Tag Archives: Puzzlin’ fool

The Guardian Cryptic Crossword Treasure Hunt… Revealed!

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cryptic

Cryptic crosswords have been getting a lot of attention this year.

Josh Wardle launched his Parseword daily puzzle, Barry Joseph has taken us on a fascinating journey into Stephen Sondheim’s love of puzzles and games (review coming soon!), and The Observer celebrated one hundred years of cryptic crossword puzzles back in March.

And just last week, The Guardian pulled back the curtain on a multi-year surprise for solvers that celebrated not only a milestone in longevity, but in creativity as well.

On May 6th, The Guardian published their 30,000th cryptic puzzle, which was set by one of the most celebrated voices in cryptic puzzles, Arachne. Crossword editor Alan Connor called the cryptic puzzle “a perfect little enigma.”

Now, that would have been milestone enough, but as it turns out, the setters of The Guardian had something much more elaborate in store for their loyal solvers: a treasure hunt spanning MANY cryptics.

They’d started two years beforehand.

Back in 2024, they began brainstorming something special for Cryptic #30,000.

A few months later, a series of entries began appearing in the bottom row of particular cryptics. Entries like WELL DONE, BRAVO, and HERE were intended to draw the eye of attentive puzzle fans. (This would prove helpful later for people searching back through the puzzle archives, once they’d learned about the treasure hunt.)

But the creative team were careful going forward, utilizing only chunks of words (ISOURF, INALCH, ALLENG) and not full entries. I can imagine the confusion for those keen-eyed solvers who were already on the trail when the pattern suddenly changed.

This continued throughout 2025 with solvers none the wiser.

The treasure hunt began in earnest when cryptic #30,000 was published.

In cryptic #30,000, Arachne included the phrases PERIMETER TODAY and QUICK CROSSWORD reading out in the grid. (The Quick Crossword accompanies the daily cryptic in The Guardian.) Solvers who then completed the Quick Crossword would then find the following message reading out clockwise on the perimeter of the grid:

LEADER I TAILORED BADLY

A cryptic clue was hidden in the perimeter letters!

This cryptic clue can be parsed with “Leader” as the definition, and “badly” indicating that “I tailored” needs to be rearranged. “I tailored” anagrams into EDITORIAL, pointing to the piece Alan Connor wrote that day in celebration of the 30,000th cryptic.

Arachne had also included the word ACROSTIC in Cryptic #30,000 as a subliminal hint to solvers for where to look in the editorial that day.

And if you read the first letter of each paragraph in Connor’s editorial, you get the message LAST THIRTY-FIVE PRIMES.

No, wait, wrong Prime…

Diabolical work. That was the pattern to follow in order to uncover which puzzles were part of their long-running secret message, indicating the actual cryptic puzzle numbers to search through, starting with #29581 and ending with #29989.

So what was the message? What was the final result of a year and a half of seeding and sneaking and devious wordplay?

29581 WELLDONE
29587 BRAVO
29599 HERE
29611 INCONCLUSION
29629 ISOURF
29633 INALCH
29641 ALLENG
29663 EAREYOU
29669 KEEPINGUPGREAT
29671 THEREWI
29683 LLBEAWON
29717 DERF
29723 ULPRIZ
29741 EBUTFIR
29753 STYOUM
29759 USTENT
29761 ERARAC
29789 ENOTAN
29803 ACTUALATHLETIC
29819 RACEOFC
29833 OURSETH
29837 ATWOULD
29851 BEWEIRD
29863 NOTTHAT
29867 ITSACER
29873 EBRALRA
29879 CEINTHE
29881 FORMOFA
29917 CROSSWORDPUZZLE
29921 ITSAGEN
29927 IUSPUBL
29947 ISHEDAT
29959 NOONBST
29983 TOMORROW
29989 GODSPEED

Well done, bravo, here in conclusion is our final challenge. Are you keeping up? Great, there will be a wonderful prize but first you must enter a race. Not an actual athletic race of course, that would be weird. Not that. It’s a cerebral race in the form of a crossword puzzle. It’s a Genius published at noon BST tomorrow. Godspeed!

