There’s an article in the Times Online about an art installation going in at the Stanmore Underground station in northwest London.  The installation is part of an Art On The Underground project that is sponsoring installations in a number of stations around London.  What’s interesting about the Stanmore station is that it focuses on crossword puzzles.

Serena Korda, the artist behind the installation, chose crossword puzzles as a theme because the Stanmore station is near where code breaking computer were housed during World War II.  Solving a Times crossword puzzle in less than 12 minutes was a requirement to join the codebreakers at Bletchley Park.  The installation was also inspired by information leaflets handed out in the underground during World War II.  These leaflets featured a crossword on the back.

Along with installation, there are a number of crossword puzzles themed around Stanmore.  The installation itself provides clues for the puzzles.  The installation is called The Answer Lies at the End of the Line.  And, apparently, this is also true for any who can’t solve the puzzles.

Imangi is a new word puzzle game for the iPhone.  At its most basic level, the game involves finding words in a grid, however in Imangi you have the option of altering the grid by rotating the letters in individual rows and columns.  The idea is to maximize your score.

Imangi Studios is interested in getting feedback on the game from puzzle lovers.  So drop in and let them know what you think.

It’s still a few months away, but publicity has already started for the Sudoku National Championship in Philly on October 24-25.  The championship will include guest appearances by Will Shortz and Maki Kaji, credited as “the man who gave sudoku its name.”  (The creator of sudoku is actually American Howard Garns.)

It looks like they learned a lot in the first go around and have made a number of improvements for this years competition.  Most notable are help determining which level you belong in and a prize structure that awards more to the third place winner in the advanced level than the first place winner in the intermediate level.

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.

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.

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!

It’s coming up this Saturday, June 14th, and you can do it in the comfort of your own home.  This is always my favorite puzzle day of the year.  Registration is open through June 12th.  Winners who are US citizens get a spot on the US team for the world puzzle competition.  But even those outside the US can take part.

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.

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!