Category — Constructing

I just added a new link for a very interesting site I just discovered called PuzzleWiki. The site’s description is:

PuzzleWiki is a resource built for “paper-based” puzzle solvers and creators, especialy for participants in live puzzle hunt events. This site is built and maintained by the Microsoft Puzzle Hunt team Everyday Heroes.

This site sounds very cool, and given its Wiki-nature, it will only become more awesome.

Beyond the shuffling of architectural air ducts, if you have the tenacity to rearrange the letters of this post’s title by hand you may have the good fortune of discovering the hidden words – INTERNET ANAGRAM SERVER – but it would be much easier if you simply went to the Internet Anagram Server at www.wordsmith.org/anagram and let the interweb do the work for you. It’s a great tool to test seemingly nonsensical strings of words in a puzzle, hiding your own clues in rearranged letters or simply discovering that GATOR PEED IN ONE CORRAL is an anagram for your full name – well at least mine.

I wrote up a brief essay that outlines my method of creating a good puzzle geocache.

Stuck on a puzzle that requires you to become a codebreaker? The Secret Code Breaker can help. The site provides a number of free codebreaking tools that I’ve found far more useful in some circumstances than many other online tools.

One of the most useful ones is the Monoalphabetic Substitution Cipher Solver – while there are many cryptogram solvers available on the web already, this one has the ability to solve cryptograms when the spaces are removed.

There is a wonderful library of tools useful in cracking classical ciphers available at rumkin.com. This is typically the first place I go when trying to solve a puzzle that involves cracking a cipher.

If you enjoy wordplay (and, frankly, who doesn’t?), then you’ll love the National Puzzlers League. The NPL is a self-described eclectic crowd who enjoy all forms of wordplay and are continuing the traditions of “The World’s Oldest Puzzlers’ Organization”.