Black Ink is a nice little app that I stumbled upon for Mac users who love crosswords.  The basic idea is that it is a unified interface for a number of free crossword puzzles available on the internet.  Black Ink will download the puzzles automatically and save them so that you can play them all in one place.  There is a cost for this app ($24.95), but you can also download a free 30 day trial version.

Found through MacApper.

Just a quick note.  The blog GeekDad in the Wired blog network had a post today that featured a puzzle.  The puzzle was a timer puzzle similar to many that you may have seen before.  How do you measure out 9 minutes with a 4 minute egg timer and a 7 minute egg timer?  The more exciting aspect of this post is the suggestion that “Puzzle of the Week” may become a regular column on GeekDad.

Here’s a great site for crossword lovers that I found.  Ephraim’s Crossword Puzzle Pointers is a very simple page that just provides links to puzzles recently published in major peridicals.

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.

For fans of picross puzzles (also sometimes called logic art or nonograms), the Wii Picross site is not to be missed.  The site has a great interface for solving the puzzles online and it allows users to create and submit their own puzzles.  As a result there are over 3500 puzzles available to play on the site.

The site is currently running a contest for puzzle submissions with the theme “Where You Are.”  Prizes include a Nintendo DS game or picross books.  Submissions will be accepted until May 18th.  Enjoy!

• Bozzball’s puzzling world is featuring four new puzzle types this month.  Including: Fillomino, Futoshiki, Ripple Effect, and Tents and Trees.  There’s also the promise of new puzzle types coming in June.  Which reminds me… it’s been a long time since I wrote a post on a puzzle type…
• Passion for Puzzles has a post about a game called Scorching Earth.  The post compares the game to migration, but I think it’s a pretty loose resemblance.  For starters, Scorching Earth is much more challenging.  It’s also less of a maze and more of a fill-in-all-of-the-squares puzzle.

I’ve found a new puzzle related blog called The Puzzle Page.  The blog posts a regular brain teaser and has some little puzzle games that you can play in the sidebar.  I’ll be including posts from this blog in my blog roundups in the future.

Postcards from Anna Graham is a new site billing itself as: “The world’s only puzzle/travel blog.” If you haven’t figured it out already, the puzzles on the site are anagrams and they’re presented in a unique way. Each puzzle is a postcard that Anna has sent from the place she is visiting in her travels. A few of the phrases in the postcard are highlighted and they don’t entirely make sense in the context. These are the anagrams and the challenge is to solve the anagrams so that the postcard makes sense. Each postcard ends with a trivia question that the anagrams will help you solve. You do this by taking a look at one of the answer cards Anna has provided. They list the anagrams and provide squares to fill in the answers. Some of the squares are greyed out. Rearranging the letters that fall into these squares give you the answer to the trivia question. If you’re ever really stuck, you can take a look at the front of the postcard to see where Anna is sending it from.

All in all, the site is pretty clever. Enjoy!

• The griddle has a new puzzle this week called a “Funky Kakuro.”  It’s a kakuro with a couple extra twists.  All of the squares that will have an even number in them are marked with an “E” and other squares, with circles in them all contain the same number.
• Bozzball’s Puzzling World relaunched this week and a lot of new puzzles of various kinds were added including sipralgalzies, akari, and slants along with the traditional favorites.

The site Sudoku World has an amusing little feature called “Safe For Work” sudoku.  The idea is similar to that of the boss key which was a feature of some old games.  The idea was that you could hit a button when your boss came by and look like you were doing something productive when you were really playing a game.  The same is true of the Safe For Work Sudoku.  It’s disguised to look like a spreadsheet that you’re working on.  Now, your boss will never know how many hours you spend playing Sudoku at work.

• KrazyDad is working on creating a new type of slitherlink puzzle called Altair slitherlink.  The grid for the puzzles is based on a medieval Islamic tiling.
• Mathpuzzle.com has some new material this week… including some interesting analysis on how many moves it takes to solve a Rubik’s Cube.

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.

I just got a tip about a “mystery hunt” style puzzle game called Clue Chaser.  The game requires players to solve a series of puzzles and the first one to solve them all wins a prize.  The creators of the game are looking to have a competition every three months or so.  Game 1 has already been completed and it took about 32 days.  Game 2 begins on April 1st.

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.