Here’s a new puzzle. Enjoy!

pdf solution

There’s a cute story on Boston.com about Aric Egmont who proposed to his girlfriend Jennie Bass in a Boston Globe crossword puzzle.  For any who are interested in solving the puzzle you can find it here.  A word of warning though… the article above does reveal the answer for at least one of the clues.

The College Puzzle Challenge is coming up next month.  You need to be enrolled in a participating college to field an official team, but there are plenty of puzzles on the site that would certainly interest outsiders.

I’ve been checking out the site Smart Kit a little more often recently.  It seems to be a good source of puzzles.  A recent puzzle that they posted is called “Letter Path.”  The letter path of the title is a sequence of letters connected by lines.  The object is to traverse the path in such a way as to spell out a famous quotation.  No letter is repeated on the path, and you will have to visit a letter more than once to get the full quotation.  Enjoy.

Here’s a new puzzle. Enjoy!

pdf solution

I always love it when a new Eyezmaze game comes out.  The latest is Grow Island and I found out about it through Passion For Puzzles.  Personally, I found this one trickier than the other grow games, even though it has pretty much the same gameplay.  All grow games provide you with a set of options that you must choose in the correct order to successfully complete the game.  The games all have different settings and different options to choose from.  In Grow Island, the setting is a deserted island and you have eight different technologies to choose from.  Obviously, the order in which you choose the technologies has a huge impact on how the civilization on your island develops.  And, as always, wrong orders can result in entertaining outcomes also.

I did some googling around and discovered that there are actually two possible (and very different) endings to the game.  So, if you find one, keep searching until you find the others.

I recently came across a site that featured Top Hat Puzzles.  Top Hat puzzles are a sudoku variation that involves a differently shaped grid.  The grid is smaller and twisted 45 degrees.  There are 22 squares in the grid and there are 12 internal areas of six squares each.  The object, as with all sudoku puzzles, is to fill each internal area using each of the digits 1-6 exactly once.  What is interesting about this puzzle is the layout of the internal areas.  In a standard sudoku, each square is part of three internal areas: a row, a column, and an internal square.  In this puzzle, some of the squares are a part of four internal areas, others are a part of two.  I won’t post a puzzle here for copyright reasons, but if you’re curious about how this layout works, you can click over.

The puzzles are small, and can be solved quickly.  It’s also interesting to note that the site’s author also seems to be working on two other sudoku variations.  One is called sequential sudoku and the other five star sudoku.  Links to drafts of these puzzles can be found at the bottom of the page.

Here’s a new puzzle. Enjoy!

pdf solution

Last month, Passion for Puzzles posted about a new puzzle called “Deducto” (presumably the name comes from deduction.)  It’s a fairly straight-forward logic puzzle that reminds me a little bit of the puzzle game called Einstein’s Puzzle, only simplified considerably.  The idea is to determine a row of letters and a row of numbers, using limited information on which numbers are in adjacent columns to which letters.

It strikes me as a nice base that maybe some more complex puzzles could be built upon.

Over a year ago, I posted an article that mentioned a little flash adventure puzzle game called Warbears.  I’ve recently discovered that there’s an entire site dedicated to Warbears–with a second mission and a thrid coming soon.  There also seems to be an entire Warbears world called Bedtime City that players can join.  There are some standard MMO features like earning credits, buying an apartment, and furnishing it.  It seems like a mini Puzzle Pirates.

Here’s a new puzzle. Enjoy!

pdf solution

I got an email a while back about a site that specializes in audiopuzzles.  Audiopuzzles are brain teasers that have been recorded, so that you can listen to them and solve them in groups or in your car.  The site has some samples and they are also selling CDs with companion books.