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

Confused and disoriented, you stagger through doors marked “Two Second Cruises” and find yourself in a travel agency. Surveying the office, you find yourself with a choice of different travel agents. Of the four, only one looks friendly. Ignoring a woman in an spotted animal print, a man with a fierce mane of hair, and a woman hungrily devouring a Subway combo meal, you opt for the man wearing a Virgin Airlines button.

He somehow knows exactly what’s on your mind. “Puzzles you want, puzzles you’ll get!” With quick keystrokes, he reserves you a spot on a cruise to a tropical island. When you stand up to thank him, you lose consciousness.

Waking up, you find yourself on the deck of the cruise ship. There’s noise coming from behind you and the island itself. The travel agent has left a note for you however.

Enjoy the island as long as you want. If you want to know where to go, try looking for some helpful individuals. Flag them down, and they’ll not only show you the hottest spots on the island, but help you decide what to do next.

What is the Puzzle Boat?

The Puzzle Boat is an online puzzle extravaganza, similar to the MIT Mystery Hunt or Microsoft Puzzle Hunts. It can be solved entirely online.

Puzzles (red links on the map) are in PDF format (with one exception). Puzzle types include cryptograms, crosswords, and visual puzzles. Some puzzles are traditional, others are unconventional, others defy categorization. The use of outside references are acceptable, and absolutely necessary in some cases.

As you solve puzzles, new puzzles will become available. Some puzzles require solutions to other puzzles. Solving these meta-puzzles will give you the names of several individuals on the island. Finding all of these individuals will allow you to complete the extravaganza.

You can solve the Puzzle Boat with others. To register a team, click Register above and enter a team name, password, and team members. Others on your team can use this name and password to access puzzles, and see how far the team has progressed. You can also solve on your own, but it’s not as much fun…for most.

If you have questions regarding the Puzzle Boat, write to Foggy Brume at editor@pandamagazine.com.

Blueprint for the "Onyx" level Dastardly Pathtag

I haven’t met many puzzle constructors who don’t want their puzzles to be solved.  Yes, there may be a few sadistic souls out there who revel in creating impossibly obscure puzzles.  But most of us are like authors or directors – we’ve poured our creative energies into something, and once it’s finished we want people to enjoy it.

I have a number of geocaches published in New York City, some of them traditional (coordinates posted on the geocaching.com site) and some of them puzzles (to be solved before the location is revealed).  It’s not hard to notice how much less attention the geo-puzzles receive.  In 2007 I published two caches in Central Park, less than half a mile apart.  One is a puzzle that has been found 4 times in the last six months.  The other is a traditional that has been found 316 times in the same time frame.

I talked about it with another local constructor in the area, childofatom.  How can we change this?  What could we as puzzle creators do to interest more people in solving puzzles?

We talked about borrowing the Puzzle Solving 101 concept.  We talked about hosting an educational seminar for new solvers.  Finally we took a cue from the growing popularity of Pathtags and batted around the idea of creating a special solver tag, available only to cachers who solve a number of the area’s geo-puzzles.  Pathtags are custom metal coins that can be collected and traded, and tracked online.  They’re similar to geocoins, but smaller (about the size of a quarter) and (importantly) much cheaper to produce.

We collected some of the best geo-puzzles in New York into a bookmark list of “Dastardly Puzzle Caches”.  We hashed out a “Dastardly” design and minted it in two finishes.  There were just over 30 puzzles, so we decided that one tag would be earned for solving 15, and another tag for hitting 30.  We picked out a pub and a date two weeks in the future.  We generated a list of people who had solved at least a handful of them and sent out an email telling folks when and where we’d be, and that we’d be handing out tags to any qualified solvers.

Then we sat back.

And watched the “Great Puzzle Solving Flood of 2010” start to roll in.

In the two weeks before we sent out our email, the Dastardly puzzles on our list collected a grand total of 16 finds between them.  In the two weeks afterward?  Over 100!  When we showed up to the pub it was crowded with eager geo-puzzle solvers happily introducing themselves to each other and swapping hints.  We quickly handed out tags and joined in the conversation.  One geocacher had published a puzzle that morning in honor of the gathering, using the pub’s coordinates as a starting point; another resolved to start writing his first NYC puzzle cache as soon as he got home.  We all promised to have another gathering soon where we could hand out more tags to people who had leveled up in that time.

The tags have created a spark in our community, and we’re building on it.  Interested in seeing if it might build interest in puzzles in your area?  Feel free to contact me through my geocaching.com profile and let us know if you’d like to adapt the tag design – there could easily be a whole series of “Dastardly” pathtags representing different puzzle communities all around the country (or around the world).

Before I begin, let me first apologize for the delay in updates here at Puzzlehead Industries. Apparently, my employer believes that this site deals with entertainment and games instead of software and work, and it is therefore blockable. *sigh*

The Boston Crossword Puzzle Tournament was held this past April 11 (which was a Sunday in April), hosted by Joon Pakh. The contest included 150 registered participants as well as 500 Oreo cookies. Contestants solved four soon-to-be-published puzzles from the New York Times using American Crossword Puzzle Tournament scoring rules.

