Tag Archives: Wordplay

Penny Dell Crosswords Jumbo now available for Android!

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Hello puzzlers and PuzzleNationers! Happy Monday!

Right on the heels of our Friday post about new puzzle sets for our Android and iOS editions of the Penny Dell Crosswords app, we’ve got another bonus post and another huge announcement for our Android users!

Penny Dell Crosswords Jumbo for Android just launched today!

That’s right, ever since the release of our Android version of the Penny Dell Crosswords App, you’ve been clamoring for more, and we’re happy to deliver more terrific puzzle content!

Penny Dell Crosswords Jumbo offers a fleet of great puzzles (150 of them!) in one easy-to-access package!

Just click here to visit the PuzzleNation Google Play page and load up on terrific crossword puzzles today!

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New Puzzle Sets for the Penny Dell Crosswords App!

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Hello puzzlers and PuzzleNationers!

That’s right, it’s a bonus blog post today because we’ve got some exciting news!

We’ve got two new puzzle sets available for both the Android AND iOS versions of the Penny Dell Crossword App!

Just in time for TableTop Day, we’ve got our April 2016 Deluxe Set! You get 30 easy, medium, and hard puzzles, plus 5 themed bonus puzzles!

And if you’re looking for something a touch less seasonal, we’ve got you covered with the Deluxe Fun Set, also loaded with 30 easy, medium, and hard puzzles, plus 5 bonus puzzles!

Wait, there’s more!

For our iOS solvers, we’ve also got a new collection available:

Collection 13 not only offers a complement of topnotch puzzles, but it features a 5 puzzle sampler!

And that’s not all!

That’s right, an iOS app loaded to the brim with great puzzles! In the fine tradition of the first Jumbo app releases, Penny Dell Crosswords Jumbo 3 offers a fleet of great puzzles (150 of them!) in one easy-to-access package!

It’s a certified puzzle bonanza all across the board!

All this, plus a new edition of the PuzzleNation Newsletter hitting inboxes today! How can you go wrong?

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today!

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It’s Follow-Up Friday: TableTop Day Eve 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 puzzly holidays!

Saturday, April 30, is the fourth annual International TableTop Day, a day that has been set aside for family and friends to get together and play games. Board games, card games, role-playing games, puzzles…anything that involves gathering in person and having fun around a table fits the bill!

Although the actual holiday is tomorrow — making today TableTop Day Eve — we celebrated early! The PuzzleNation Crew got together with our friends from Penny Dell Puzzles for a few hours of TableTop Day fun on Tuesday! Games were played, snacks were consumed, and fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers were introduced to some terrific games.

[The spread of games available for the event. Can you name them all?]

As usual, the event started with people picking out their favorites and introducing new players to the game. This was the case with Just Desserts (a card game all about serving desserts to hungry customers; guaranteed to make you hungry) and Timeline (a card game about history where you don’t need to know what year things happened, just if they happened before or after other important moments).

One attendee opted to tackle the challenge of Puzzometry (a diabolical jigsaw puzzle) while I played a few rounds of Geek Out! and tested the pop culture and trivia knowledge of my fellow puzzlers.

[The conference room is abuzz with TableTop Day energy and fun, players strategizing deeply.]

I started recommending some new games to the players at this point, and the hit of the day was easily Red Flags, a Cards Against Humanity-style game all about building the perfect dates for other players.

The uproarious laughter inspired by the game was constant background noise while I explained the ever-changing rules of Fluxx to some curious players.

[Forgive the lack of further photos. I was so busy explaining games that I neglected to take more pictures. As a small gesture of apology, please accept this picture of me beneath a half-collapsed puzzle fort.]

We then closed out the event with two terrific card games for smaller groups: 12 Days and Loonacy. (12 Days is a lowest-card-wins wagering game based on the 12 Days of Christmas, and it has the most beautiful cards I’ve ever seen; Loonacy is a pattern-matching card game that rewards quick reflexes.)

The day was a total success, and it was a wonderful break in the middle of the day, allowing for a fun way to interact and recharge before returning to a thoroughly puzzly workday.

But that wasn’t all! To include fellow puzzlers who couldn’t attend the event in person, we had our own in-house session of Schmovie running all day.

I gave participants five What? cards (Undercover, Magical, Teenage, Flying, The Last) and five Who? cards (Barista, Chef, Princess, Pro Wrestler, Spy) to combine as they saw fit, and then challenged them to come up with the funniest Schmovie titles for those subjects.

