Derrick Schneider from Obsession With Food sent me an email about a flash puzzle game.

Have you seen the Sling puzzle game? It’s clever (the initial intro is a bit tedious, but it will give you the basics). Basically, you maneuver around a level by slingshotting your little ball of slime. Nice mechanic.

http://sling.ezone.com/game.php

It’s definitely a unique game. It combines elements of ballistics games with some of the elements of basic puzzle games.

Eric Berlin has been blogging quite a bit about Tanga recently and, in his most recent post, he mentions another daily puzzle called Common Knowledge from Puzzability.

Common Knowledge consists of two rounds.  In the first, you play a hangman type game, guessing letters to fill out clues until you have five misses.  After you’ve played about five of these games, you move on to round two.  In round two, you are shown all of the clues, to the extent that you managed to fill them in, and you have to guess the common theme.

It’s a fun little game.  And, if you’re interested, there are quite a few other puzzles on the Puzzability site.

It’s called Quzzle and it was invented by Jim Lewis with the aid of a computer.  There’s a nice write up about the puzzle on the blog for the Ebiquity Research Group at University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Most people know of sliding block puzzles through Rush Hour or similar games.  Lewis wanted to come up with the most difficult puzzle he could, which meant that the puzzle needed to have a long solution and that it needed to have lots of dead ends.  You try the puzzle for yourself with this Java applet.  You can also buy it here.

Through Passion for Puzzles, I came across a new puzzle game called cubeoban.  The game involves sliding colored blocks around to match a specific pattern.  The blocks slide as far as they can in a given direction until they reach an obstacle.  In this way, it’s similar to Orbox, but here you control multiple objects.

Cubilus seems to be a cubeoban clone, right down to identical level layouts.  The only difference is that each colored block has a unique shape in the middle.  Passion for Puzzles suggests that it’s cubeoban for the color blind.

I got an email a couple days ago from Brian at the Candy Addict blog:

I thought you and your readers might be interesteed in the Scavenger
Hunt we just posted:
http://candyaddict.com/blog/scavengerhunt2006/

It’s fun to play and you get a chance to win a BUNCH of free candy!

The scavenger hunt consists of answering a bunch of candy-related trivia questions and then unscrambling a bunch of letters to come up with the name of a classic candy bar.  It’s fun, especially if you like candy.

Through Digg, I just came across a great new puzzle site called Tanga. It appears to not yet be fully “up and running,” or so they say. It’s unclear what all will be available when this happens, but currently you can find a fun daily puzzle on the site. Fair warning: registration is required to see the puzzles.

The puzzles remind me a little bit of Perplex City cards. Each puzzle consists of a picture along with very little instruction. The answer is always one word. The first puzzle is a simple rebus, but there are other kinds of puzzles as well.

Solving puzzles gets you Tanga points, which we’re told will be the site currency once it is “up and running”, and gets you entered into a daily drawing for a free board game. Quite a bit of fun for a site that isn’t finished yet. It makes me wonder what the creators have in store.

I just came across the site Gidd Games that collects all of the flash games collected on Digg (the site used to be called Digg Puzzles.) The site has a couple games like Hapland and 3D Logic that I’ve mentioned here before. Of course, not all of them are puzzle games (or even quality games) but it’s a fun site to check out.

I just found this site today which has all of Wei Hwa’s old puzzle challenges dating back to the beginning.  So, anyone looking for a URL for the minesweeper by google challenge (as was asked inthe comments), here it is.  The others are there as well.

I recently came across this press release about an upcoming indie film called GPS and a game that goes along with it.  The film seems to be truly independant, in the sense that there will likely be no one you’ve heard of involved with making it.  It’s being billed as a suspense thriller about people who us GPS trackers to find treasure.

The game allows you to get involved.  There’s some treasure hunting involved, but there are also online puzzles and what seems like an ARG-style mystery involving the characters in the film.

The DVD release of Wordplay has been announced for Novemver 7th of this year. There will be over 85 minutes of bonus features and something called “The Five Greatest Puzzles Ever Made.” Apparently, there will also be some DVD-ROM material, including printable puzzles.

I recently came across a blog post called “A Great New Search Engine for Puzzle and Riddle Lovers” which led me to a site called Trumalia.  It took me a little while to figure out what Trumalia is.  First, it’s a search engine like any other search engine.  It doesn’t focus on puzzles or riddles; it just searches the web.  Second, it’s a place to promote contemporary art.

It’s also a treasure hunt.

If you click on the eye on the Trumalia page, three search terms appear.  Clicking on each term returns a list of pages containing that term but, if you look carefully at pages 2-4, you’ll see that one of the pages is a riddle.  Solve the riddle and a new search term is given to you.  Eventually you will be presented with an image containing a secret code.  Combine that code with the code from other images and you’ll find buried treasure.

There are four riddle series and one has already been cracked.  Happy hunting!

I always enjoy new puzzle types created by combining two familiar puzzle types. The writer of this blog entry tried to figure out the best way to combine battleship and sudoku puzzles. The first (and less preferred by the author) is to put a “minifleet” in a sudoku grid and fill the empty spaces with numbers according to sudoku rules. The second method puts numbers on the fleet of ships so that a correct arrangement of ships will provide clues to solve the sudoku. The author prefers this one and I do as well. I would think that the ideal for this kind of combination would be an ambiguous sudoku grid, that can only be solved with the ships properly placed, along with an ambiguous battleships puzzle, so that the rules of sudoku are rewuired to find the true solution.

There are sample puzzles in the post. So, click over and try them out yourself.

Firebox .com has announced the release of a new board game from Mind Candy Design based on the popular ARG Perplex City. The board game, which is played independently of the ARG (so they say), involves solving puzzles and collecting glass stones. It sounds to me a lot like Trivial Pursuit with a wide range of puzzles to solve. And that sounds pretty good.

The press release said that the game is being sold through Firebox.com, but I couldn’t easily find it on the site. If anyone can provide a link to where you can actually buy the game, let me know.

I came across this quiz on about.com to determine whether or not you’re a puzzle snob. I was slightly disappointed because it should really be titled “Are you a crossword puzzle snob?” (I think my score just officially went up a couple points.) But these things are just silly fun anyway, so I thought I’d post it.

At the KrazyDad blog, thousands of printable puzzles have been made available for free. The puzzles are sudoku and kakuro variations. They include what he calls jigoku puzzles, which are sometimes called greater-than sudokus and krypto kakuro puzzles where letters are substituted for the kakuro numbers.