The blog The Most Beautiful Things has a post today about the most beautiful puzzle type.  The writer concludes that the most beautiful type is the variety cryptic crssword–a cryptic crossword with an interesting twist.  This is described as the “holy grail” of puzzle types.  There are a lot of great links in the post to variety cryptic crosswords which, as the post notes, can be hard to come by.

There’s a nice video on the Britannica Blog about a new digital puzzle.  The puzzle is four blocks with a grid of LEDs on top.  The LEDs light up in specific patterns and the object is to arrange the blocks so that all of the edges match up properly.  The puzzle is timed and can also tell when it has been correctly solved.

On the site Ars Technica, I found a little article on a symposium called “The Design of Mechanical Puzzles” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference.  There is an interesting discussion of Burr type puzzles in the article and even a puzzle that you can try to solve.

I stumbled on a puzzle blog called Puzzalot and discovered a new type of puzzle created by the author called nonoriddles.  A nonoriddle is a standard nonogram (paint-by-number, etc.) puzzle with an added twist.  All of the squares in a nonoriddle grid contain letters.  When all of the appropriate squares are filled in, the empty squares spell out a riddle to answer.  It’s actually a nice touch, because it gives you something satisfying at the end of a nonogram puzzle that isn’t necessarily a picture.  The interface for playing is also very nice.  Enjoy!

When I first posted about Trizm puzzles a couple months ago.  I mentioned that puzzles that were playable online wouldbe coming soon.  Well, the time has come!  You can now play the puzzles on the site.

A while back there was a post on Passion for Puzzles about a new kind of puzzle called KenKen puzzles.  The puzzle was featured on the Times Online site where a few puzzles were printed along with an article about the puzzles’ creator Tetsuya Miyamoto.  To be honest, I only skimmed the article.  It seemed to be more about the creator’s teaching philosophy than about puzzles.

KenKen puzzles are a variation of killer sudokus.  The layout is exactly the same.  The only difference is that the groups of boxes have not only a number, which in killer sudoku would represent the sum of the numbers in the boxes, but they also contain an arithmetic operator which tells you what to do with the numbers.  They need not only be sums.  They can be differences, products, or quotients.

Enjoy!

This is just a fun little blog post that I came across about solving crosswords collaboratively with Flickr.  It’s always interesting to see the various unintended ways that web technology can be used.

My Puzzle Fix is a puzzle blog that offers a daily puzzle for your enjoyment.  Of particular interest on this site are the “Double Meaning” crossword puzzles.  These are crossword puzzles where there are two clues for each word.  Additionally, the clues are grouped by across and down but, otherwise, they are given in completely random order.  So you don’t know, at the start, which clues go with which words.

• Passion for Puzzles has a link to an interesting game called Open Doors.  The game is played in a maze that’s filled with doors that only open in a specific direction when you move through them or move by them.
• Logic puzzler had a type of puzzle on the site called “Architect puzzle.”  This puzzle came from from a site called Wydawnictwo LOGI, that has more architect puzzles available and plenty of other puzzles.

Just a quick roundup this week. The Griddle has a new puzzle called a Braille Wordsearch. At first glance, it just seems like a wordsearch that needs decoding, but that’s not quite the case. One of the interesting things about braille is that the letters can actually overlap each other. The result is several overlapping wordsearch boards. This is the kind of puzzle that I would put more in the category of interesting than fun. Still worth a look.

I got an email today about a new puzzle called Trizm puzzles.  Trizm puzzles are based on sudoku puzzles in that you have to fill in a grid with digits and specified regions of the grid may only contain each digit exactly once.  The main difference between Trizm puzzles and sudoku puzzles is that Trizm has a triangular grid.  As a result, there are no rows or columns, just rows and crossbars.  The new layout is a little tricky to understand at first, but it has an interesting result.  Some of the triangles in the grid may be part of only one region making them harder to fill.  Others may be part of four regions.

Currently, there are only printable versions of the puzzles on the site but I’m told that a javascript version that will allow you to complete puzzles on the site will be coming soon.  There are even versions planned for the iPhone and Facebook.  Enjoy!

The writer over at the Gridless blog has written me to let me know that a modification of the Kevin Bacon puzzles can be found there also.  On Gridless, they’re called Ouisa’s Ladder.

I’ve posted before about all of the puzzles available by Jim Bumgardner at krazydad.com. Recently, he’s added thousands of Slitherlink puzzles to his site with varying degrees of difficulty and grid size.

Jim is also looking at variations on the classic Slitherlink puzzle and he’s constructed a hexagonal slitherlink that appeared in a recent blog post.

I came across a new kind of puzzle called shinro that can be found in Southwest Airline magazines.  According to the magazine, shinro is Japanese for “compass bearing.”  The puzzle involves finding holes in a square grid.  Like battleship puzzles, the number of holes in each row and column are indicated.  In addition, there are a number of arrows in the grid that point to at least one hole.

I can’t find any other examples of this specific kind of puzzle on the web.  So, I’m interested to hear if anyone else has found some.  I’m also interested in trying to make some of my own shinro or shinro-like puzzles.  So keep an eye out for that.

I recently got an email from the creator of a puzzle called Hexa-Trex.  As the name suggests the puzzle involves hexagons.  The hexagons are laid out in a pattern chosen by the puzzle designer and each has either a digit or an arithmetic operator inside.  The goal is to find a path through all of the hexagons exactly once to create a valid mathematical equation.  New puzzles are posted every couple of days and the range from very easy to quite challenging.  Enjoy.