Puzzled Pint is a fun mini-puzzle-hunt hosted every month at bars and other outlets all around the world…

…and I’ve created the October set of puzzles, “Shopping Spree!”

The event goes live on Tuesday, October 8, but an introductory puzzle will be posted on Friday, October 4. If Puzzled Pint is being hosted anywhere near you, I hope you grab some friends and go!

Hey, New York Times subscribers! When you’re done with Connections and Wordle and Spelling Bee and so forth, open up this weekend’s Sunday magazine and try my new Patchwork variety puzzle!

A few decades ago, I lived in New York City, and every once in a while I would hear about some puzzle-adjacent event taking place. Maybe it was in a museum, maybe it was an exploration of one neighborhood or another. We would form teams and walk around (in one memorable instance, we were driven around in a limousine), and we would look for clues, each of which would lead to the next location and the next clue, until you eventually reached the finish line. A fun idea in theory, but none of these events were executed particularly well — they were all lackluster at best, and several were worse than that.

Thirty years later, I have finally had the experience I hoped for all those earlier times, for I have now participated in the Great Gotham Challenge. I flat-out would not have considered schlepping down to the city for this, but I was given a comp by the event’s co-creator, Theresa Piazza, and I am extremely grateful for her generosity.

I assembled a team of local puzzle friends (shoutout to Jon Delfin, Jeffrey Schwartz, and Francis Heaney), and together we met at the event’s starting line, just outside of Moynihan Train Hall. Bunches of teams would be heading off from this spot at various start times over the course of the day — at our 1:00 p.m. start time, there were ten or a dozen such teams ready to go. There were a few rules and introductions that needed to happen, and these were delivered by a trio of people wearing, for some reason, vaguely military or science-fictiony jumpsuits.

The event didn’t seem to have a theme beyond “let’s explore New York City.” No matter. Give me some good puzzles and an interesting experience, and I’m yours. And the Great Gotham Challenge provided this to near perfection. Over the course of four hours, my teammates and I solved a dozen puzzles across a wide swath of Manhattan, and I lost count of how many times I said “What?!?” and “Wow!”

Since the Challenge is over, I asked for permission to turn the Spoilers knob up to 11. Permission received. And so let’s take a deep dive and look at a puzzle event done right, with solid puzzles consistently executed with panache.

Puzzle 1 – The Envelope: We started with a large envelope, in which there was a card with a verse on it, and some random-seeming numbers on the opposite side. We used the numbers to pull a hidden message out of the verse, and one of my teammates saw how to use that message with the details on the envelope — the fake postmark and the fake cancelled stamp. Pretty good, and just the right amount of tricky. While this was an impressive start, I jumped to the conclusion that every puzzle would be much the same: Here’s an envelope. There’s something inside it. Solve it.

This conclusion was wildly incorrect, as we shall soon see.

Puzzle 2 – Making Connections: We were next sent into Moynihan Hall itself, where we were told to make contact with — which is to say, literally shake hands with — ten or so people wandering around. Wait a minute, I thought. This is only the second puzzle, and it involves TEN actors? I was starting to think this event might be more ambitious than I originally assumed.

We were given descriptions of the ten people, but finding them all was far from trivial. The “influencer” was pretty plain, standing there with a phone attached to a selfie stick and a ring light, flipping her hair and putting on a show of being ostentatious. But others were far more subtle. The hint about “rolling purple” — did that indicate the otherwise unremarkable guy with the purple suitcase? What about the person who, we were told, had pulled an all-nighter at NYU? If we wanted somebody who looked tired, there was a wide assortment to choose from. We absolutely did not want to approach anyone not involved in our game.

Ultimately we made all of the right choices, shook hands with everyone, and with each interaction, received small cards with words or phrases on them. These, it turned out, fittingly made a slight variant on a New York Times “Connections” board, the solving of which resulted in the answer we needed to continue.

Puzzle 3 – The Printout: We were sent to a Fedex/Kinko’s to print something out. We made our request to the guy behind the counter, who had no idea what we were talking about. (If he was playing dumb, he played his role superbly.) When we finally revealed that we had a “retrieval code,” he directed us to a copier where we could plug that in, but that machine seemed to want us to set up an account with a minimum of $5.00. Surely that wasn’t something the gamerunners expected of us, right? We stood there dithering, to the attendant’s rapidly increasing exasperation. “That is a retrieval code,” he said. “I have worked here for three years. I know what a retrieval code looks like. You type it in there.“

Finally, he went behind the counter and typed in the code on his own computer. “See, it works,” he said, although we could not see because only he could see the screen. Could he print that out for us? He could, and did, at a far more reasonable cost of 44 cents, and we finally had our puzzle: A bunch of rebuses on New York City neighborhoods, which we made short work of, and which led to a surprisingly elegant extraction that used certain rebus elements a second time.