Here are a few of my favorites:

  • Undercover chef: The Tsai Who Loved Me
  • Teenage barista: Latte to Class
  • Magical barista: Starbucks: The Foam Awakens
  • Teenage princess: Medieval Times at Ridgemont High
  • Flying spy: The Airborne Identity
  • Undercover princess: Leia Confidential

Are you celebrating TableTop Day? Let us know your plans in the comments! We’d love to hear about it, see photos, and share in the fun!

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A musical puzzle a thousand years in the making…

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Most of the time, if I’m writing a blog post centered around a certain video, I explain the story of the video first, laying out all the necessary exposition so you as a reader will go into the video properly informed. Then I’ll share the video, share a few parting thoughts, and wrap things up.

I’m not going to do that today, though. Today, I’d like you to watch this video first and allow me to explain its significance afterward:

In all likelihood, that’s the first time you’ve heard this song. And there’s good reason for that. Until it was performed on April 23, it hadn’t been heard in a thousand years.

It has taken two decades of masterful puzzle solving, diligent research, and careful extrapolation to allow Sam Barrett of Cambridge University to reconstruct these melodies.

From the article on the University of Cambridge website:

The task of performing such ancient works today is not as simple as reading and playing the music in front of you. 1,000 years ago, music was written in a way that recorded melodic outlines, but not ‘notes’ as today’s musicians would recognise them; relying on aural traditions and the memory of musicians to keep them alive. Because these aural traditions died out in the 12th century, it has often been thought impossible to reconstruct ‘lost’ music from this era – precisely because the pitches are unknown.

Akin to decrypting an encoded poem, Barnett had to identify what are known as neumes (symbols representing a form of musical notation employed during the Middle Ages, specifically the 11th century), and then puzzle out how to translate those neumes into actual notes for musicians to perform.

The discovery of a missing manuscript leaf proved to be the key to unlocking what are now known as the Cambridge Songs:

“After rediscovering the leaf from the Cambridge Songs, what remained was the final leap into sound,” he said. “Neumes indicate melodic direction and details of vocal delivery without specifying every pitch and this poses a major problem.

“The traces of lost song repertoires survive, but not the aural memory that once supported them. We know the contours of the melodies and many details about how they were sung, but not the precise pitches that made up the tunes.”

This remarkable accomplishment marks the latest in a series of transformations the work has gone through since its creation in the sixth century as a poetic treatise on philosophy by Boethius.

His work was translated, then set to music, and then lost to the ages before being reconstructed and reimagined by Barnett and the three-piece group known as Sequentia, who perform a snippet of it in the video.

There have been times while I’ve been working on this that I have thought I’m in the 11th century, when the music has been so close it was almost touchable. And it’s those moments that make the last 20 years of work so worthwhile.

This is the sort of tenacity, creativity, and resolve I have come to expect from puzzle-minded people over the years, and it’s one more example of how seemingly nothing is beyond the reach of people willing to put in the time and effort to discover (and rediscover) what was once believed lost.

Amazing stuff.

[Although the information in this post came from the original article on the University of Cambridge website, I became aware of the story thanks to this article on Gizmodo.com.]

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PuzzleNation Product Review: Mad Libs: The Game!

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mad-libs_uawibn

[Note: I received a free copy of this game in exchange for a fair, unbiased review. Due diligence, full disclosure, and all that.]

There are a lot of puzzly games where wordplay is key. In Scrabble, Bananagrams, or Words with Friends, it’s all about forming words and fitting them into grids. In Taboo, it’s all about communicating without using certain words. In Balderdash, it’s all about crafting the perfect definition, either to mislead other players or to demonstrate your mastery of language and vocabulary.

Mad Libs: The Game follows in that grand tradition of wordplay, but instead of forming words, avoiding them, or defining them, this game is about using them to their utmost in order to entertain your fellow players.

madlibs2

Each player starts with 7 Word cards. Each card depicts a word in noun, verb, adjective, or adverb form (or multiple forms, for adaptable words), and these cards are the ingredients for cooking up funny, weird, entertaining sentences in the game.

But what do you do with those cards? Easy! Just like the original fill-in-the-blank stories, you’re going to use those cards to conjure up the best ways to fill the blanks in our Sentence cards.

So each round begins with a new Sentence card and the players choosing Word cards from their hand in order to come up with the most entertaining words to fill in the blanks for this round’s Sentence card. Then everyone reads their completed sentence aloud, and a vote is held where players point to the player with the best completed sentence. That player then wins a point.