Naturally, when the hour arrived, a Genius crossword appeared, set by the one and only Enigmatist, another beloved name in the field of cryptics.

Duncan over at Fifteen Squared did an amazing breakdown of not just the treasure hunt but the puzzle that awaited solvers at the end, and it is a mind-bending bit of puzzling.

To start, there were no answer length at the end of each clue, which is definitely a break with tradition when it comes to cryptic crosswords. And that’s for a good reason.

Solvers had to add a letter to many of the answers in order to form the words RECKON, DEDUCE, REASON, and IDEATE beyond the boundaries of the grid.

Yes, they had to think outside the box.

Many of the answers referred to luminaries in their various fields (EINSTEIN, ESCHER, LEONARDO, MANDELA, WATSON, CERVANTES, etc.), making the Genius crossword rather literal.

The first letter of every clue ALSO had something to hide. When you removed the names of two more geniuses reading out acrostic-style, BEETHOVEN and ARAUCARIA (yet another beloved cryptic setter), you get the message IT IS WHAT GENIUSES DO.

Which ties back to thinking outside the box.

Wow. What a puzzle.

So, did the puzzle live up to the hype after ALL of this amazing build-up?

I’ll give the last word to Redditor colinbeveridge, who shared this heartfelt response to the entire endeavor:

I’ve finally followed the rabbit-hole all the way to the bottom and… wow. Just blown away by the whole thing, to the point of tears at the final mic-drop.

It’s as if a dedicated team of clever people co-ordinated in secret for a year and a half to deliver something that felt like it was designed just for me (and possibly you, if you’re here). Gorgeous, beautiful work.

WELL DONE and BRAVO, Guardian editors and setters and contributors. What an amazing gift to offer your solvers.

Good luck topping this one when you get to the next 30,000 puzzle goal line!

Are you a cryptic solver, fellow puzzler? Would you have been unable to unravel The Guardian’s crafty clues and hidden hints? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.

Puzzly Events in the Boston Area This Summer!

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Back in April, I helped spread the word about The Wedding Party, an interactive puzzle experience running in Boston from May to the middle of June.

It’s hosted by our friends at Club Drosselmeyer, who are amazing performers, puzzlers, and event planners who have been branching out in recent years to great success!

And I’m excited to share that The Wedding Party will be running additional Fridays and Saturdays through August 1st!

That’s so many new opportunities to check out this delightful “playable theater” experience. Who doesn’t love a wedding with all the pomp and circumstance and spies and secret plots and potentially world-endangering threats?

You know, wedding stuff!

And that’s not all! If you’re in the Boston area, you’re absolutely spoiled for puzzly choices this summer!

You can add a little exercise and exploration to your puzzling with The Big Dig Treasure Hunt from The Massachusetts Mysteries!

On Saturday, June 13th and Saturday, July 18th, The Big Dig Treasure Hunt challenges you (and a couple of teammates) to walk through Downtown Boston, solving puzzles for a few hours.

Stephanie Yang (who created some of the puzzles for The Wedding Party) has masterminded this event, and as someone who has participated in The Great Urban Race and similar city-based puzzly challenges, this one sounds like a winner!

Click here for more details and ticket information.

And for Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts or puzzle fans who enjoy a pint with their adventuring, Incantrix Productions is hosting a D&D-inspired bar crawl in Malden, Massachusetts!

Choose your class, interact with guild members, help them solve problems, and enjoy a few drinks along the way! It’s a casual D&D LARP-style event that sounds like a great time for longtime RPG fans AND a marvelous way to introduce new players to roleplaying in a fun setting!

As the organizers say on Eventbrite: “You’ll solve puzzles, make choices, drink potions, argue philosophy, and possibly die.”