Puzzle 4 – Popsicles: My team got a little lost en route to the next puzzle station, which was on the High Line, the long, elevated public park built into a former freight line. We couldn’t seem to find a vendor selling Mexican ices. We asked at the Information booth, and they said there was nothing like that here, which was in one sense absolutely correct — nobody was selling ices. But about a hundred feet away and FULLY IN VIEW OF THE INFORMATION BOOTH was a fellow giving away ices if you knew to approach him, and knew to tell him a knock-knock joke. It took us longer than I care to admit to make contact with this guy and get our popsicles, but they were a nice little treat when we finally got them, and it was pretty nifty to find the next puzzle on the popsicle sticks.

Puzzle 5 – Portal to Another World: No, seriously, that’s what we were told to look for, somewhere on a largely empty street in Chelsea. How does an actual, non-fictional person find a portal to another world? We walked around the designated area for a while, asking ourselves this question. And finally, our eyes were drawn to a truck parked nearby, it’s back door fully open to reveal a floor-to-ceiling heap of boxes.

What was that in the lower corner? That box is open, and seemed to lead to some sort of tunnel. My teammate Francis jumped into the truck and crawled down the tunnel, and sure enough… well, it was not, to be honest, a literal portal to another world, but it was a delightfully theatrical way of giving us the next puzzle, in the form of a UPS envelope.

Puzzle 6 – Twist and Turn: And here we ran into one of the only flaws in event’s design. In the back of the truck, as Francis was given the envelope that contained this puzzle, he was also given — several times, with clear importance — a particular phrase. We tried to figure out how to apply that phrase to the contents of the envelope, a clever paper sculpture in three sections that could be twisted and turned in various ways to form the head, torso, and legs of an assortment of people. Presumably if we understood how to use that keyphrase, it would give us an insight into the proper orientation of this sculpture. We twisted, we turned, we thought, we spun our wheels, and then finally we took our first and only hint, where we learned that what Francis was told in the back of the truck was itself an answer that was supposed to be submitted, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the sculpture.

So we submitted the answer, and it unlocked a whole lot of information necessary for solving the sculpture puzzle, which we then did in less than two minutes.

Puzzle 7 – Window Cleaner: Back on the High Line, we were given clues that led us to a fake ad for a window cleaner. We called the phone number, and followed the recorded directions, which was a simple enough thing to do seeing as the High Line is a narrow straight line cutting through Chelsea. Eventually we wound up at a particular park bench where we found…

Puzzle 8 – The Overlay: We retrieved an envelope in which was a single sheet of acetate. In the upper left corner was a very specific set of coordinates. The rest of the sheet was taken up with a set of lines of varying thicknesses, arrayed so that it resembled a street scene — a crosswalk was easily recognizable, and some bike lanes. Okay. There were also some letters peppered throughout the scene. We found a view of the street that seemed to match what was depicted in the overlay. But now what?

The very specific coordinates pointed to the street level below the High Line, and unfortunately my teammates took my advice and we descended from exactly where we needed to be to solve the puzzle. After a little bit of flailing around, we returned to the High Line and our view of the street. (I was starting to get well and truly tired of going up and down stairs.) We tried to line up the overlay precisely with the street scene, though it was hard to say exactly what that would have accomplished.

“Am I crazy,” I said, “or is there an O in the crosswalk down there, just as there’s an O in the overlay?”

Light bulbs went on over all four of our heads. “That’s not an O in the crosswalk, it’s just a circle. And there’s another circle…”

“And there’s another one…”

“And another.” The circles painted on the street corresponded to the letters on the overlay, and reading only those letters got us our answer. Unexpected and delightful.

Puzzle 9 – The T-shirt: We’re directed to a particular laundromat, where the Chinese woman up front winks at us because it’s plain as day that we are not here to do laundry. In the rearmost dryer are a jumble of white T-shirts. We take one, as directed. It shows a line drawing of a building, and a hand holding a key, and a bunch of abstract shapes. Presumably it is also a puzzle, although I don’t yet understand how that might be.

As requested, we leave the laundromat, and the instant we step outside, the T-shirt’s drawing floods with color. It’s made with photochromic dyes that change in direct sunlight. We take it to a nearby park, sit in the sun, and solve it.

Puzzle 10 – Fashion Posters: We’re told to look across the street from a hardware store, but it’s not at all clear what we are looking for. I stare at a list of special drinks on a blackboard outside a restaurant, willing it to become a puzzle. It does not cooperate. Something on the sidewalk? These posters on one of the boarded up buildings?

Holy crap. At a glance, the posters are for some fashion company or another, model looking off into the distance, posing against a white background. At a second glance, the woman is wearing the vaguely military or science-fictiony jumpsuit that the gamerunners were wearing back at kickoff. The posters are riddled with Ben-Day dots, like a comic book viewed in extreme close-up. I try treating these like a Magic Eye, which turns out not to be correct, but after staring long enough I thought I could discern the shapes of letters. Ultimately, Francis had the excellent idea of taking a picture of the posters and playing with the color saturation levels. That did the trick.