The winner was Eric Maddy, who not only won the Boston tournament but (as I am led to believe) also won the Brown University tournament the day before. And he’s not even from New England, but hails from California. Impressive!

Trip Payne posted a new crossword on his site today called Something Different #3 (PDF AcrossLite). Don’t let the size fool you … the answers are a lot of fun and easier to get than you might think. 50-Across is my favorite entry.

Trip has a bunch of free puzzles on his web site – check them out here.

Puzzle cupcakes … can you name all 100 puzzles, video games, and board games depicted by the artwork on these cupcakes? (Yes, you read that correctly.) Click on the image for a closer look.

Today I have a few questions for you, Gentle Reader:

1. Are you really a puzzlehead?

2. Do you have £200?

3. Do you want to win £10,000?

If you answered “yes” to all of these questions, then the ISIS Platinum Pyramid Challenge is for you!

What is ISIS?

The ISIS puzzle was first made available to the public on July 7, 2006. ISIS is a spherical puzzle box made of precision-engineered anodized aluminum. The individual components of the puzzle box can be rotated or pressed.

The ISIS is not only beautiful (comes in many colors, even a custom patriotic USA theme) but also maddening – the solution to each one is unique (although the mechanism for obtaining the solution is common to all).

Unlocking the box reveals unique codes that can be redeemed for prizes (such as gold or silver coins) or to reveal further clues.

In 2008, the RAMISIS (or ISIS 2) puzzle was released. Instead of a sphere, RAMISIS is a pyramid with rotating layers – but the goal is similar. Find the right sequence for manipulating the device in order to access the codes inside.

What is the Platinum Pyramid Challenge?

On September 25, 2006, the Platinum Pyramid Challenge was announced. Solve all five ISIS puzzles, find the Platinum Pyramid, and win £10,000.

Good luck with this one, fellow puzzleheads!

I heard mention recently (on Ryan and Brian Do Crosswords) of a new quiz show on the BBC called Only Connect. The tag line is amazing: “A quiz show in which patience and lateral thinking are as vital as knowledge”. Here’s the links to the three segments published so far:

• Episode 1 Segments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
• Play Only Connect Online

At first I was a bit put off by the show’s look and feel, mostly because I was expecting the typical array of flashing lights, catchy background music, and so forth. (I think the exact opposite of Only Connect would be something along the lines of Press Your Luck.) And the teams had me spooked – Oxford collegians vs. Cambridge librarians? And they use Greek letters as names for categories? (Is that a sigma or a delta?) I have no chance of answering anything!

Or so I thought. I watched the three clips, and I was surprisingly more successful at them than I expected. There were some questions that made me feel totally inept, but a few that I answered before either of the teams did.

The show’s premise is simple – find the common thread that ties four seemingly unrelated clues together. For instance, if the clues were: Rose, Sarah Jane, Tegan, and Ace, the correct answer would be Companions of Doctor Who.

Best quote of the show: “Everyone can do S-O-S in Morse Code, I hope? If not, we’re all going to hell in a hand cart.”

Amanda Yesnowitz and Brian Cimmet wrote a wonderful little tune called “A Way With Words”, which they performed at the “Crossworders Got Talent” program during the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Here’s the video on YouTube … enjoy!

On Friday, February 21, 2010, in Brooklyn, New York, Dan Feyer ended the 5-year winning streak of Tyler Hinman to become the A Division Champion at the 33rd annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT).

Click here to discuss the ACPT in the Puzzlehead forums.

Part 4 – Competition

In 1978, the director of marketing of the Marriott Hotel in Stamford, Connecticut, was searching for a way to sell the services of the brand new hotel during the winter – typically a slow season. He came up with the idea of running a crossword puzzle tournament using this logic: lots of people live in the Stamford area and commute to New York City by train, and many commuters like to solve crossword puzzles on the route, so a tournament might appeal to that crowd.

He called the then-editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle Eugene Maleska who suggested a constructor in Stamford might be interested in running it. That constructor also declined, but he recommended a 25-year-old puzzle whiz named Will Shortz who might be interested.

Shortz had restarted the National Puzzlers League (NPL) conventions just two years earlier, and jumped at the chance to create it, and with that the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament was born. In its first year, 149 contestants showed up and had such a great time solving and socializing that the tournament has become an annual event. The 2005 ACPT was documented in the motion picture Wordplay (which was selected for screening at the Sundance Film Festival) and was lucky to capture one of the most exciting conclusions to the tournament in ACPT history.

The tournament is a full weekend event. There are five divisions to the tournament that allow people to compete with others at approximately the same skill level (E Division is for beginners, A Division is for expert solvers). Six puzzles of varying size and difficulty are solved on Saturday (with Puzzle 5 being the most difficult), followed by one puzzle on Sunday morning. The top three finishers in each of C, B, and A divisons then compete head to head with each other on stage in front of the tournament audience. (Trophies are given for finishers in all divisions as well as age groups and geographic regions.)