What more could you ask from a pub crawl?

Will you be attending any of these amazing events, fellow puzzlers? Is there an event near you that you’d like to see featured on PuzzCulture? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.

June Puzzles and Games News Roundup: Upcoming Tournaments, Events, and Free RPG Day!

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There’s so much going on in the intertwined worlds of puzzles and games to get into, so let’s skip the intro and get to the good stuff!

Westwords Crossword Tournament Is Almost Here!

On Sunday June 14th, Berkeley, California will host the third annual Westwords event. It’s only a few weeks away!

This event is being held both in-person and online, with four themed puzzles and two themeless/freestyle puzzles to challenge solvers. The list of constructors for this year’s event is quite impressive: Andrea Carla Michaels, Byron Walden, Mark Axel, Rebecca Goldstein, Sarah Sinclair, Sophia Maymudes, Mallory Montgomery, and Zhou Zhang.

Go to westwordsbestwords.com for full details and get in on the fun!

lolla-logo

Lollapuzzoola, Midwest Crossword Tournament, and Boswords Fast Approaching!

And there are plenty of other crossword events coming up in the next few months to keep ambitious puzzlers busy!

Registration is already open for Lollapuzzoola 19 on August 15th in New York City, as well as for the Midwest Crossword Tournament on October 3rd in Chicago.

Not only that, but registration for this year’s Boswords Summer Tournament opens Wednesday June 17th!

boswords new

The event itself is happening on July 26th in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, and is sure to be a great time.

Man, we’ve got Westwords in June, Boswords in July, Lollapuzzoola in August, and Midwest in October! Tournaments galore!

International Day of Play!

June 11th marks the third annual International Day of Play!

The United Nations, through UNICEF, created International Day of Play in 2024 to raise awareness of how important the act of playing is to the development and well-being of children.

This year’s theme for International Day of Play is “Protect play, protect childhood.”

Play is so important for all of us. It fosters relationship building and cooperation, reinforces friendly competition and concepts of right and wrong, and maintains that childlike love and whimsy that comes with play that so many of us, young and old, must hold onto at all costs in a world that is so often unkind, unfriendly, and unfair.

You can find out more about International Day of Play on UNICEF’s website.

Free RPG Day is coming soon!

Last, but certainly not least, Free RPG Day is Saturday, June 27th.

The concept behind Free RPG Day is simple. All over the world (but mostly in the United States), local game shops, hobby shops, and other outlets team up with RPG publishers to distribute new, fresh, and most importantly, free material for all sorts of different roleplaying games, systems, and settings.

Sometimes they’re quickstart versions of the games to introduce new players. Sometimes they’re exclusive adventures or modules to play either in-store or at home. Othertimes, they’re entirely new games, free of charge.

Not only can you receive a wealth of new ideas and playing options in one fell swoop, but it serves as a terrific way to meet fellow roleplayers and build a community of game enthusiasts.

You can click this helpful link to find local spots near you that are participating in Free RPG Day, and I would highly recommend searching online for local game shops, game cafes, and even community centers like your local public library to see who is participating.

These shops will often be running demonstrations of games, tutorials on how to play, hosting raffles and contests, and offering terrific sale prices to encourage you to find the game that fits you best.

Every year, dozens of companies get involved, not only to encourage the growth of the game world, but to promote their own products. And what better way is there to get people hooked than with free exclusive materials begging to be tried out?

Keep your eyes peeled for this year’s edition of the Level 1 Anthology, offered by 9th Level Games. It’s a collection of new games by up-and-coming and established RPG creators, all centered around a particular theme. Last year’s edition was all about the end of the Wild West. This year’s is about Stand Up.

This project is close to my heart because I had games featured in the previous two years’ Level 1 collections, and I also have a game featured in this year’s collection!

You can check out last year’s Level 1 Anthology free of charge on the 9th Level Games website (or purchase all five years of Level 1 for only $10)!

