain from inside here, but there are definitely parallels between taking the viewer on a good journey through a film or song and taking him or her on a good journey through certain puzzles – one of my published works, for example, is a 1000-word short story that not only contains a solvable mystery but also an additional layer of meta-surprise the reader will discover as it’s read.
[In this pic, Whitney displays some fantastic grayscale makeup
work and costuming. You can check out her tutorial here!]
4.) What’s next for Whitney Avalon?
More television appearances and commercials! (Including Girl Meets World on Disney Channel.) More writing! More singing! (I front pop rock band Strangely Attractive.) And, I surely do hope, more puzzles! (Most likely to appear as exclusive content in my monthly newsletter.) I can’t wait to see where the creative winds take me this year, and I’d be delighted if folks want to join me on my travels. I’ll always do my best to make you smile, laugh, and think.
5.) If you could give the readers, writers, aspiring content creators, and puzzle fans in the audience one piece of advice, what would it be?
Take a moment to ponder how improbable it is that you exist at all. Grin. Be kind. Have fun. Revel in your glorious good fortune.
Many thanks to Whitney for her time. You can follow her on Twitter (@whitneyavalon) for the latest updates, watch her videos and songs on YouTube, check out her website, and sign up for her monthly newsletter! There’s no telling what entertaining endeavors she’ll have for us next.
There have been few fictional puzzle solvers in recent years as widely known as Stanley Hudson, the irascible, curmudgeonly, perpetually near-retirement salesman in the Scranton branch of Dunder-Mifflin.
In fact, Stanley’s tendency to prefer his puzzles to actually working became the centerpiece of season 4 episode “Did I Stutter?”, where manager Michael Scott tries to figure out how to deal with Stanley’s insubordination.
In this instance, the puzzles were a key plot point, representing Stanley’s desire to do anything but participate in yet another Scranton office meeting.
But puzzles and The Office never came together more beautifully than they did in the season 9 episode “Customer Loyalty.”
In the pre-credits sequence (known in television terms as the “cold open”), salesman Dwight discovers an old file with a letter inside from Dunder-Mifflin company co-founder Robert Mifflin.
“A valuable artifact has come into my possession. I have hidden it until such time as a person of strong intellect may safely recover it. This golden chalice is of immeasurable historical and religious significance.”
Former secretary Pam overhears this, and calls her husband Jim, who is in Philadelphia, asking if he’d ever concocted a prank that would send Dwight on a wild goose chase for the Holy Grail.
Jim realizes that Dwight has finally stumbled upon The Dunder Code, an elaborate prank Jim set up years ago.
(Oddly enough, I had a similar idea a few years before this episode aired. I created a treasure map and hid in the resource room of the PuzzleNation offices. As far as I know, no one has stumbled across it yet. I suppose Jim and I are fellow puzzle-pranksters in spirit. But I digress.)
Dwight, unaware that it’s a prank, sets off on his quest to find the Grail. Puzzle fans (and fellow office drones) are invited to solve clues alongside Dwight as he uncovers an invisible ink message leading him to the ceiling above accounting.
From there, it’s mostly symbol-based clues — a key with an X attached for “annex,” a handful of cards (a flush) for the bathroom, a toy forklift pointing toward the warehouse beneath the office — and soon enough, the entire office staff is downstairs, tearing the place apart looking for the Grail. (Which Jim admits he can’t remember if he actually hid or not.)
A crafty cameraman, however, discovers the Grail’s final resting place.
In one episode, puzzles provided the ideal spark for a character showdown, while in another, they served as the perfect bit of levity to open the episode, spoofing The Da Vinci Code and once again showing how easily Jim can manipulate Dwight (and other officemates) into abject silliness.
But in both cases, puzzles contributed to great moments in a classic sitcom’s history. A very worthy legacy indeed.
On Tuesday, we delved into tile puzzles and games, exploring dominoes, mahjong, and sliding-tile variations. Letter-tile games may not have the centuries of history behind them that those listed above do, but you simply cannot talk about tile games without discussing one of the world’s most popular and recognizable brands: Scrabble.
