Hark Audio’s Podcast Puzzlemania

Hark Audio’s Podcast Puzzlemania

On Air Fest is a days-long celebration of podcasts, occurring over the next few days in Brooklyn, NY. One of the participants is Hark Audio, which curates snippets of different podcasts into what are essentially podcast mixtapes, allowing the listener get a good sampling of what’s going on out there in Podcastland.

Hark Audio wanted something nifty to hand out to people visiting their booth, and what could be better than a bunch of podcast-related puzzles? So they commissioned me to create bunch of ’em — a crossword, a word search, and a couple of miscellaneous offerings. Knowledge of the podcast scene isn’t necessary to solve these puzzles, but it might come in handy here and there.

Get Podcast Puzzlemania here.

Ye Gods: The 2024 MIT Mystery Hunt

Ye Gods: The 2024 MIT Mystery Hunt

I normally write about the annual MIT Mystery Hunt within a day or two of its conclusion. The 2024 edition, however, seems to still be going on. Ostensibly a puzzle event that takes place over Martin Luther King weekend, my team is still submitting answers one week later, and I hear through the grapevine that the organizing team, TTBNL, is allowing teams that make it to the finish line to play through the event’s grand finale — which is superb and very much to their credit.

The part of the Hunt I did see was a lot of fun. The theme of the thing was that the ancient gods had sent you to the Underworld, from which you needed to escape. Several parts of the event were quite innovatively structured (some to a degree that I do not yet understand — I’m waiting eagerly for the solutions to make their way online). Puzzles were for the most part tight, varied, and very challenging. Let’s see if I can remember some of the stuff I worked on…

Marathon: A not-uncommon presentation for a Mystery Hunt puzzle: A list of words, some miscellaneous other information, and no instructions whatsoever — the better to preserve the joyful aha you’ll get after staring for a while and discussing matters with your teammates. The aha here wasn’t thunderous, but it was significant enough to make those of us solving it very happy, and it helped us make sense of that list of words in fairly short order. How you got the actual answer to this puzzle was a little surprising — I thought it left behind a lot of extraneous, unused puzzle material — but once we saw it we knew it had to be right.

🫰📝🧩: Gah, spare me from puzzles named after emojis. Although if any of them deserve to be named as such, it is this one, a mini-crossword with all-emoji clues. Deciphering them was perhaps the brainiest I felt all weekend — just one little firecracker after another. Super fun, and quite ingeniously constructed.

😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠: When I say the Hunt puzzles were “for the most part” very challenging, I am thinking of this puzzle, which was the opposite of challenging: My friend Ben and I solved it in under three minutes. He’d already had the initial observation by the time I arrived in the spreadsheet, and I had the next and final observation fifteen seconds later, and then it was just a matter of getting words where they needed to go. If I had been the editor of this puzzle, I would have suggested a couple of ways to beef it up a bit, but it cannot be denied that dismantling a Mystery Hunt puzzle with such rapidity can be pretty satisfying. (I thought we might earn some recognition for Fastest Solve, but apparently another team solved a different puzzle in… eleven seconds? Yeah, I can’t compete with that.)

Bringing Down The House: I know what this puzzle is about, I compiled a lot of information about it, and I never arrived at the answer. This is the first puzzle I’ll be checking the solution for once all of the answers are finally posted.

Reverse!: A very clever fusing of the board game Othello with a word search. And not too tough, as Hunt puzzles go.

Circus Circus: The great joy of the Mystery Hunt is when one of these crazy puzzles clicks over from “this is plainly impossible” to “oh! wait! I get it now!”, and this puzzle had that by the bucketful. Not sure I would have gotten there entirely on my own, but that is why I do not solve the Mystery Hunt entirely on my own.

Harrah’s: One of my favorite kinds of Hunt experiences: Lots of absurd pictures to analyze, a big aha lurking behind them, and then, once you finally see what’s going on, a lot of picking away at things with your teammates — with lots of room for multiple people to show their cleverness.

Planet Hollywood: Although the pictures here weren’t quite as absurd as Harrah’s, everything I said above also applies to this puzzle. Quite fun.

ENNEAGRAM: This one quickly got much too tough for me, but it sure was fascinating watching my team make every single nutty leap necessary to arrive at the final answer. This is a puzzle type I’d like to see again, but maybe not at quite such a Mystery Huntish level.

