Figure Ground is a unique new puzzle game from Ian Gilman.  The concept is simple, moved colored blocks around on the right to match an image on the left.  There are a couple catches though.  When blocks of the same color are laid next to each other, they are permanently attached.  Also, moving blocks of one color reveal blocks of a different color beneath.

Anyone who keeps an eye on the comments on this blog has probably found this site already, but I would just like to draw your attention to the Web Kendoku site.  It’s a site that lets you play Kenken puzzles on the web.  Enjoy!

I got an email a while back about a site called Treasure Challenge that offered cash prizes for solving puzzles.  I just tried the puzzle for the first time today.  The site requires you to create a user to log in.  You are then presented with the treasure challenges for the week.  It will either tell you who solved the challenge or when the challenge will be active, or it will let you try the challenge.

First, you are presented with a series of trivia questions that shouldn’t be too difficult for anyone connected to the internet.  Some of the questions require you to click on an ad link.  The answer to the question takes you to a page that contains the answer.  For example, today’s treasure challenge was cleary sponsored by Amazon and all links went to their site.  This is, apparently, how the site makes money.  After you answer the trivia questions, you are presented with a riddle for which you only get one guess per day.

After this, thinks get a bit murky.  I haven’t gone any further, so I can’t say for certain what happens.  The rules say something about a FASTCASH round and multiple clues.  If you want to find out what that means, I suppose you’ll have to play.

The New York Times has started up a new blog called Wordplay and it is, not surprisingly, a crossword puzzle themed blog.  I looked through some of the previous posts and most of them seem to be about the NYT crossword that day, with a few news items about Will Shortz sprinkled in.

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.

I got an email from Leonid Mochalov, a Russian puzzle inventor.  He was drawing my attention to his web site which features many original puzzles, some of which are very unique.

The puzzle types on his page include Squarewords, a sudoku like puzzle involving words, and Express-Labyrinth, a maze-like puzzle that requires you to visit every square in a grid.  The site also shows us a number of Mochalov’s block puzzles including a “Chess Cube” that you can print out and try to construct for yourself.

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.

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.

Smartkit has put together a puzzle book with 79 of the best puzzles from their site.  Check it out.

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.

I got an email about a new kind of puzzle called Mozaniac.  The puzzle involves assembling pieces to create a picture, but it differs from jigsaw puzzles in a couple ways.  The pieces interlock in a way such that they overlap each other.  In this way, a single set of pieces can be used for four different puzzles when both the front and back of the pieces are used.

There are a number of puzzles for sale on the site.  Some of them feature fine art painting, which the creators not are not terribly difficult, and others require you to assemble pictures of numbers which are the more challenging puzzles.  What’s missing from this site is a small Mozaniac puzzle that you can print out and try for yourself.

Vexus Puzzle is a web site that features new and original logic puzzles.  There are two puzzle types currently available to try on the site, Navigrid and Isolate.  Navigrid is a puzzle that requires you to fill a sequence of numbers into a grid.  The trick is that there are only a set number of moves that can be made between two consecutive numbers.  These moves are listed below the grid and each can only be used once.  Isolate requires you to devide a grid into sections of different sizes which are listed below the grid.  Each section must contain exactly two squares with blocks in them and each internal point in the grid must have at least two line segments connected to it.

That’s the two puzzles in a nut shell but, as always, the best way to get a sense of them is to click over and try them out.  Enjoy!

I got an email today about a web site dedicated to pentominoes.  Currently, the site is running a competition for readers to solve a pentomino sudoku.  It is similar to a standard sudoku, but the grid is made up of pentominoes and the numbers in each pentomino sum to 22.  Enjoy!

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.