Tomorrow marks the beginning of the 2nd World Sudoku Championship.  And, amazingly, there will be a live internet broadcast feed of the event.

Here’s a new puzzle. Enjoy!

pdf solution

Yes, Tyler Hinman has won the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament for the third consecutive year.  There’s a great picture on the site of him wearing his Trogdor t-shirt.

The other big news is that the tournament will be leaving Stamford, CT where it started.  It will be moving to New York City and a bigger venue.  Wordplay did have an impact on attendance this year.  There were 750 contestants up from 500 last year.

Zotmeister has a new magnetic field puzzle on his site.  This is an interesting puzzle type that involves placing a series of dominoes in a grid.  The dominoes are either magnets, in which case they have a positive side and a negative side, or they have no polarity.  Of course, magnetic poles can only be orthagonally adjacent to opposite poles.  And there’s information on how many positive or negative poles there are in specified rows and columns.  The puzzle that is currently posted is quite large and fun to solve.

The New York Times ran an article today on Nikoli.  The most interesting part of the article is a discussion of why Nikoli is so successful.  Maki Kaji, who runs Nikoli, attributes their success to open forums that allow readers to submit criticisms for puzzles and post some of their own inventions.

Of course, the question that is sure to arise from all of this is:  “What’s going to be the next sudoku?“  And it’s a question that’s been asked for the past two years or so.  On the NYT site, they have three Nikoli puzzle types that you can play: Kakuro which I think would have exploded by now, if it were going to.  Nurikabe which both Wordstream and Mochikoro are derived from.  And Masyu which is an interesting loop drawing puzzle.  My prediction: None will be the next sudoku.

I recently received an email from Jeffrey Montanye about his site called Maze Zing.  Jeffrey has taken common items (paperclips, fish hooks, marbles, children’s blocks) and arranged them into mazes which he then photographed.  The maze photos are published on his site and in a book called Maze Zing: Junk Drawer Jewels.

He’s featuring a Maze of the Month on his site and there are currently six available.  With each photo, there is a series of accompanying challenges.  The challenges include finding paths between different objects in the photo and locating specific objects Where’s Waldo style.

Here’s a new puzzle. Enjoy!

pdf solution

The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament takes place this weekend.  The web page says to visitors:  You’ve seen the movie — Come join the fun!  Likely there will be an increase in turnout for the first tournament after Wordplay.

As usual, there are sample puzzles on the site.  And those that can’t make it to Stamford can play along at home for $20.  (For fun only, no prizes for those playing at home.)

More on this next week.

Edwin Wyatt is a famous woodworker and puzzle maker, author of Puzzles in Wood and Wonders in Wood.  I bring him up because Su.Doku.Es recently had a post about a puzzle based on one of his inventions.  Wyatt specialized in wooden puzzles that appeared to be impossible objects.  The object was to take them apart and put them back together (without breaking them.)  The Puzzle mentioned on Su.Doku.Es was called The Grill and had six interlocking pieces.  The updated puzzle, available at Mr. Puzzle has eight interlocking pieces.

Here’s a new puzzle. Enjoy!

pdf solution

I’ve discovered a new blog that links here authored by a young man named Winston Breen. Winston, as it turns out, is a fictional character from the book The Puzzling World of Winston Breen by Eric Berlin. It’s a YA mystery novel that features a number of solvable puzzles. Quotes from the web site compare the novel to Encyclopedia Brown or a Da Vinci Code for young adults. From what I can see on the site, Winston Breen may be cooler than both of these. Don’t get me wrong. As a kid, I loved Encyclopedia Brown, but the smoking gun in his mysteries tended to be a misplaced word or a breach of etiquette. And I distinctly remember having a conversation once about The Da Vinci Code and how it would be great to have a similar book with real puzzles. Well, Winston Breen appears to be just that.

The book has a section that allows you to download puzzles from the book. Presumably so that you can download them and print them out so that you won’t have to write in the book. The puzzles are available now to anyone, although the book won’t be out for some months. The instructions for these puzzles are incomplete, but you can still get a good sense of them. There’s a good variety of puzzles here. Definitely for a younger crowd, but I’m still impressed.