Look Before You Leap: The last puzzle I worked on as time ticked down to what I thought was the end of the Hunt — in retrospect I guess I could have kept going if I had wanted to. It was fun to recognize what this puzzle was turning into as the letters filled the grid. Ultimately I figured out everything but the final answer. Someone on my team took it the rest of the way, and looking at his work, I see that I was prepared to make this puzzle WAY more complicated than it needed to be, so maybe it’s for the best that I surrendered.

There were, of course, a ton of other puzzles where I said “That looks interesting!” — lots of variety crosswords and cryptics and so forth. But my team, Palindrome, is heavy on crossword people, and I have generally stopped trying to shoulder my way into those puzzles — those grids tend to get filled before you can blink. I did try to put some brain cycles toward the always important “meta puzzles,” but this year every single one of them proved impenetrable to my efforts. It was impressive and entertaining to watch my teammates work on them, but at nearly every breakthrough, my response was either “I never would have thought of that!” or a good old-fashioned “Holy %$&@^#!”

The 237-Headed Elephant In The Room

And now let us turn our attention back to the fact that the Hunt-construction team is still running the Hunt a week later. Only five teams completed the Hunt in regulation time, and they accomplished this only with some generous hinting and an unknown number of free answers. It came out during the event’s wrap-up that the constructors had put together 237 puzzles for us to solve.

That’s… a lot of puzzles. I would even say it is too many puzzles. And I’m saying that as someone who really likes puzzles.

Look: A movie that is good when it is two hours long is not great when it is 15 hours long. Part of putting together an event of any kind is keeping in mind the amount of time it’s supposed to last. And I have a difficult time grasping how anybody could take in the sight of this mountain of puzzles, most of which were quite hard, and say “Oh, yeah, a bunch of teams will definitely wrap this up in 48 hours.” The math simply doesn’t work.

One of the most well-known maxims among writers is “Kill your darlings.” Every writer has wonderful ideas and brilliant paragraphs that, alas, do not serve the story they are trying to write. The savvy author excises this stuff mercilessly. And so it goes in many other artistic endeavors — and I certainly believe that puzzlemaking is an art.

In writing, you can do all that excising afterwards — you write a bloated first draft, you read it over, you say “Oy vey,” and you get out your red pencil. (I just looked: The “morgue” of trimmed stuff from my first book is over 15,000 words. And this was a not-particularly-long book for kids.) Nobody gets hurt, except maybe the author’s pride.

Making a puzzle hunt with a team of sixty people is a little different, and a little harder. You can’t create 237 puzzles and then trim it down to a more reasonable 150. You’ve got to keep your eye on the desired running time the entire way. “How many solving hours will all this add up to?” is a question the organizers on the team need to ask themselves near-constantly. I don’t doubt that TTBNL’s brain trust did ask it… but maybe not as often as they should have, and also plainly they arrived at the wrong answer.

It’s okay. The puzzles were fun, as is evident from the fact that as I type this, almost a week after the Hunt officially ended, some of my teammates are in a voice channel in our Discord, plugging away on the stuff we haven’t solved yet.

But I hope the experience of this 237-puzzle Everest is the shock the Mystery Hunt community needs to realize the weekend needs to pull way, way back, to somewhere between 125-150 puzzles, and a winning time of perhaps 35-40 hours. Maybe this way a dozen or twenty teams can cross the finish line, instead of a bare handful. (I am not absolving myself or my team from Hunt Bloat, by the way. The Hunt we ran in 2022 ended reasonably on time, before noon on Sunday, but only eight teams reached the very end. I would have loved for that to be more.)

Things Ain’t What They Used to Be

For reasons completely unrelated to the quality of the event’s puzzles, I found myself a bit maudlin over Hunt weekend. There have been dramatic changes to the Hunt over these past few years. MIT has cracked down on all these outsiders invading their campus over MLK weekend, and has aggressively curtailed the marathon, overnight nature of the event — as I understand it, even the constructing team had to abandon their headquarters in the wee hours, and set up camp in a hotel lobby instead. As a result, the event isn’t quite as freewheeling and anarchic as it was years ago.

This is not a complaint. MIT is fully within their rights to control their campus, and it is something of a wonder that I was allowed to roam the place freely one weekend a year for close to 30 years. But I think I’m allowed to miss those days. It is absolutely bananas, in the best way, that a past Hunt culminated with teams figuring out that they had to stop an elevator between floors in order to find the coin. Or the days before wireless Internet, where we would hack our way to online access any damn way we could, including threading wires out the windows and into classrooms we had not been assigned.

