Information, resources, stories and fun for puzzle solvers and creators

I’ve been cracking the whip on the Puzzlehead I.T. guys lately … unfortunately, they’re sado-masochists. But one such beating finally convinced them to hop on the Twitter bus to Tweetsville.

You can now follow Puzzlehead on Twitter as “imapuzzlehead” (yes, all other good combinations of “puzzlehead” were already taken). Check out the tweets at this URL:

http://www.twitter.com/imapuzzlehead

We here at Puzzlehead understand how fortunate we are that we can enjoy warm tropical weather year round. But if you’re snowbound and suffering from cabin fever, here’s something at which to throw your collective brains.

That Fedora Guy has put together an interesting geocaching.com bookmark list called The Unfoundlings. On it are caches all around the world that have never been found after having been published for at least six months. As of October 2009, there were 53 unfoundlings, and it should come as no surprise a good number of them are mystery caches. A few of them are just challenges, such as the 100 Letterbox Challenge or the South Dakota County Challenge. But most of them are just really tough puzzles, such as:

• Secrecy
• Cache Noir – Scene One
• Different Alternating Universes

Good luck with these, puzzleheads!

-eP

PS: My favorite unfoundling is not a puzzle – it’s the single most remote cache in North America.

Click here to discuss this article in the Puzzlehead Forums

Today, we bring you the latest in our ongoing “Darn, I Wish I’d Thought of That” series. I’m sure you’ve seen a mechanical puzzle box at some point in your life – a small container, usually made of wood, that requires you to push, pull, slide, twist, tilt, or turn the box in various directions in order to open it. (My wife has a really clever one in the shape of a little house.)

I heard on the Podcacher Podcast today about an altogether new spin on the puzzle box – one the brings puzzle box out of the world of 18th century Japanese craftsmanship and into the modern technological era. Check it out here – Buzzle: The Morse Code Puzzle Box.

The box has a power outlet, a button, and two LED lights. In order to open the box, you have to play a game of hangman using Morse code. The box will pick a word at random from its dictionary, then buzz the number of letters in the word using Morse code. Using the button, you key in the Morse code of your guess for the first letter of the word. If you get it right, the green LED lights. If you get a letter that is elsewhere in the word, the yellow LED lights. And if the letter is nowhere in the word, the red LED lights. Once you’ve guessed a letter correctly, you move on to the next letter. Get ten letters wrong (10 red LEDs), and it’s game over – the box stays locked, and it picks a brand new word (which may have a different number of letters).

According to the builder, the inspiration was the Reverse Geocache puzzle – a box that won’t open until it arrives at the proper location, but will only tell you how far away the proper location is from where it currently lies.

So if you’ve got a soldering iron, a table saw, some sandpaper, and some engineering know-how, why not build your own puzzle box?

Discuss on the Puzzlehead forums

You say you’ve never heard of National Puzzle Day? Don’t be surprised. It’s just one of a long list of obscure holiday celebrations. Lists of these wacky holidays are readily available online.

Listed below are 300 obscure holidays in random order: 286 of them are real, 14 are fake. Find the fake ones, and you’ll be able to determine the coordinates of the final location of a geocache I placed to celebrate this holiday. Here’s how:

[Read more →]

I saw a link on Amy Reynaldo’s blog today about a new blog by Merl Reagle, one of the best crossword puzzle constructors around. (Those of you who listen to NPR’s Puzzle on the Air or have seen the movie Wordplay know who he is.) Specifically, Amy referred her readers to Merl’s Pet Peeve No. 1:

[...] It’s something I’m tempted to call a “flansir,” which stands for “familiar looking although never seen in reality” (pronounced “flancer,” let’s say).

