WordConnect is a little puzzle game that is a little bit like Tetris with letters. Letters fall from the top of the screen and your goal is to arrange them into words. When words are formed, the letters are removed from the board. You continue to play until you can create all of the words from a given list and then you go to the next level with a new list.

It’s an interesting game and the letters fall in an order that is intended to help you, which is good because it might be too hard otherwise. There are currently only two levels, but the creators of the game seem very willing to improve it and they are asking for feedback on the site.

• Logic puzzler has a post about a puzzle called Trigon.  Trigon puzzles involve a grid made of triangles, each with a number in the center.  The goal is to fill in a number on each of the edges such that the numbers  in the centers of the triangles are the sums of each triangle’s three edges.
• Passion for Puzzles has a post about a Creative Commons cross platform implementation of Theseus and the Minotaur mazes called Nimuh.  The game is pretty nicely made and it tells the story of an extra terrestrial who visits Spain.

There’s a fun post over at the MAKE blog about Liberty Puzzles.  Liberty Puzzles makes high quality wooden jigsaw puzzles that always have a few fun shaped pieces thrown in for good measure.

Just a quick roundup this week, with only one blog post.  This post over at the Winston Breen blog struck me because the puzzle concept is exactly the same as the one used by Will Shortz on NPR Sunday Puzzle yesterday.  Of course, it is President’s Day today in the US and the puzzles are themed around US Presidents, so maybe that’s just a coincidence.  The goal is to the name of a US President hidden in the sentences that are given.  As far as I can tell, none of the sentences are the same.  So if you enjoyed it yesterday, enjoy it again today!

Will Shortz has written a little blurb about the upcoming tournament for the New York Times.  It serves mostly as a reminder that the tournament is coming up and that it will be in Brooklyn this year.  It also mentions that there will be a screening of a film called “Wordploy,” a spoof of the 2006 documentary Wordplay.

• Mathpuzzle.com has an interesting tidbit this week about “circle packing puzzles.”  The idea is to fit a certain number of fixed sized discs into a given space.  There’s a lot of discussion about how to create such a puzzle with a unique solution.
• Passion for Puzzles has a couple of interesting puzzle games posted this week.  The first is the Gaia 3d Jigsaw Puzzle which basically takes the online jigsaw puzzle game to a new level by creating a 3d environment (though as far as I can tell the puzzle is still 2d.)  The other is a game called Just Skidding.  It involves moving a worm to an apple over a series of blocks.  The trick is that if a worm moves off of a block, the block moves in the opposite direction as long as there are no other blocks in its way.
• Puzzle Monster has a new puzzle called weakest link.  You are given a sequence of numbers and asked to find the one that doesn’t fit the sequence.
• Smartkit features a puzzle this week called I/O.  It’s one of those flash puzzles where very little information is given and you have to intuit the object.  It looks a little bit like a computer circuit board.

Pluto Puzzles has a nice collection of word and number puzzles of varying kinds.  Some of the more interesting puzzles include:

• Triple Trouble - Take a group of letters add three of another single letter and rearrange the letters to form a word.
• Fifteen - Divide a grid of numbers into fifteen sections each summing to fifteen.
• Addagrams - Add a single letter to a group of words to create new words.
• Mathematical Maelstrom - A set of algebra equations arranged like a crossword.

Enjoy!

There are many kinds of puzzle dictionaries, so why not a cryptogram dictionary.  The dictionary works by allowing you to look up long cryptogram words with repeated letters and see all of the possible decrypted words.  The site uses, as an example, a nine letter word in which the letters 1 and 6 are the same, letters 2 and 4 are the same, and letters 5 and 8 are the same.  There are only two English words that meet these criteria: depending and rehearsal.

Of course, a computer programmer could easily put this book together and most people who like to solve cryptograms will want to solve them without aid.  I think the really interesting thing about this book is the way that it presents cryptograms as single word entities.  Thinking about it this way might lead to other types of puzzles.

Here’s an interesting new puzzle game called “numbrosia.” In the game, you are presented with a 5X5 grid of numbers. The object is to get all of the numbers to zero. You do this by adding or subtracting 1 from an entire row or column and by moving rows left or right and columns up or down. It’s not difficult to get all of the numbers to zero. The real trick is doing it in the fewest possible moves.

The interface to the site is a little clunky and it requires you to view the leader board to move on to the next level. Still, the puzzle is interesting.

• Jim Bumgardner reports on his blog, KrazyDad, that the online magazine Mung Being, which regularly publishes his puzzles, has published an interview with him.  Jim fields a number of questions about puzzles including what makes a good puzzle, and why it’s hard to make money as a puzzle constructor.
• Bozzball’s Puzzling World continues to greatly expand the variety of puzzles available.  This week saw slitherlink and battleships added to the bunch along with a series of Lost themed puzzles.
• Passion for Puzzles had a link to a java game called Paso Doble.  The game requires you to move a puppet around a room to land on an “X.”  There are a couple tricks involved.  First, the puppet can only take two steps at a time.  Second, you may need to walk on the walls or the ceiling to reach the “X.”
• Mathpuzzle.com has been updated twice since last week.  New links include a catalog of heptomino oddities (a heptomino oddity is a symmetric figure made up of an odd number of identical heptominos.)
• Winston Breen’s blog includes an interestig word puzzle called “A bit of this, a bit of that.”  It’s very much like a crossword in that you are given clues that can be used to fill in specified empty squares.  What’s interesting is that the puzzle is constructed in such a way that many of the squares are a part of three different clues.