It hit me particularly hard when I saw that LaVerde’s has closed. Even though I knew it, I couldn’t quite believe it until I was standing there looking at where it used to be, covered over with white plastic sheeting. This was the on-campus convenience store and marketplace, and they made surprisingly good sandwiches. My brother and I were there multiple times a day during Hunt weekend. He and I would be co-solving something, and suddenly one would look at the other: “LaVerde’s?” Agreed. And off we went to get meatball heroes for lunch. Well, no more. Another change. So it goes.

And I also found myself pretty uncomfortable in our crowded headquarters. Many people were masked, and we had Covid tests for people to use, but the experience just wasn’t as carefree as it used to be. The specter of possible illness seemed to be hanging over the room. Perhaps that is my mishegoss and mine alone, and if so, I’ll own it. But it’s nonetheless how I felt, and after an hour or so I packed up and retreated to my hotel, and continued co-solving there. Another change — after years of struggling to integrate remote solvers into my team, now it’s the easiest thing in the world, thanks to Discord and Google Sheets. That is the route I am likely to choose myself from now on.

Of course, come next November or December, as the prospect of the Hunt appears on the horizon, the need to immerse myself in it (to whatever degree MIT allows) may yet rise up again. I’ve been doing this for a long time. Now as then, most of the puzzles are well beyond me, and there are sometimes long periods where I am watching other people solve instead of solving anything myself. But then there are other times where I say the right thing and all my smart puzzle friends say “Ohhhhh!,” and it is the best feeling in the world. Whether I attend in person or solve from home, and whether the whole thing ends right on time or two weeks late, I wouldn’t miss it for anything.

12 Years of Spaghetti!

12 Years of Spaghetti!

Back in 2012, I made a joke on Facebook. I said that if I presented a bunch of words and claimed it was a puzzle, that my friends would be able to solve it even if the words had been chosen entirely at random. Someone responded, okay, let’s try it. Thus was the game of Spaghetti born.

My initial joke contained more truth than I knew. Every time I present some random words and say “Solve this,” we get a wide range of “solutions,” from the absurd to the remarkably, jaw-droppingly elegant. It is always a wonder to behold. Wanna see? Okay.

As per usual, I will give you five words, which I have chosen at random out of an abridged dictionary. Your job is to pretend these words are a puzzle, and present the solution to that puzzle. Obviously, you can’t just say “The answer is WHATEVER,” and leave it at that. You have to explain why the answer is WHATEVER.

To ease your way slightly, you have the option of adding a sixth word to the list — a word of your own choosing.

If all this sounds completely unhinged — well, yes, no argument from me. But don’t worry, you don’t need a solution of your own to participate in this. Just keep an eye on the comments to this post throughout the day. The winner of the game will be chosen by you! Click the thumbs-up button by any solution that impresses you. Whoever gets the most likes will be our winner.

Ready? Here are your five Spaghetti words. What’s the solution?

QUERULOUS
HEPTAGON
DEMONSTRABLE
MAST
GYMNASTIC

Good luck!

(One last note: I think I’ve changed the settings on my blog so that anybody can post a comment without my having to approve it. If you do get stuck in the moderation queue — sorry, I’ll get to it when I can, but I’m going to be elsewhere for much of the day.)

Into The Words

Into The Words

My new download-and-solve puzzle hunt, “Into The Words,” is available for your downloading-and-solving pleasure! Ten puzzles, including a metapuzzle, just right for a few hours of solo solving or some fun co-solving with a friend or partner. Can you cheer up the grumpy Witch of the Woods?

Originally commissioned by the Mohonk Mountain House for its Wonderful World of Words weekend. You can purchase the puzzle set here!

“Can I Make One Of Your Puzzles?”

“Can I Make One Of Your Puzzles?”

I’ve been asked this question a few times over the last couple of months. It is a very polite question, insofar as it probably doesn’t need to be asked at all. You can copyright a specific puzzle — the words placed just so, the clues carefully phrased — but as best I understand, you can’t copyright a specific puzzle type. Anybody is free to make a crossword, or a word search, or a Rows Garden, or a Patchwork, or what-have-you.