What upcoming events are you most excited for, fellow puzzlers and gamers? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.

Games as Diagnostic Tools?

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There’s a lot of misinformation out there about the connection between puzzles/games and brain health.

If you’re a puzzle fan, no doubt you’ve seen the onslaught of ads about “brain fitness,” “brain training,” and all sorts of promises about memory help and staving off Alzheimer’s, dementia, and other cognitive conditions.

A casual Google search will turn up dozens of articles online arguing both sides. And so much of the data is inconclusive at best.

But!

There are absolutely benefits to playing puzzles and games in very specific circumstances:

  • Tetris has been used by researchers to help people suffering from traumatic flashbacks, a type of post-traumatic stress.
  • The University of Exeter conducted a study involving more than 19,000 participants that concluded that adults age 50 and older who regularly solve puzzles like crosswords and Sudoku have better brain function than those who do not.
  • An article from Scientific American discussed how crossword solving engages the episodic buffer, one of the mechanisms related to our working short-term memory, our ability to temporarily hold information while performing cognitive tasks.
  • Jigsaw puzzle solving can induce a mental state similar to dreaming, one that helps with stress, relaxation, and mood.

The latest exciting possibility of a connection between puzzles/games and health comes from a publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which reports that playing a three-minute video game has proven effective in identifying patients with depression based on anhedonia.

Anhedonia is the loss of the ability to enjoy things you would normally find pleasure in. Basically, the goal post of “enjoyable” moves, meaning something you previously enjoyed no longer results in the same good feelings it did.

And when you consider that anhedonia is present in an estimated 70 percent of patients with major depression issues, you can see how devastating anhedonia’s moving goal posts would be for someone already struggling with depression.

So how does this game work as a diagnostic tool?

The game challenges the player to collect the most apples from a series of digital trees. With each round of harvesting, fewer apples fall from the tree, and at some point, a player will move on to the next tree.

That moment, that decision point, is where the researchers are focusing their diagnostic attention:

The researchers asked 120 game players—50 diagnosed with major depression and 70 who were not—to compete to collect the most apples falling from digital trees. Researchers use such foraging tasks because reward-seeking circuitry, especially regarding something that looks like food, has been engrained in the mammalian brain by evolution.

And it turns out that the subjects who were previously diagnosed stopped taking pleasure in the game 50 percent sooner than non-diagnosed players.

While the non-diagnosed players would often stick with a tree until its yield dropped to 5 apples, those diagnosed with depression abandoned one tree for the next while the yield was still 8 or 9 apples.

Yes, like most diagnostic tests, this game will probably prove less effective as knowledge of it grows, but it remains a valuable option for researchers.

Dan Iosifescu, MD, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, elaborates on that:

Depression is increasingly thought of as an umbrella term that may include several distinct conditions… Measuring reference points may help us identify a specific subtype of depression linked to anhedonia, clarify its disease-causing brain computations, and tailor treatments.

And we may be able to do this remotely by asking patients, rather than traveling repeatedly for in-person visits, to spend a few minutes per week playing a smartphone game that lets us quickly adjust their treatment.

Greater accessibility of testing is definitely a good thing (although at the moment, the game is not publicly available to try).

Here’s hoping this game and others like it can be used to get specialized help to those who need it.

Do you find certain games and puzzles therapeutic, fellow puzzler? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.

That One Puzzle That Means a Little Bit More…

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A year ago yesterday, my friend Maureen passed away unexpectedly.

We didn’t get to see each other much, given that I live in CT and she lived in North Carolina. But we chatted online when life allowed, and it was always a treat when I would see one of her texts or posts pop up.

Mo and I bonded over bad movies, a shared love of writing and performing, and Brak’s “I Love Beans” song from Cartoon Planet.

And she was forever baffled and interested by the fact that my day job is puzzles.

She was immensely supportive and creative, encouraging me in all my endeavors (successful or not), and every year at Christmastime, she would send something she thought would inspire my creativity.