Merl goes on to clarify:

I tend to differentiate this from a traditional “crosswordese” word, which is generally a short, obscure word that occurs often in puzzles because of its handy letter combinations, like ERN(E), ODA(H), and PROA. And one reason that these words have truly earned their crosswordese badges is because there’s no way to know what they mean simply by looking at them. However, they do exist in the real world, outside of puzzles. If you were online doing research on a sea eagle or a harem room or a Malayan canoe, you would probably come across these words. Odd as they are, they are the actual terms for these unusual things. A flansir, though, not only is something that only occurs in crosswords, it virtually never occurs outside of crosswords — it’s an entirely crosswordcentric thing.

Amen, brother! Read the entire article here. And while you’re at it, check out the rest of Merl’s blog.

I write trivia, word games and other puzzles for game shows, books, websites and magazines. While you’re here, solve some puzzles, read my bio and feel free to get in touch.
– Shawn Kennedy

If you like puzzles and but don’t like paying for them, look no further than to Puzzlement, a new web site by Shawn Kennedy that offers free daily and weekly puzzles.

Shawn Kennedy has written trivia and word games for six game shows. Each year, he invents puzzles for the Google U.S. Puzzle Championship and is a judge at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. For three summers, he helped Will Shortz edit the New York Times crossword. As a longtime contributor to Games and World of Puzzles magazines, Kennedy writes all types of teasers from word games and logic puzzles to 10-page puzzle mysteries. He has written games for CBS, ABC, National Public Radio, boxed calendars, newspaper syndicates and various websites. His books include Funny Cryptograms, Sip & Solve Word Hunts, Sexy Cryptograms, USA Today Sit & Solve Word Searches, Scratch & Play Mystery Word Puzzles, Cluesome, and Japanese-style logic puzzles for The Giant Book of Sudoku Presented by Will Shortz.

National Puzzle Day is Friday, January 29. Celebrate by solving or creating a puzzle!

What puzzles would you recommend solving in honor of National Puzzle Day? Let us know in the Puzzlehead forums.

In my never-ending quest to find more ways to reach more Puzzleheads, I set up a Facebook group for us to connect and proudly share our puzzleheaded-status. Click the link on the top of the right sidebar to join!

What makes a puzzle worth solving? I don’t have a good answer that would apply to all people. But I do have an idea for what I feel makes me feel that a puzzle was worth the time I invested in solving it:

• It was neither too hard nor too easy. If it was too easy, I wouldn’t have tried to solve it. If it was too hard, I would have given up. I know this property is entirely dependent upon the individual’s experiences and preferences, so there’s no one puzzle that will make everyone feel that way.
• It used a puzzle technique I had not seen before. Obviously, the more puzzles you solve, the less new stuff there is to see. But puzzle constructors never cease to amaze me – they either create new puzzle ideas altogether or they synthesize a new idea out of many existing ideas.
• If it was a series of smaller puzzles, the puzzles grew incrementally more difficult. This all goes back to the need to feel like I’m making progress. Similarly, mountain climbers don’t climb until they reach the top, they break the climb up into various stages and focus on one stage at a time. Without mini-goals, the challenge seems to daunting. (Crossword puzzles are extreme in this regard – solving each across or down clue is its own mini-goal.)
• I felt like I had really accomplished something. All puzzles require work, and the “aha!” moment of when the puzzle solution becomes clear should come right when I’ve had to work for it for a while.
• I felt the puzzle was fair. Puzzle constructors should not let would-be solvers wander down intentionally-constructed dead ends for too long, or they risk eroding the feeling of accomplishment (see previous item).

I’ve started a new category of links on the right side of this page – Puzzles Worth Solving. I’ve included them on the list either because I did solve them and I thought they met the criteria I described above, or because I haven’t solved them and I believe that they will.

My first entry there is a link to a bookmark list on Geocaching.com of puzzle caches I think are worthy of your attention. These are all solve-at-your-desk puzzles, which means that you can solve them no matter where you live even if you’re not a geocacher.

If you know of any links to other specific puzzles of any sort that you feel are worth solving, please send email to me or let us know in the Puzzlehead forums.

The web site for the 2010 MIT Mystery Hunt has finally been created. It includes a link to all of the puzzles as they were presented to the Hunt participants. No solutions have been posted yet, tho …