Tag Archives: Puzzlin’ fool

This is impossible!

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There are puzzles out there for every skill level, from super-easy to staggeringly challenging. And every once in a while, you will come across a puzzle that feels expressly engineered to be as difficult as possible, if not borderline mind-meltingly impossible, even for an experienced solver.

If you’ve ever suspected a puzzlesmith of such diabolical shenaniganry, you’ll probably feel vindicated by Sean Adams’s post on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a bitingly funny introduction from a (hopefully) mythical puzzle book.

Enjoy!

Answers? Why, you shouldn’t have!

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Apologies for the delay in posting the answers to the Word Mastery for the Holidays post, my fellow puzzle fiends! The holiday season, so ridiculously hectic.

In any case, here are the answers! How did you do?

1.) Move hitherward the entire assembly of those who are loyal in their belief.

Oh Come All Ye Faithful

2.) Listen, the celestial messengers produce harmonious sounds.

Hark, the Herald Angels Sing

3.) Proceed forth declaring upon a specific geological alpine formation.

Go Tell It on the Mountain

4.) Nocturnal timespan of unbroken quietness.

Silent Night

5.) Embellish the interior passageways.

Deck the Halls

6.) An emotion excited by the acquisition or expectation of good given to the terrestial sphere.

Joy to the World

7.) Twelve o’clock on a clement night witnessed its arrival.

It Came Upon a Midnight Clear

8.) The Christmas preceding all others.

The First Noel

9.) Small municipality in Judea southeast of Jerusalem.

Oh Little Town of Bethlehem

10.) In a distant location the existence of an improvised unit of newborn children’s slumber furnishings.

Away in a Manger

11.) Tintinnabulation of vacillating pendulums in inverted, metallic, resonant cups.

Jingle Bells

12.) The first person nominative plural of a triumvirate of far eastern heads of state.

We Three Kings (of Orient Are)

13.) Geographic state of fantasy during the season of Mother Nature’s dormancy.

Winter Wonderland

14.) In awe of the nocturnal timespan characterized by religiosity.

Oh Holy Night

15.) Natal celebration devoid of color, rather albino, as an hallucinatory phenomenon for me.

I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas

16.) Expectation of arrival to populated areas by mythical, masculine perennial gift-giver.

Here Comes Santa Claus

17.) Obese personification fabricated of compressed mounds of frozen minute crystals.

Frosty the Snowman

18.) Tranquility upon the terrestial sphere.

Peace on Earth

19.) Omnipotent supreme being who elicits respite to ecstatic distinguished males.

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

20.) Diminutive masculine master of skin-covered percussionistic cylinders.

Little Drummer Boy

21.) Jovial Yuletide desired for the second person singular or plural by us.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Puzzled what to get someone for Christmas?

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The holiday season is upon us, and with Black Friday and Cyber Monday already making way for Thoroughly-Frustrated Shopper Thursday, I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer up some puzzly suggestions for holiday gifts.

As you might expect, I come from a puzzly family. So Christmas has always featured brain-teasing toys, 3-D puzzles, and whatever else parents and other relatives could find to keep us busy and baffled. My younger sister has passed this tradition on to the next generation with puzzle boxes for my nephews, ensuring that any holiday money is well earned by mid-afternoon.

Here are a few ideas for the puzzle lovers in your life.

For any Rubik’s Cube masters in your household, Eric suggests a marvelous variation with The Brain Cube. Instead of matching colors, you’re matching the geography of the brain, ensuring that each fold and wrinkle lines up with its neighbors. This is a real brain-teaser, available at Marbles — The Brain Store.

We’ve featured ThinkFun products on the blog before — most notably their puzzly day-to-day calendar — but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. They’ve got puzzle games and brain-teasers galore, suitable for all ages and levels of difficulty. (This hexagon one caught my eye while I was browsing.)

The folks at Hammacher Schlemmer offer all sorts of gadgetry and products, and two of them caught my eye as I perused their catalog for gift ideas.

The first was the maze bank pictured above, The Labyrinthine Piggy Bank. Any coins that fall off the track are safe and secure, but only someone with the patience and dexterity to navigate the ten feet of track within will be able to gain access!

The second piqued my interest as a lover of words and wordplay. It’s The Lexicographer’s Extended Scrabble game, a 21×21 grid with more tiles and squares than the original, allowing for more flexibility and more elaborate words. Perfect for the verbivore Scrabble enthusiast in your life.

If you’re looking for pen-and-paper puzzle goodness, our pals at PennyPress and Dell Magazines offer perfect stocking stuffers, as well as digest-sized and full-sized puzzle books. Whether it’s logic, crosswords, word seeks, fill-ins, sudoku, variety puzzles, or the Brain Boosters shown above, they’ve got you covered.

And, of course, you can’t go wrong with a one-year PuzzleNation gift subscription! With access to ten different puzzle games, as well as score tracking and two-player mode to solve with friends,  hours of puzzle-solving fun await.

This is just a small sampling of the puzzle-wonderful delights available this holiday season, but hopefully these suggestions will help you trim down your shopping list this year. So good luck, keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you next time.

Puzzlin’ ’til the cows come home

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Yesterday Eric posted a link to a marvelous site called MazeLog, which features numerous puzzles that require a bit more brainpower than the average maze.

His post reminded me of a challenging maze puzzle I discovered last year in Ian Stewart’s deeply mathy and thoroughly engrossing book Cows in the Maze: And other mathematical explorations.