I understand and appreciate the politeness. When a new puzzle form gets introduced to the world, it seems only fair that its creator should be allowed to capitalize on it for some length of time before other constructors crowd in. (I’m not sure what the proper length of time is, though. A year?)

Anyway. When I am asked this question, my answer is always an enthusiastic Yes. That Yes is sincere, but also it would be hypocritical for me to say anything else: My path to professional puzzlemaking was eased enormously by the constructors who came before me. The first variety puzzles I created and sold were originally invented by others — Mike Shenk’s crossword variant Going Too Far, and E.R. Galli’s twisty, turny Wry Tangles. When I started Puzzlesnacks, I had a few minor original puzzle types in my arsenal, but I was mostly pretty reliant on the established canon of variety forms. I was sending my subscribers Labyrinths and Checkerboard puzzles (both of which began with Mike Shenk), and Trail Mix and Shapeshifters (Patrick Berry), and puzzle types that have been around for so long I don’t know who invented them: Spiral, One Two Three, Flower Power, many more.

So now that I am adding to the world of variety puzzle types, am I going to frown on other people creating examples of them? Not hardly. If you solved a puzzle type that I created, and enjoyed it enough that you want to try making one yourself, to give away or to sell somewhere, you have my full blessing. Just let me know about it, huh? I’m going to want to solve it.

(Caveat: I was asked by a constructor if they might pitch an entire book of one of my puzzle types, and I requested that they hold off on that. I’d like to be the first person to give that a go. I think that’s reasonably fair.)

And since there is always some confusion, in puzzle-construction circles, about who originated a given variety form, let’s talk briefly about the puzzle types I think of as “mine.”

Cascades

Two answers in each row, and then consecutive answers stepping down each “cascade.” The clues for a given cascade are grouped together, but it is up to the solver to figure out where each set of cascade answers goes in the grid. Joon Pahk has gone a step further, putting all of the Cascade clues into a single long list — I thought that might be a little too much, and it is certainly harder, but not overly so. For a constructing challenge, see how few words you can get away with, on average, in each cascade.

Consonant Companions

A recent creation — I’ve only made four of them so far. In a minute I’ll discuss a puzzle type called Fraternal Twins. That puzzle has two different grids, and solvers work back and forth between those grids until both are entirely filled. The two grids “communicate” with each other in a way — if you get stuck in one grid, the other might offer a helping hand.

I got to thinking, how else can two grids communicate? Fraternal Twins is based on anagrams. What if instead the puzzle was based on what we hardcore puzzlers call the “consonantcy?” In a consonantcy, you take a word or phrase, strip out the vowels, add in new vowels (not necessarily in the same places), and get a new word. For example, you can change MISQUOTE to MOSQUITO by changing which vowels are placed among the consonants MSQT.

And that’s how it is with a Consonant Companions puzzle. There are two grids. In each grid, the consonants get put into the shaded spaces, and vowels go into the white spaces. The consonants are used in the same order in both grids; the vowels change as needed. (The letter Y should never be used.) I make a point of lacing a reasonable number of high-scoring Scrabble letters into these puzzles — you don’t want it to be all R and S and T.

For an extra challenge for your solvers, only number the left-hand grid, and present the right-hand clues out of order.

Double or Nothing

A puzzle type where the title came first: Hey, how about a crossword grid where you either put two letters or no letters into each space? Then you could call it Double or Nothing!

The only problem with this idea was: I couldn’t construct it. I saw it not as a themeless puzzle but with a gambling-related answer running across the middle of the grid, and no matter how many different ways I tried to build off that central entry, I simply couldn’t get it to the finish line. I presented the problem to Patrick Berry, and he said, “Maybe I’ll give it a shot, but that sounds really hard.” And so of course he had a completed grid to me before the end of that same day. (You can try that first puzzle here. I’ll note that when we first passed this around at a puzzle convention, we didn’t tell anybody what the trick of it was beyond the title.) Patrick has since made many Double or Nothings for the Wall Street Journal — all of them, astonishingly, gambling themed just like that first one. I am content to make themeless Puzzlesnacks-sized ones and leave it at that.