While we wait for the book to come out, there’s Winston’s blog. Right now, the only insight we get into Winston’s character is that he loves puzzles. Currently, there are two posted and his blogroll lists a number of puzzle sites, including this one.

Blocky is a flash puzzle game that is, in some ways reminiscent of the Same Game, but requires a very different kind of logic.  You are presented with a grid of blocks of different colors (that also happen to have faces.)  The goal of each round is to clear away all of the faces.  You do that by selecting rectangles in which all four corner blocks have the same color.  The selected blocks are cleared and replaced with new blocks of different colors without faces.  Of course, given enough time, you’d always be able to clear every level.  But, there’s a time limit.  And the more blocks that are cleared in a single rectangle, the more points that you get.  As you advance, more colors are added and the grids become larger.  It makes me wonder if this game is derived from a pencil and paper puzzle.  Certainly, it would be easy to create one from it.

Laser Logic is a nice little flash game where you use mirrors to redirect lasers to targets. Of course, there are often multiple lasers of multiple colors. Targets must be hit by the correct laser color or the correct combination of laser colors. And there are only a limited number of mirrors available for use. The levels get harder as you go on, and the game will remember your progress if you return again. There are no flashy graphics in this game, but I often enjoy simpler games like this one.

Update:

Tablesaw points out in the comments that this game is a direct copy of a game called Chromaton.  On the site, you can find a free download for Windows and Mac OS X.

Here’s a new puzzle. Enjoy!

pdf solution

I’ve posted recently about two of the games in the Casual Gameplay Design Competition at Jay Is Games, but now submissions are closed, and I can express general thoughts on all of the games.

• Rings and Sticks – Read my post here.
• Gateway II – A standard click-adventure and a sequel to the original Gateway game.  Lead a robot through rooms and interact with objects in order to achieve a goal that’s not apparent at first.
• Planned – An interesting puzzle game.  To solve you need to click on a series of diamonds so that they all touch each other.  When you click on a diamond it grows, but you can’t click on the same diamond twice in a row nor can you click on a diamond that’s already touching another diamond.
• NoBuzzle Tree – See my post here.
• Grow Word – A standard cryptogram puzzle that requires you to solve it one letter at a time.  It’s actually not the best interface for solving a cryptogram and you may find yourself looking for a pencil and paper to solve it by traditional means.
• Orbit – This is a simple puzzle game where the goal isn’t clear at first.  There are several orbiting planets and clicking on them makes them split off into other orbits.  There is, of course, more to discover but that’s part of the fun.
• Tower of Babblers – Again, the puzzle here is to figure out what the goal is.  And, honestly, after I had figured that out, I found the game slightly annoying.
• Sprout – This is a cute game about a seed that wants to learn how to be an acorn.  In the game, the seed can learn to be the seed for any tree that it is near.  It then decides what tree it wants to be, grows, and bears another tree.  And, of course, different things happen based on what type of tree you grow.
• Frog and Vine – This game is actually four different puzzles built around a theme of frogs and vines.
• Grow the Robot – A game to test your knowledge of boolean logic operators.  It also tests how well you can follow really complicated circuit diagrams.
• enQBate – This is a touch-every-square puzzle game (or touch-every-hex, as the case may be.)  Nothing too revolutionary here.  There are teleports.  And some of the puzzles require you to hit the same square twice.
• Chicken Grow – This game is actually two puzzles.  One is a sliding block puzzle.  The other involves water running through pipes.
• Jelly Fusion – This puzzle game is fairly unique.  It requires you to move little jelly creatures with eyeballs around the board.  You do this be combining them (and thus creating larger jelly creatures with multiple eyeballs) and separating them.  There are also move limits and limits on how large you can make your jelly creatures that vary from game to game.
• Growbal Warming – The goal is to save islanders from rising floods due to global warming.  Also, oddly, you have super powers and can get new ones as the game progresses.  The problem is that if you don’t pick the right power, there’s almost no way to pass the next level.  Which is slightly annoying.