Basically, you have two starting points, and your first move can determine whether you complete the puzzle or not. All you have to do is follow the instructions, which sounds simple. Believe me, it isn’t.

“Where are the Cows?” (or “Cows in the Maze”) is impressive, to say the least, and I think it’s a worthy challenge for any dedicated puzzler. Enjoy!

(I know the image above is a little small. Click here for the full-sized version.)

Puzzle Tech Support, how may I help you?

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All of the best operatives have tech support. Bond has Moneypenny and Q. Batman has Oracle. Punisher has Microchip.

My older sister has me, your friendly neighborhood puzzlin’ fool.

Allow me to explain.

For a few years now, my older sister has competed in various rounds of the Great Urban Race, a city-centric version of The Amazing Race that combines trivia, puzzle-solving, and physical challenges. And an outrageous amount of running around.

(I understand there is a similar event in Canada known as the City Chase. And, of course, there’s the supremely puzzle-focused BAPHL, which Eric covered earlier this year.)

Since it’s damn near impossible to do research on the run, competitors are allowed to have someone as remote tech support to do the electronic legwork while the team is on the move. As a puzzle fiend and a world-class Googler, I was her first and only choice.

So last weekend, for the third time, I found myself hunkered down in front of my laptop with several Google windows prepped, waiting for text messages or emails to roll in.

The first time, she was in Philadelphia.

Where is the only digital printing studio in Philly with IRIS 3047 printer? Where is the Class of ’49 Bridge? What is the river that the St. James Brewery in Dublin is situated on?

And then the kicker. Where is this statue?

I hit Google Image Search immediately, but the dimensions on the picture simply didn’t match up with anything I could find in the Philadelphia area.

Which meant either the photo was compressed or otherwise distorted, or it was taken from a weird angle.

So I went with that, looking for any gargoyles with potential, or at least a similar shape. That’s when I stumbled upon an image from Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary.

They have two gargoyles that are put up on the main gateway in early September, since they do a special Halloween tour every year. They’d gone up on the ninth.

It turns out the picture was of the second gargoyle — the first, with an outstretched claw, was the one that kept turning up on Google Image Search — as shot from below.

Crafty, crafty.

The second GUR was New York City.

Find a certain restaurant. (No sweat.) Track down the business or organization behind a certain slogan. (Took a lot longer, because she gave me the wrong slogan.) Track down a business on a given street. (Nailed it quickly.) Find a theater under former names. (Again, no sweat.) Locate the largest rare goods shop. (Got it.) Unscramble a phrase to find a business’s name. (Anagrammed it in my head.)

But again, an image-search question was the most time-consuming. I had a cellphone-quality picture of a photocopy of a picture of a cigar store Indian statue, and I had to find the exact statue in Manhattan AND its location.

THAT was tedious. But I was eventually successful in tracking him down.

This time around, she was in Las Vegas (which I believe she and her partner qualified for after performing well in the New York City round).

There weren’t any tough Image Searches this time around — or if there were, she didn’t need my assistance with it — but my trivia and puzzle skills did come in handy again.

In one instance, a phone number was translated into another language, and I had to identify and decode the number. (It was Tagalog.)

My anagramming skills again came into play, but this time in a list of comic book titles and characters that had been scrambled. I was stumped by the last one, GECRSOSN MPRIRE, for a while, because while CONGRESS PRIMER immediately jumped to mind, that was total nonsense to me as a comic book fan. Googling that phrase did me no good, either.

It was a while before I started playing around with GECRSOSN again and remembered a defunct comic brand, CROSSGEN. CrossGen Primer. I excitedly texted her back with that.

The first puzzle she sent me, though, was easily the most puzzly of their challenges.

In this zero-ten numbered puzzle, complete this chain:
8 5 4 _ _ 7 _ 10 3 2 0

Did you get it? I’m sure you have by now. From there, it was a quick Google search for the address of a certain wedding chapel where their next challenge awaited them.

I’m sure she’ll participate again at some point, and when she does, I will be there, puzzle skills at the ready.

But in the meantime, let’s all keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you next time.

I hereby dub thee Sir Cuitous.

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Have you ever been jonesing for a puzzly challenge, but your phone’s dead and you don’t have any puzzle books with you and nobody wants to play 20 Questions or Hangman?

What is a desperate, puzzle-hungry person to do in a situation like this?

Well, if you’ve got a chessboard and a knight (or just some graph paper and a pencil, if you want to go bare-bones with it), you’ve got a puzzle waiting to happen.

It’s called a knight’s tour, and the challenge is to place the knight anywhere on the board and, moving the piece as you would in a regular game of chess, you hit every square on the board once.

It’s tougher than you’d think, and if you desire an even greater challenge, you could go for a closed tour, where the knight touches every square just once AND returns to the starting square.

Knight’s tours are common mathematical problems for computer science and programming students to this day, with the endgame being to write an algorithm that will find a knight’s tour for a given grid.

A variation on the knight’s tour is the uncrossed knight’s tour, where the goal is the same but you’ve got the added wrinkle of not being able to cross your knight’s path at any point.

But you don’t have to stick to an 8×8 grid by any means. Any square or rectangular grid can offer a suitable challenge to the aspiring knight’s tour hunter.

There’s nothing quite like a DIY brain teaser to keep your wits sharp. So no matter where you are, remember to keep calm and puzzle on. I’ll catch you next time.