Here’s a great post for anyone who likes woodworking and making puzzles. The author of the post has gathered free puzzle plans from around the web. It’s worth taking a look at, even if you don’t intend to make any of the puzzles as many fun designs are on display.
SmartKit is featuring a new puzzle by Peter Grabarchuk called Strimko. It’s a sudoku variation where, instead of the traditional square grid divided into sections, there’s a grid of circles connected by lines. The circles that are connected by lines create the equivalent of the internal sections.
The Griddle has another sudoku variation up called Quad Clue Sudoku. This variation features a six by six sudoku grid with four numbers at some of the grid intersection points. These four numbers correspond to the four numbers in the four ajoining squares. It’s another way of providing starting clues, without telling you exactly where they are. Enjoy!
iRectangles is yet another puzzle app for the iPhone. This app is based on the nikoli puzzle sikaku. For the puzzle, you are given a grid of arbitrary size. Some of the individual squares in the grid have numbers in them. These numbers correspond to the number of squares in a rectangle. The object of the puzzle is to section off the grid into a collection of rectangles such that each rectangle has a single number in it that is the rectangle’s area. There should be no spaces left over in the grid.
I’ve found a couple sites, just by googling, that has some examples of the puzzle that you can try. And, of course, there is always the iPhone app.
Back in January, I wrote about an idea for Texas Holdem puzzles. One of the recent coments on that post directed me to a site with puzzles exactly like the ones I described. Check it out.
Tredoku is another sudoku variation. In a tredoku puzzle, the grid is laid out in varrying three dimensional patterns. The same rules still apply. The same numbers can not appear in the same rows or columns or the same internal square. In Tredoku, rows and columns continue even over 90 degree turns in the grid.
The main advantage here is that grid orientations are virtually endless. And it’s a little bit neater than massively overlapping sudoku grids. There’s currently a tredoku blog set up where you can go and try some of the puzzles. Enjoy!
From The Griddle, a new puzzle called Grid Fill. In Grid Fill, you are given a set of words and a grid. The words fit into the grid taking up either an entire row, or one of the marked off internal areas. The puzzle part comes in because the rows and the marked off areas overlap. It’s really more of a logic puzzle like Sudoku instead of a word puzzle. Enjoy!
There was a post on Passion for Puzzles recently about CrosScan puzzles. CrosScan puzzles are billed as a combination of crossword puzzles and word search puzzle. What this means is that the puzzle is essentially a word search puzzle but instead of a list of words, you are giving a list of clues to decipher. You then need to find the word in the word search grid.
I have a couple thoughts on this puzzle type. First, it may be harder than a crossoword because the answers to clues don’t really help you at all for the others. The clues generally form a theme, but that’s about all you get. You don’t get letter clues. My second thought is that it seems like it’s possible to find the wrong answer. I may get the wrong answer for the clue, but as long as I can find the right letters in the grid, I’ll never know it was a wrong answer. I think there needs to be some kind of final answer, like a word made up of unused letters. That could help solve the problem.
I found a blog post entitled “The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever” and, naturally, it piqued my interest. The post points to a Wikipedia entry of the same name. Apparently, there is a puzzle commonly know as “The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever” and it is attributed to Raymond Smullyan and John McCarthy.
It’s a kind of puzzle that most will be familiar with. The puzzler is presented with three gods. One that always lies, one that always tells the truth, and one that sometimes lies and sometimes tells the truth. Your task is to come up with three questions that will help you determine the identity of each god. The additional trick is that the gods speak their own language and you have to decipher that as well.
The solution to the puzzle is on the wikipedia page, so don’t read it all if you want to figure it out for yourself.
A recent commenter posted on a new puzzle type called Suduro, billed as a Sudoku/Kakuro combo. Readers of this blog should find Suduro familiar. It is identical to my Circle Sum Sudoku puzzle.
On Blaine’s Puzzle Blog there was a sudoku variation called a mini-sudoku posted recently. When I first heard the title, I thought it was just a sudoku puzzle with a smaller grid, but it’s more clever than that. The puzzle is a 3X3 grid, one of the inner squares in a sudoku puzzle. This means that the squares in the grid need to be filled with the digits 1-9. The only clues that you have is the sum of the digits in L-shaped sections around the outside of the grid.
I didn’t catch this one when it first came up because of the name. But it’s worth a closer look.
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:
Enjoy!
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.
Logic-Puzzles.org is a great new site that is dedicated to logic grid puzzles. These puzzles feature a set of assertions, generally about a group of people and what kind of pets they have, what color hats they wear, etc. The goal is to determine from the limited set of assertions, which pet each person has, etc. There is a grid that accompanies the puzzle that helps you solve it.
Logic-Puzzles.org provides a seemingly unlimited amount of these puzzles and a great interface for playing them. The grid is provided for you and you can fill it out on the site. The site will also keep time, so that you know how long it takes you to solve a puzzle. I would highly recommend checking it out.
There’s a new sudoku variation over at The Griddle called Curve Doku. The puzzle combines a killer sudoku with a greater-than sudoku. It’s called Curve Doku because the two puzzles are connected by curves that also serve as blocks in the sudoku grid.
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