I’m getting to this a little late, but the site WiseOZ has been running a little contest called Fried Logic since Friday.  The contest consists of 8 stages and when each stage opens, you are shown a logic puzzle with no instructions for solving.  There are two tasks.  The first is to identify the puzzle.  In the earlier stages, the puzzles were sudoku, bridges, and nurikabe.  The second task is to solve the puzzle.  The first to complete either task wins a prize.  Currently, the contest is on stage 4, so there’s still plenty of time to have some fun with it.

Z-Rox is a new puzzle game being promoted by SmartKit.  The game asks you to identify a given letter, number, shape, or symbol but all it shows you is a single line cross-section as it moves from top to bottom–like a copying machine.  In order to not make it too easy, the line always stays in the same place.  There seems to be 100 different puzzles currently for the game.  I haven’t gotten through them all, but when I got to 50, the game told me I was half way there.  Enjoy!

Posting on a puzzle type is long overdue for this blog.  So, today I present Rolling Block Mazes.  Rolling Block Mazes were invented by Richard Tucker in 1998.  The idea is to move a block of specific dimensions across a grid from a specified starting location to a specified ending location.  The trick is that the block may only be rolled such that after each move, the block must rest on a face ajoining the one it had rested on before.  The block often has faces that are larger than a single square, so, in these cases, the block must have room for the longer side to land.

Here are some resources on rolling block mazes:

• Rolling Block Mazes at Puzzle Beast
• Rolling Block Mazes at Logic Mazes
• Bloxorz
• Rolling Block Mazes Flash Game

Enjoy!

Over at onigame’s blog, there is a Penrose Sudoku posted.  The main trick to solving the puzzle seems to be discovering the row/column equivalents.  Go check it out and, please, post tips if you have them.

If anyone has ever tied to solve the peg solitaire puzzle, you’ve probably reached a point where you wondered if there really was a solution.  Here’s a video that demonstrates how to solve the puzzle.

Through mathpuzzle.com, I discovered that the Cambridge Univesity Press is releasing a new series of books called The New Martin Gardner Mathematical Library.  Over at the Cambridege Press blog, they are giving away some of the books to those who can solve some of Martin Gardner’s famous puzzles.

The blog for the World Puzzle Championship has a post today announcing that there are 49 days left until the competition.  The post also features a collection of all of the puzzles used in the Belarusian and Russian Puzzle Championships.  These puzzles were constructed by many of the authors who will be contructing the puzzles for the main competition.

Back in April, I put up a post about KenKen puzzles when they first started appearing on the Times Online site.  Now Will Shortz is jumping on the KenKen bandwagon and he’s created a short video to introduce the puzzle to America.  The puzzle Will does in this video is very simple and uses only addition.  Still, it’s clear that some of the harder puzzles that he mentions involve other arithmetic operations.

With Will Shortz behind it, you can expect to start seeing KenKen puzzles in newspapers soon.  He’s also planning to realease a few KenKen books in October.

Here’s a quick news tidbit.  Next week, the New York Times will feature crossword puzzles constructed by students aged 15-19.

I got an email about a new site called The URL Riddle.  It’s one of those sites where each page presents you with a riddle and the answer to the riddle is the next page that you need to go to.

The author is looking for feedback, so post any thoughts on the site here.  One thing that I noticed was that on sites like this, players can often feel like they are making no progress.  It’s often good to have pages up for answers that players are likely to guess with a short message and maybe another hint.  I’ve emailed the author with this suggestion, so maybe we eill see improvements soon.