You never know what kinds of puzzles will appear at the tournament – one puzzle had every single clue written as a spoonerism (if the answer is HUMERUS, the normal clue would be “Funny bone”, but the spoonerism clue was written as “Bunny phone”). Another featured a story with numbered blanks – you had to figure out the words that went in the blanks from the context of the story, then place those words into the corresponding places in the puzzle. Crazy stuff!

Dan Feyer, Winner of the 2010 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament

Tyler Hinman won the 2005 tournament and went on to win the next four in a row in an unprecedented streak of competetive solving. The question of who would unseat Hinman was wanswered this past weekend as Dan Feyer (who won C Division in 2008 and B Division in 2009) dominated the competition, finishing first in the points standing and first in the A Division final.

Even if you can’t get to New York City for the tournament, you can still play online. All of the puzzles from the past several years are available, and you can solve them while on the clock, just like the tournament players do in person. (I played along online this year and my score would have put me in 468th place if I was there in person.)

On Friday, February 19, 2010, in Brooklyn, New York, the registration desk for the 33rd annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT) will open for business, marking the commencement of one of the single largest gatherings of puzzleheads from across the country.

Click here to discuss the ACPT in the Puzzlehead forums.

Part 3 – Evolution

While crosswords became popular in the early 1920s, it was not until 1942 that The New York Times (which initially regarded crosswords as frivolous, calling them “a primitive form of mental exercise”) began running a crossword in its Sunday edition. The first puzzle, a Sunday, ran on February 15, 1942; the motivating impulse for the Times to finally run the puzzle (which took over 20 years despite the fact that its publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, was a longtime crossword fan) appears to have been the bombing of Pearl Harbor: in a memo dated December 18, 1941, an editor conceded that the puzzle deserved space in the paper, considering what was happening elsewhere in the world and that readers might need something to occupy themselves during blackouts.

The puzzle proved popular, and Sulzberger himself would author a Times puzzle before the year was out. In 1950, the crossword became a daily feature. That first daily puzzle was published without an author line, and to this day the identity of the author of the first weekday Times crossword remains unknown.

There have been four editors of the puzzle: Margaret Farrar, who edited the puzzle from its inception until 1969, Will Weng, former head of the Times’s metropolitan copy desk, who edited the puzzle from 1969 to 1977, Eugene T. Maleska, who edited the puzzle until 1993, and the current editor, Will Shortz. Of the three former editors, Maleska alone held the position until his death.

In addition to editing the Times crosswords, Shortz founded and runs the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament as well as the World Puzzle Championship (where he remains captain of the US team), has published numerous books of crosswords, sudoku, and other puzzles, and serves as “Puzzlemaster” on the NPR show “Weekend Edition Sunday”.

The popularity of the puzzle has grown over the years, until it came to be considered the most prestigious of the widely circulated crosswords in America; its popularity is attested to by the numerous celebrities and public figures who’ve publicly proclaimed their liking for the puzzle, including opera singer Beverly Sills, author Norman Mailer, baseball pitcher Mike Mussina, former President Bill Clinton, conductor Leonard Bernstein, TV host Jon Stewart and music duo the Indigo Girls.

In addition to their appearance in the printed newspaper, the Times puzzles also appear online at the paper’s website, where they remain the only part of the paper’s content for which users need to pay for online access (unless they already subscribe to the printed version of the paper for home delivery). In 2007, Majesco released The New York Times Crosswords game, a video game adaptation for the Nintendo DS handheld. The game includes over 1,000 Times crosswords from all days of the week. Various other forms of merchandise featuring the puzzle have been created over the years, including dedicated electronic crossword handhelds that just contain Times crosswords, as well as cookie jars, baseballs, coasters, mousepads, and other items.

Will Shortz does not write the Times crossword himself. Instead the puzzles are submitted to him as the editor by a wide variety of contributors. Aside from the increasing difficulty throughout the week, the Monday-Thursday puzzles and the Sunday puzzle always contain a theme, some sort of connection between 3-5 long (usually Across) answers. The theme could consist of a similar type of pun in each theme entry, a similar type of letter substitution or alteration in each entry, or any of numerous other types.

Notable dates, e.g., holidays or anniversaries of famous events, are often celebrated with an appropriately themed puzzle, although only two holidays are currently commemorated on a routine annual basis: Christmas and April Fool’s Day. The Friday and Saturday puzzles, the most difficult in the paper, are routinely unthemed and are usually “wide-open”, with fewer black squares, and more long words.

Given the Times’s perception as a paper for a generally literate, well-read, and somewhat arty audience, puzzles frequently reference works of literature, art, or classical music, as well as modern TV, movies, or other touchstones of popular culture.

Next time – the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament