For fans of picross puzzles (also sometimes called logic art or nonograms), the Wii Picross site is not to be missed.  The site has a great interface for solving the puzzles online and it allows users to create and submit their own puzzles.  As a result there are over 3500 puzzles available to play on the site.

The site is currently running a contest for puzzle submissions with the theme “Where You Are.”  Prizes include a Nintendo DS game or picross books.  Submissions will be accepted until May 18th.  Enjoy!

• Bozzball’s puzzling world is featuring four new puzzle types this month.  Including: Fillomino, Futoshiki, Ripple Effect, and Tents and Trees.  There’s also the promise of new puzzle types coming in June.  Which reminds me… it’s been a long time since I wrote a post on a puzzle type…
• Passion for Puzzles has a post about a game called Scorching Earth.  The post compares the game to migration, but I think it’s a pretty loose resemblance.  For starters, Scorching Earth is much more challenging.  It’s also less of a maze and more of a fill-in-all-of-the-squares puzzle.

A while back there was a post on Passion for Puzzles about a new kind of puzzle called KenKen puzzles.  The puzzle was featured on the Times Online site where a few puzzles were printed along with an article about the puzzles’ creator Tetsuya Miyamoto.  To be honest, I only skimmed the article.  It seemed to be more about the creator’s teaching philosophy than about puzzles.

KenKen puzzles are a variation of killer sudokus.  The layout is exactly the same.  The only difference is that the groups of boxes have not only a number, which in killer sudoku would represent the sum of the numbers in the boxes, but they also contain an arithmetic operator which tells you what to do with the numbers.  They need not only be sums.  They can be differences, products, or quotients.

Enjoy!

I’ve found a new puzzle related blog called The Puzzle Page.  The blog posts a regular brain teaser and has some little puzzle games that you can play in the sidebar.  I’ll be including posts from this blog in my blog roundups in the future.

Migration is a flash maze game that I came across recently.  The object is to move a herd of gnus to an oasis across a field of varied terrain.  Each of the terrain types represents a season and the trick is that a gnu can only move into a terrain type during the correct season.  Each time the gnu moves, the season progresses.  It’s a simple maze.

It gets a bit more challenging at the 10th level when you have to control more than one gnu.  Now you can move either gnu as you choose and moving either will advance the season for both.

Enjoy!

This is just a fun little blog post that I came across about solving crosswords collaboratively with Flickr.  It’s always interesting to see the various unintended ways that web technology can be used.

Postcards from Anna Graham is a new site billing itself as: “The world’s only puzzle/travel blog.” If you haven’t figured it out already, the puzzles on the site are anagrams and they’re presented in a unique way. Each puzzle is a postcard that Anna has sent from the place she is visiting in her travels. A few of the phrases in the postcard are highlighted and they don’t entirely make sense in the context. These are the anagrams and the challenge is to solve the anagrams so that the postcard makes sense. Each postcard ends with a trivia question that the anagrams will help you solve. You do this by taking a look at one of the answer cards Anna has provided. They list the anagrams and provide squares to fill in the answers. Some of the squares are greyed out. Rearranging the letters that fall into these squares give you the answer to the trivia question. If you’re ever really stuck, you can take a look at the front of the postcard to see where Anna is sending it from.

All in all, the site is pretty clever. Enjoy!

After coming off of my brief hiatus, I discover that the World Sudoku Championships have already come and gone.  Congratulations Thomas Snyder and the Czech Republic for their victories in the individual and team competitions respectively.

• The griddle has a new puzzle this week called a “Funky Kakuro.”  It’s a kakuro with a couple extra twists.  All of the squares that will have an even number in them are marked with an “E” and other squares, with circles in them all contain the same number.
• Bozzball’s Puzzling World relaunched this week and a lot of new puzzles of various kinds were added including sipralgalzies, akari, and slants along with the traditional favorites.

The site Sudoku World has an amusing little feature called “Safe For Work” sudoku.  The idea is similar to that of the boss key which was a feature of some old games.  The idea was that you could hit a button when your boss came by and look like you were doing something productive when you were really playing a game.  The same is true of the Safe For Work Sudoku.  It’s disguised to look like a spreadsheet that you’re working on.  Now, your boss will never know how many hours you spend playing Sudoku at work.

• KrazyDad is working on creating a new type of slitherlink puzzle called Altair slitherlink.  The grid for the puzzles is based on a medieval Islamic tiling.
• Mathpuzzle.com has some new material this week… including some interesting analysis on how many moves it takes to solve a Rubik’s Cube.

There was a little post on BoingBoing recently about a Japanese speed cubing kit.  By “speed cubing”, I mean trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube in as little time as possible.  Interestingly, this seems to have little to do with how well you can solve the puzzle but rather how easily your cube can be manipulated.  The kit comes with lubrication and mini screwdrivers (for loosening the cube’s screws.)

My Puzzle Fix is a puzzle blog that offers a daily puzzle for your enjoyment.  Of particular interest on this site are the “Double Meaning” crossword puzzles.  These are crossword puzzles where there are two clues for each word.  Additionally, the clues are grouped by across and down but, otherwise, they are given in completely random order.  So you don’t know, at the start, which clues go with which words.

Here’s a fun news story about a puzzle solving parrot named “Ten.” The story has a video with it that is a bit more informative than the news blurb. The parrot faces off against zoo visitors in what is called a “chain puzzle” which the video reveals to be a simple tavern puzzle that many readers will recognize. In fact many of you will think, as I did, that you could certainly beat the parrot.

The reason why the parrot beats all of the visitors is that the parrot has already solved the puzzle. It simply has to do what it knows how to do to take the two pieces apart. The people facing off against it are actually trying to solve the puzzle. Still, it’s pretty amazing to watch the parrot complete the puzzle and I was particularly amused by the little boy who tried to watch what the parrot was doing and imitate it. There’s something delightfully ironic about that.

• Passion for Puzzles has a link to an interesting game called Open Doors.  The game is played in a maze that’s filled with doors that only open in a specific direction when you move through them or move by them.
• Logic puzzler had a type of puzzle on the site called “Architect puzzle.”  This puzzle came from from a site called Wydawnictwo LOGI, that has more architect puzzles available and plenty of other puzzles.