Here are two new flash puzzle games for your enjoyment.

Bloktonik is something like four-way Tetris. Individual blocks of different colors fall from the four different sides of the screen. The goal is to gather blocks in the center of the screen get four or more blocks of the same color together. Blocks will move from one side of the screen to the other and will not stop unless they encounter a block. And the last thing you want is for a block to make it all the way across, earning you a skull-and-crossbones death block.

Splash Back is entirely different. You start with a grid full of bubbles of varrying sizes and 10 bubbles stored. The idea is to use your stored bubbles to increase the size of the bubbles on the board until they burst sending small bubbles in four directions and growing (or perhaps bursting) the bubbles around them. The ultimate goal, of course, is to clear the board of bubbles entirely. It ends up being a chain reaction sort of game where a single move can end up having a greater effect than you originally anticipate. Still, it’s not quite as mindless as most chain reaction games end up being and, as the board becomes more sparse, you do have to think about which moves will have the most impact.

Thanks to Passion for Puzzles for posting about both games.

On February 27, Chrysler will be having a “Snowdoku Challenge” which is being touted as a “must-see outdoor sporting event.” They’re looking for teams of up to 8 players to go to New York City to compete against each other and see which team can fill out an over-sized sudoku made out of snow in the least amount of time. The competition will involve sitting in a 2007 Chrysler Aspen with a giant pencil on it and then using that pencil to fill out the sudoku. The first team to complete the sudoku with the giant pencil and return it to the top of the SUV wins. Winners get a trip to Aspen, Colo.

Before you start assembling your team, you need to be within a 200-mile radius of New York City. More information can be found at this press release. Here’s hoping the video of this event ends up on youtube.

A few months ago, Wei-Hwa Huang wrote a minesweeper widget for Google homepages. His minesweeper featured variations on the classic game. He announced today on his blog that he’s added a new variation, wraparound minesweeper, to his widget.

Mind Candy has released the final clue for Perplex City Season 1 and the Receda Cube could be found at any moment. The final live event for Vanishing Point will be taking place in less than an hour, and someone will soon be taking a trip to space (assuming they don’t have to pay taxes.) And a mysterious site calles ilovebees.com has just become reactive.

I release the content of this site under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license which allows reader to do what they want with it as long as they attribute me and don’t sell derivative works.

Recently, I found the site of someone who is doing just that. Otto Janko at janko.at has written a little java applet interface for my mochikoro puzzles (and those of some others as well.) Here’s a direct link to one of my puzzles. I’m excited to see my work improved upon in this way and I think this is a great example of what the creative commons is all about.

There’s a little puzzle game called Lights Out over on Passion For Puzzles. The idea is simple: there is a 5X5 square filled with lights with some of them on to start. The goal is to turn them all out. To turn a light on or off, you simply click it… but all orthogonally adjacent lights will turn on or off as well.

I got an email from sudokuguy directing me to his blog where he is regularly posting original sudoku puzzles of various themes. Sudokuguy seems to be mostly experimenting with extra internal regions (his ultrasudoku has four additional internal squares plus the two diagonals), and alternate ways to overlap sudoku puzzles (sudoku3 has three overlapping puzzles each just a single row and column off from the others.)

Currently, there are about 30 puzzles on the site for those who love sudoku variants.

Click Drag Type is a flash puzzle game (currently in its third installment.) It also nicely explains its puzzle type in the title. Click Drag Type 3 includes puzzles from all three Click Drag Type installments totalling 15. For each puzzle, you are presented with a screen with little instructions. Certain objects can be clicked and dragged (imagine that) with very specific behaviors. Solving the puzzle involves determining the unique behavior of the objects on the screen and manipulating them to reveal a number that you must enter.

A timer on the bottom keeps track of how long you spend working on the actual puzzles. And, as you solve each puzzle, you’re invited to take a “behind the scenes” look which provides a short explanation of the puzzle written by the designer.

Meiji, a chocolate maker in Japan, has made polyomino puzzles out of Chocolate.  Meiji’s chocolate polyomino puzzles come in two varieties: milk chocolate made from pentominoes and dark chocolate made from hexominoes.  The pieces fit together to form a rectangle.  Though, I don’t think that the point is to solve the puzzle.

A Transport Puzzle is a type of puzzle that is commonly found in flash games. In the strict definition of transport puzzles (found on wikipedia), the goal is to move yourself or other tokens from one part of the puzzle board to another. No piece is ever lost or added to the board and pieces can’t be lifted from the board and placed in a new location.

I’m posting this today, because I found a new transport puzzle called Silversphere on FreeGamesNews. But a number of other cames that I’ve posted about here fall under the category of transport puzzles. Cubeoban is certainly a transport puzzle and Sling probably counts too. CuberXtreme seems to be what the Wikipedia article calls an Elimination Puzzle. Orbox B is probably a transport puzzle. Even though some objects are destroyed and cleared, the object is to move from one place to another. Mindfields 2204 is very much like a transport puzzle but tokens are placed on the field, which I think would preclude it from the category in the strictest sense.

A recent press release has announced the coming of Eternity II, the follow up to the popular Eternity Puzzle.  The puzzle will be available starting July 28 (there’s a big clock counting down on the site) and there will be a $2 Million prize for whomever solves it.

The original Eternity Puzzle was created by Christopher Monckton and was released in June of 1999 and it consisted of 209 irregular pieces to be fit into a dodecagon.  The puzzle was solved less than a year later by Alex Selby and Oliver Riordan who won a prize of £1 million.  (There’s a great description of the solution on mathpuzzle.com.)  Apparently, the puzzle took far less time to solve than Monckton had anticipated and he nearly had to sell his mansion.  But, apparently, he was protected by prize-indemnity insurance.  Who knew such a thing existed?  I’m not sure why he needed the money anyway.  Wikipedia reports that 500,000 copies were sold for £35 each.  I obviously don’t know what their margin was, but it seems like they should have had the £1 million.

The new puzzle is also designed by Monckton but appears to be very different from the original.  All of the pieces are regular squares with colored patterns on them.  The goal seems to be to arrange all of the pieces edge to edge so that the colors match.  There’s a good picture of this here.

Monckton may be taking another gamble with this one.  Let’s hope his insurance company doesn’t have to pay out again.

The Beer Cage Puzzle goes hand-in-hand with the Wine Bottle Puzzle that I posted about a couple weeks ago. Put a can of beer in the cage and lock it in place. To get the beer, you need to solve the puzzle. Another great sobriety test!

Grand Illusions has a story about puzzles that grow on trees.  The tree is called a Patience Tree or a Cannonball Mangrove and at the core of the fruit is a collection of seeds that fit together perfectly.  This is sometimes called a Monkey Puzzle Nut.  When the seeds fall apart, they form a 3D puzzle to solve.  A video is available on the site for you to see what this looks like.

And the Sudoku craze just keeps on rolling.  It cracks me up that links still come up in Digg that read “check out this great new puzzle I discovered called sudoku” or something to that affect.  Anyway, thanks to Passion for Puzzles for turning up the latest sudoku song.  It’s by two guys named Rhett and Link and I think I like it better than the original sudoku song.

I found a new flash game called Mindfields 2204 through Web-Game Magazine. Mindfields 2204 is a puzzle game that requires you to guide a tank through a series of hazards in order to reach a goal. To guide the tank, you place a series of objects on the board which can tell the tank which way to turn or have some other effect. You press a button to start the tank and, from then on, the tank moves without your control until it reaches its target or is destroyed.

The early levels are easy and are mostly there to help you understand how things work. It’s not until level 10 or so that it really becomes a challenge.