Puzzle 11 – Perfume: At the end of the High Line is a food court and marketplace. One of the booths is for the same fictional fashion company depicted in the posters. This must be the place.

The company has a line of perfumes to go with its cutting-edge jumpsuit fashions. We are given a small box of samples, and a card with marketing text on one side and a grid of letters on the other. Along the top and sides of the grid are the names of possible scents. Uh-oh. I have encountered olfactory puzzles in escape rooms, and it turns out I am not very good at identifying single scents. Now it appears that we will need to identify two smells in combination.

One smell is always the dominant one, but luckily my teammates do not always agree on which smell is stronger. We circle letters in the grid with varying levels of confidence. Finally, we rely on the fact that every single answer has had a strong thematic connection to its puzzle. That plus our pool of maybe right, maybe wrong letters is enough to get us to the finish line.

Puzzle 12 – Boba Tea: At a particular store in the Chelsea Market, we are given boba tea in plastic cups specially printed for this event. The cups, when nested into each other and oriented correctly, reveal Braille letters. I call up a Braille table on my iPad, we watch Francis do the decoding, and suddenly the event is over. We are invited to a rooftop lounge to confirm our final time and to mingle with the other teams. Ta-da!

When my team of puzzle constructors were first setting off to make the 2022 Mystery Hunt, we brainstormed a list of adjectives we hoped that solvers would apply to our event. One of these was wonder. We wanted to deliver a sense of wonder — not consistently from start to finish, certainly, but in special little moments here and there. This was a bit of a tough go considering that we were forced to hold our event virtually, but I still think we managed it in a few places.

Wonder is an excellent thing to shoot for in a puzzle event. Anybody can hand out a bunch of crosswords or other word puzzles. I’ve done it myself. But if you are running a day-long or weekend-long event, you are implicitly promising something epic. That’s a tough thing to deliver.

Well, the Great Gotham Challenge delivers. My jaw dropped when I realized the portal to another world was in the back of that innocent-looking truck. I was staggered all over again when I stopped looking past those fashion posters and started looking at them. And how many specially created objects did we encounter during this event? The popsicles, the boba tea, the color-changing T-shirt, the perfumes, the paper pop-up sculpture… good heavens, that’s a lot.

I have my nits — I’ve been nerding out on puzzles for far too long not to have them. It would have been nice to have some idea of where we were in the event’s path — somewhere in the middle? Close to the end? As we kept walking, with increasing tiredness, from puzzle to puzzle, some indication of our progress would have been appreciated. I didn’t know the boba tea puzzle was the finale until we had finished it.

Relatedly, while I have played several excellent puzzle events with no metapuzzle — the reuse of the previous answers in a sort of grand finale — I always mentally dock a couple of points when a metapuzzle is absent. A puzzle hunt is a kind of story. When telling a story, you want to find a way to deliver a socko ending. A metapuzzle is a time-tested way of doing that. The GGC just kind of stops.

But these are quibbles. I went into this not really knowing what to expect, and came away dazzled. I think back to the painful look-for-the-clue games I played in New York City thirty years ago, and I want to zip back in time and tell my younger self, just you wait. The really good stuff is on its way. I won’t need a comp next year. I’ll buy a ticket at the first opportunity.

The introduction to my new book, “Off The Wall Word Searches,” co-written with my wife:

Word searches have been a popular puzzle for generations, and why not? They’re fun and engaging, relaxing while still requiring a bit of brain power.

That is to say, a bit of brain power. The word search is among the easiest puzzle types the puzzle world has to offer. Get a word, find the word, circle the word. That’s all there is to it. You would be forgiven, in fact, if you have occasionally thought, while solving a word search, “It wouldn’t be a bad thing if this puzzle was a little more challenging.”

We hear you. We like it when a word search puzzle contains a “curveball”—some little extra trick to keep you on your toes. And the book you now hold in your hands is nothing but curveballs.

Sometimes we give you a list of words, but in the form of mini-puzzles to solve. Sometimes we don’t give you a word list at all.

Words don’t always go in a straight line in their grids. Puzzles will ask you to engage in all kinds of wordplay and language games. It is fair to say you won’t know what you’re going to find as you turn
the page from one puzzle to the next.

We also offer you a helping hand when you need one. When a puzzle’s word list is missing or obscured by some extra little game, you will always find it in the back of the book.

One other thing: When you’ve completed a puzzle, don’t move on to the next one right away. Take a look at the letters that were not circled in the grid. You’ll find they spell a fun fact related to the puzzle’s theme, or a pithy quote or—fairly often—a bonus puzzle for you to solve.

Okay. It’s time for you to step into the batter’s box. We have some curveballs to throw at you.

Off The Wall Word Searches from Union Square Publishing

Off the Wall Word Searches at Amazon (if you buy it from there, please leave a favorable review!)

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.

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.

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.)

I’m the guest this week on the Reality Escape Pod, talking about crosswords and Puzzlesnacks and all sorts of other puzzly topics. Listen at your favorite podcast site, or right here.

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!

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.