Drop-Ins

UPDATE: I completely forgot about this one when I first put together this post. I suspect this type might not have the potential longevity of some of the others, but I still like it — the weird-looking grid, and most especially the magical transformation the answers undergo. You first enter words in the grid, back and forth following the path but ignoring the small circles. You then place a given letter into some of the circles so that the original answers become a whole new string of words. For example, if the first word in the puzzle is SUSHI, and the second word begins with an E, you can add the letter N twice to turn that string into SUNSHINE. The letter you add is always the same across a given puzzle, but differs from puzzle to puzzle.

Fraternal Twins

Fun as they are, there’s a certain sameness to a lot of variety forms — words go this way, and then they also go that way. I wanted to try something a little different, perhaps involving anagrams. Eventually I wound up with this two-grid concept, where the six letters in a given section are the same across the two grids, but appear in scrambled order, forming different words. So far this type has only shown up in Puzzlesnacks, and in this far, far more challenging version I made for the 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt. Will Shortz has purchased one for the New York Times, but I don’t know when it will pop up.

Jelly Roll

I used to post puzzles every day on Twitter, inspired by whatever that morning’s “Word of the Day” was at Merriam-Webster’s web site. It was a fun little exercise. One day I came up with a thing where a string of words could be broken up into pairs of letters, and those pairs of letters rearranged to make new words. When I was looking around for new forms to add to Puzzlesnacks, I revisited this idea, and discussed it with Mark Halpin, who came up with how the puzzle could be best visualized. (He named it, too.) The puzzle remains much the same as it was first presented: The white path has a string of consecutive answers, and so does the gray path, and then so does the path that travels back and forth alternating between the white spaces and gray spaces.

Patchwork

Patrick Berry has a very neat form called “Boxes,” where answers are placed across each row, and then those answers can also be broken up into rectangles, each of which matches a Boxes clue. I tried making a Boxes puzzle once, and it is a tough construction. But then it dawned on me — why did they have to be boxes at all? Why not irregular sections? That would provide the constructor with a lot more flexibility. And lo, Patchwork was born. This has become one of my favorite puzzle types to create.

Consonant Companions

Consonant Companions

Tomorrow, Puzzlesnacks subscribers will get to try a brand new puzzle type: “Consonant Companions!” It’s a neat two-grid format — consonants go in the shaded squares, and vowels in the white squares. The trick is, the same consonants are used in the same order across both grids. So if you get stuck in one grid, the other grid will give you some letters to help you out. It’s fun to see how a string of consonants in one grid gets revowelized to become something wildly different.

I’d be happy enough just having a new puzzle form in the Puzzlesnacks mix, but in fact I am even happier than that, because this coming Sunday, Consonant Companions will make its debut in the New York Times as the featured variety puzzle! Look for it!

Two New Puzzlesnacks Collections!

Two New Puzzlesnacks Collections!

It’s been a long time coming, but two new collections of Puzzlesnacks puzzles are now available! We’re trying something new this time — instead of downloading them from the Puzzlesnacks Shop (which still has plenty of other goodies), the new books are available exclusively at Amazon. No more having to print everything out yourself!

In case you’re a new visitor and are wondering what “Puzzlesnacks” are, here’s the back cover:

(Thanks to A.J. Jacobs and Andrew Reynolds for those excellent blurbs!)

Something For The Kids, Something For The Grownups

Something For The Kids, Something For The Grownups

There are two new offerings in the Puzzlesnacks Shop!

For kids, I’ve got a mini puzzle hunt: Crime For Breakfast! This is the set of puzzles I brought with me around the country when I was doing school visits in support of my Winston Breen books. I always did a presentation or two, of course, but then I gave the schools the option of a writing workshop or a team puzzle event — always crossing my fingers that they would choose the latter. I’ve run these puzzles for thousands of kids, and now I’m making them publicly available for the first time.

For the grownups, we have (at long last) a second volume of Puzzlesnacks Plus. The first set came out in 2020, and my goal was to produce a new set every year, and boy, did that not happen. Winning the 2021 Mystery Hunt put that and many other things on the back burner, and then 2022 kinda flew by as well.

But we’re back, baby! Twenty full-sized variety puzzles in the flavors my Puzzlesnacks subscribers usually enjoy in a far smaller size: Cascades, Jelly Roll, Patchwork, Drop-Ins, and many more. Plus I threw in two bonus puzzles — a supersized Patchwork and a crazy mishmash of a Checkerboard and a Labyrinth that I attempted on a lark and which I think came out pretty great. I honestly don’t think you’ve seen anything like it!