Scrabble was created in 1938 by an architect named Alfred Mosher Butts, and was adapted from a word game he’d invented previously, known as Lexiko. His second attempt at the game — delightfully titled “Criss-Crosswords” — combined the letter tiles and values of Lexiko with the gameboard and playing style that we’ve all come to know.
A decade later, Butts sold the rights to manufacture the game, and James Brunot renamed it Scrabble. (Some sources also cite that Brunot simplified the rules and shifted the locations of the double- and triple-value squares, but I was unable to verify these claims.)
The game wouldn’t become a household name until years later when it was marketed and sold by Milton-Bradley. Nowadays, of course, the brand is not only known worldwide, but in myriad forms.
Our friends at Hammacher-Schlemmer not only sell an extended version allowing for longer words, but a magnetic version and a giant version, dubbed the World’s Largest (with good reason). Several Penny/Dell puzzles are based on the Scrabble model, and those signature tiles have appeared in game-show form and made an impact in the pop culture lexicon, offering more than a few magical moments to author Joe Hill’s thrilling horror novel NOS4A2.
And then there are the electronic versions. From Wordfeud and Words with Friends to Scrabulous (later known as Lexulous after several lawsuits), Scrabble and other letter-tile games (like Dabble and David L. Hoyt’s puzzle-game Word Winder) are ubiquitous in app stores and all over the Internet.
I was recently introduced to Bookworm, a very addictive puzzle game that deftly mixes the pattern-busting appeal of Candy Crush and other games with the Scrabble aesthetic of assigning point values to various words, encouraging you to find longer and more complex letter chains in order to score more points.
But there are board game variations as well. A particular favorite is Upwords, which is basically Scrabble, except the tiles are designed to allow you to stack them atop each other, spelling new words as you use your opponent’s moves against them. For instance, if your opponent played HENCE, you could place an F atop the H and an I atop the E, and then add other letters to the end, creating the word FENCING.
This additional wrinkle creates opportunities for outside-the-box thinking that Scrabble doesn’t, opportunities easily exploitable for any puzzler who’s adept at Changawords, Word Chains, and other letter-shifting puzzles. (Imagine the tile towers you could build, shifting SPARK to SPARS to SOARS to SOAKS to SOCKS to ROCKS!)
All of these letter-tile games and puzzles encourage anagramming skills, strategy, and a dab hand at quick math — being able to tell if you’ll get more out of a double-word short word or a triple-letter longer word, for instance — but there’s another letter-tile treat that adds a bit of speed to the mix: Bananagrams.
Bananagrams works on the same principle of adaptability as Upwords, encouraging anagramming in order to use up every letter tile in your hand. Launched in 2006 as the brainchild of Abraham Nathanson, it breaks free of the board game aspect of Scrabble and Upwords, allowing you to play anywhere, trying to out-anagram and out-grid-build your opponents in the shortest amount of time possible.
I had the opportunity to chat with Lesley Singleton, the UK PR Manager for Bananagrams, after a YouTube acquaintance posted a picture on her Instagram of a Bananagrams game she’d just played in French:
Lesley told me that, much like Scrabble, there are Bananagrams products for multiple languages (in case any Francophiles out there looking for the best possible chance to exercise their multisyllabic linguistic chops).
Although, as it turns out, they don’t add extra u’s to the UK edition. I made sure to ask, just in case. *laughs*
In the end, I doubt there’s a better vocabulary-building tool on the market today than any of these letter-tile games and puzzles. Whether you’re reaching for a banana-shaped bag full of tiles, a magnetic strip of letters, or the app on your iPhone, you’re sure to learn new words, big and small, the more you play.
(Though be wary of Words with Friends. I don’t know where their word database comes from, but I’ve played words I KNOW are words, and they’ve been rejected. Games like that give me headaches, and make me more and more thankful for go-to guides like the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary.)
PuzzCulture 