One year it was rubber ducks to decorate, complete with markers AND clip-on accessories like hats and mustaches.

The Christmas before she died, she sent me a puzzle box.

It has four simple wooden mechanical puzzles, including a fit-the-pieces-in-the-box puzzle and a star puzzle.

I rarely take them apart and reassemble them, since I already know the technique behind each. But I often find myself handling them, reflexively rolling one in my hand or running a finger along the edge as I’m working on something.

I’m sure these would work marvelously as fidget objects. I use them to idly engage myself while processing things. I find it more inspiring than simply staring at the computer screen or the blank page while I’m puzzling.

(There’s an IT person at my office who does the same with a Slinky while he’s coding or unraveling a programming issue.)

So many puzzles, however enjoyable, are just brief (or extended) bits of fun. I solve them, and put them aside, happy to have challenged myself but ready for the next a-ha moment.

Unlike all those, this puzzle set sits on my desk, patiently waiting for the next moment when I’m flummoxed or my editing stalls out. Just like my friend, they’re ready to help me out of the next jam.

A little piece of wooden inspiration in the palm of my hand.

Thank you for that gift, Mo.

Do you have a puzzle or a game you associate with a loved one? Did a loved one introduce you to the world of puzzles and games? I would love to hear your story, if you’d care to share.

Celebrating Mystery Science Theater 3000 with a Special Crossword!

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At this point, Mystery Science Theater 3000 is a comedy institution.

This simple idea — a man and his robot pals watching movies with the audience and gleefully poking fun at them — has spanned decades and generations.

And it’s been a good year for MST3K fans.

Not only has a copy of the last lost episode of the show been found — the KTMA-era version of Star Force: The Fugitive Alien 2,” which hasn’t been available since its original airing in November of 1988 — but the RiffTrax team of Bill Corbett, Mike Nelson, and Kevin Murphy have successfully crowdfunded a new quartet of episodes, MST3K: The RiffTrax Experiments.

A glimpse of the new set!

Over the years, this show has gone from local cable to Comedy Central, then to the Sci-Fi Channel. It left terrestrial cable for a while, until crowdfunding resurrected it. Then it streamed on Netflix, and moved to its own private streaming platform (The Gizmoplex, which is sadly shuttering soon). Along the way, it has toured with live shows, inducted new hosts and new robot voices into the cast, and now has constant livestreams running on YouTube.

It has spawned spinoffs like The Film Crew, Cinematic Titanic, and most famously RiffTrax, and new generations of fans are continuing to discover the show. (Plus a very lucky few joined the writing crew in some of the latest seasons.)

And new episodes on the horizon aren’t the only reason to celebrate.

Today marks the start of Halfway to Turkey Day!

Thanksgiving marathons have been an MST3K tradition going back to the ’90s, and the Turkey Day Marathon is so beloved that fans simply can’t wait until November to celebrate.

So Halfway to Turkey Day was born. A marathon of all the previous Turkey Day events, Halfway to Turkey Day starts today and will run through June 2nd. It’s available on Amazon Prime Video, Tubi, RokuChannel, the CW app, plus Samsung, LG, VIZIO and Google Smart TVs and more.

And I’ve been working on a puzzle celebrating Mystery Science Theater 3000, so what better day to share it than today, I ask you?

I hope all of the MSTies out there delight in a puzzly little journey through the history of one of my all-time favorite TV shows.

(Click here to download a PDF of the puzzle.)

I’ve tried to make it as inclusive as possible, so no matter who your favorite host is or what your favorite episode is, there should be something for you to enjoy. (Plus I couldn’t resist coloring in a few black squares when I spotted Gypsy/GPC in the grid.)

Happy puzzling, MSTies! And Happy Halfway to Turkey Day!

[Thank you to Jennifer Cunningham, Troy Bond, and Crossword Gentleman Doug Peterson for your testsolving and input!]