The first player to earn three points wins.

madlibs1.jpg

Now, this style of gameplay won’t seem revolutionary to anyone who has played with magnetic poetry or indulged in the much-raunchier Cards Against Humanity or one of the many other games in that vein.

But whereas those games tend to traffic in shock value for their humor, Mad Libs: The Game is all about silliness. This is a game that encourages that same level of creativity, wordplay, and surprise, but in a way that’s appropriate for family gameplay. For example, unlike the very adult themes found in CAH, the harshest words in this game are more along the lines of “pierce” or “heartless,” nothing that would raise a parent’s eyebrow.

madlibs3

[Example of a completed sentence:
“Puppies may make the world go ’round,
but it’s flower girls that pay the bills.”]

This is a terrific gateway game for younger puzzlers to get them to not only think about words, but to explore how to use them effectively. It combines humor, storytelling, silliness, and craft to make a good, clean, and most importantly, fun time.

Looney Labs is usually the home of gleefully chaotic games like Fluxx and Loonacy, but they always manage to couch their products in family replayability, and Mad Libs: The Game is no exception.

You can pick up Mad Libs: The Game here, and to check out all of our reviews of Looney Labs games and products, click here!

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The end of Sudoku?

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I recently read in Owen O’Shea’s book The Call of the Primes that there are 5,472,730,538 unique solutions for a 9×9 Sudoku grid.

Yes, five billion is a very big number, but these days, billions aren’t what they used to be. I mean, think about how many newspapers, magazines, and puzzle books feature Sudoku puzzles. It’s a huge amount of material every year.

So, the thought occurs to me…how long before those 5,472,730,538 unique solutions run out?

To be fair, it’s not like reaching Peak Oil or a point of no return. I’ve solved a lot of Sudoku puzzles, and never once have I felt like I was re-solving a grid I’ve seen before, even if I was. This is purely a matter of mathematical curiosity. How long would it take for us to use up every last possible 9×9 grid?

Man, where do I begin?

Well, if I’m going to talk Sudoku puzzles, it makes sense to start with our friends at Penny Dell Puzzles.

Across seventeen Sudoku titles, they publish approximately 23,236 Sudoku puzzles a year, and probably an additional 350 per year across their Crossword/Variety and Variety titles for a total of 23,586 puzzles in a calendar year.

Now, Penny Dell Puzzles is the top puzzle publisher in North America — #humblebrag — and let’s assume there are another half-dozen publishers worldwide matching their output. That gives us a ballpark of 165,100 Sudoku puzzles published worldwide.

But what about newspapers?

According to the Newspaper Association of America, there were 1,331 daily newspapers in 2014, and there were 1,450 daily newspapers in 2005, making an 8.2% decrease from a decade before. If we apply that percentage to the number of daily newspapers worldwide as of 2005, 6,580 titles, we get 6,040 daily newspapers worldwide. And although they may not ALL have a daily Sudoku, this will help cover some of the major magazines that also carry Sudoku that I’ve excluded from my ballpark calculations.

That gives us 6,040 newspapers x 365 puzzles a year for a total of 2,204,600 puzzles a year.

Now, for other publishing efforts regarding Sudoku, Amazon.com lists 20,718 results for Sudoku, and if we apply an average of 217 puzzles per title — which seems a fair approximation, based on the stats published by our friends at Penny Dell Puzzles, the fact that some books will have more puzzles, and some results will be ABOUT Sudoku and probably contain few to none actual puzzles — that’s 4,495,806 puzzles available right now in the world’s biggest bookstore. (Yes, obviously not all of them were published this year, but hey, this is meatball mathematics.)

Unfortunately, statistics on Sudoku are sketchy at best for the mobile app market, online puzzling, and downloadable puzzles through Playstation Network, Wii, and other gaming platforms, so I can’t factor those puzzles into my calculations.

But just with the numbers I’ve got here, we’re talking about 6,865,506 Sudoku puzzles worldwide. So, if each of those Sudoku puzzles is unique — which is possible, if unlikely — that barely makes a dent in our total of possible Sudoku grid layouts, which you recall is 5,472,730,538.

So, if we’re producing 6,865,506 unique Sudoku puzzles a year, it’ll take nearly 800 years to use every possible 9×9 grid! (For the folks at Penny Dell Puzzles, it would take nearly 232,033 years! So they’re in the clear. *laughs*)

I guess we won’t be running out anytime soon.

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