Tomorrow marks the start of Perplex City Season 2.  The Perplex City web site has already undergone some changes in preparation.  The new site is really nice and it’s definitely become a great site for puzzle lovers.  The most notable difference is that there’s now a large collection of puzzles that can be solved online without having to buy cards.  The plan is to allow site members to create puzzles to add to the collection, but that has yet to be implemented.

As of tomorrow, Season 2 puzzle cards will be available.  There will be 256 cards again, this time in three waves.  There will also be a couple puzzles written by me (though none in wave 1), so keep an eye out.

The alternate reality portion of the game is being called Perplex City Stories now, and that should be back in April.  Presumably with another big prize to be won.

The Chrysler Aspen Snowdoku Challenge that I wrote about a while back took place today.  The winning team was a group of women from the University of Pennsylvania swim team.

There’s a picture of the event here.  And I have to say I’m a bit disappointed.  I was expecting the grid to be larger.  Also, the oversized pencil is great, but what the heck is it for?  They’re clearly laying down numbers printed on clear plastic.  While they appear to be using the pencil to do this (who knows why) they’re also clearly using their hands.  Well, what did I expect from one big gimmick?

Here’s a new puzzle. Enjoy!

pdf solution

There’s another “grow” game today on Jay Is Games. The game is called NOBuzzle tree and it’s a trial and error puzzle game somewhat like those on EyezMaze. You are given a leafless, fruitless tree and a number of options to grow on the tree beneath it. The goal is to grow the items in the correct order, but there are no initial clues as to how to do this. You must actually try growing leaves and fruits to see what happens. The key is that whenever you grow a new leaf, any leaves or fruits that you’ve already grown and rightly come before the new leaf, will also grow an addition leaf. Sound complicated? It’s not really and once you begin playing around with it, you’ll immediately figure out how it works.

Jay Is Games is having a flash game design competition for which all of the entries must have a “grow” theme. The first entry in the competition is a puzzle game called Rings and Sticks, and it’s very good. The gameplay is unlike other games that I’ve seen before. You begin with a collection of rings scattered about the screen and a stick growing up from the middle. Along the bottom, there are a series of growing options. Either grow the stick, fork the stick, fork the stick slightly wider, grow the left branch, or grow the right branch. For each level, you have a limited number of each option that you can use. The goal is to grow the stick through each of the rings.

As the levels advance, the growth patterns become more complicated. Barriers begin to appear that your stick must grow around. There are also seeds that can begin a new stick growth. It’s not long before the levels begin to get really challenging.

All in all, it’s a great first entry. I’ll be interested to see if any other entries are as good.

Le Defi is an online advertisement for the Belgian beer Stella Artois in the form of a flash puzzle game. The set up for the game is that the glass of Stella Artois sits in the middle of a giant mechanical trap to test your wits. Choose one of four puzzles to explore to see if you can win. The puzzle games are very simple. One is essentially a Simon clone that requires you to activate parts of the machine in the same order that you are shown. Another is a Towers of Hanoi clone that requires you to move a stack of gears. Still, it’s fun for something that is essentially an advertisement.

A blog called regeneration has posted some pics of custom Rubik’s Cubes available through a site called Rubix Corner. The site has 5×3x3 and 4×3x3 cubes, with additional layers that do not rotate, along with a number of double cubes that overlap and even a Rubik’s Cube cubed, three interconnected cubes.

I often think about ways of classifying puzzles, so I’m always interested to see how other people do it.  I recently came across a blog entry called “a taxonomy of puzzle elements.“  It’s not bad and it’s a good starting point for thinking about classification.

I tend to think about broader categories though and I’ve come up with three types of puzzles, based on the type of solution given.  The three types are:

• Mechanical puzzles - For these puzzles, the solution is an actual physical object in the correct orientation.  Good examples of this are the Rubik’s Cube or jigsaw puzzles.
• Pencil and Paper puzzles - The solution to these puzzles requires something to be filled out on paper.  Sudoko, kakuro, crossword, wordsearch, all fall into this category.  Anything that you would want to print out to solve is probably a Pensil and Paper puzzle.
• Question and Answer puzzles - The solution to these puzzles is an answer that can be verbalized.  Riddles and brain teasers obviously fall into this category, along with rebus puzzles and the like.  Of course, you can verbalize the solution to any puzzle, but you can’t say a properly aligned Rubik’s cube or a filled-out sudoku.

I’m  interested to hear what people think of these categories and flush out what the limitations are and how they can be improved.

Independant Gaming has compiled a list of the top 10 freeware puzzle games for 2006 with a few honorable mentions thrown in for good measure. Most of the games require you to have Windows to play. There is a single flash game called Zookeeper, which is essentially a Bejeweled clone.

Found through Binary Joy.

Mental Floss is featuring a crossword puzzle which they’re calling The World’s Geekiest Crossword Puzzle.  The trick is that the puzzle is not in English or any natural language for that matter.  To complete the puzzle, you will have to enter words in Esperanto, Klingon, Elvish, and other languages that people just made up.  There are only eight clues for the entire puzzle.  Each clue tells you a little bit about the language the answer will be in.  This is the most interesting part of the puzzle, as there are likely languages included that you’ve never heard of before.  Solving it, for most people, would be mostly a matter of research.  Looking up the correct phrase in each language.

Found through BoingBoing.

Passion for Puzzles had a post about Matchstick Puzzles.  Matchstick puzzles are rearrangement puzzles where you are presented with an arrangement of matchsticks and are challenged to move a limited number of them to form a new arrangement.  The post links to a collection of Matchstick Puzzles on Ze Frank’s website.  I hadn’t heard of Ze Frank until recently, but he’s apparently very interested in puzzles.  There’s currently a puzzle competition going at at Tanga where you could win a chance to meet Ze Frank.

Here’s a new puzzle. Enjoy!

pdf solution

Passion For Puzzles has an article about a commemorative edition of Sam Loyd’s Get Off  The Earth puzzle.  The puzzle features 13 Chinese warriors positioned around a globe.  Rotate the puzzle slightly and there are only 12.  The challenge is to figure out where the 13th Warrior disappears to.  There’s an excellent representation of this on this page along with an explanation of how the puzzle works.

Puzzlin Craft bills itself as “Just another WordPress weblog.”  It also happens to be dedicated to puzzles.  The puzzles here seem to be strictly word puzzles, including crosswords.  The puzzles would probably appeal to fans of NPR Sunday Puzzle.  It’s a very new blog, having started only in the beginning of this month, but it seems like there will be one or two posts per week.  It’s a good start for a new puzzle blog.

I’m a big fan of the EyezMaze site. The games there are unique in just about every possible way, most notably when it comes to gameplay and style. They may not tax your intellect much (most games require trial and error to solve) but they should stimulate your imagination.

EyezMaze has a new game called Neighbours. It’s a simple flash game where your presented with nine rainbow-colored tufty-looking creatures to place in nine homes arranged in a three by three square. The trick is that some of them get along and some of them don’t. And you can’t tell just by looking at them. You have to place them in homes next to each other and see if they relax or fight. The goal is to have them all happy. It’s a fun way to spend 20 minutes or so.