Author: Eric Berlin

Puzzlelopedia

Puzzlelopedia

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My friends at Puzzability have been crafting wonderful, ingenious puzzles for decades, and today heralds the release of their second puzzle book for kids, Puzzlelopedia. I had the opportunity to help out a little with this book late in its production, as a test-solver and proofreader, so I’m well-positioned to assure you that this book is stuffed with an absolutely dazzling variety of puzzles, not to mention the occasional article delving into some fascinating facet of wordplay. Young solvers will dive into this and never want to come out. Their previous book, The Brainiest Insaniest Ultimate Puzzle Book, remains available as well, and also gets my highest recommendation.

Demonically Tough Puzzles

Demonically Tough Puzzles

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Puzzles are not normally thought of as a hobby requiring much by way of endurance. If you like to run, perhaps you will decide to train for a marathon — building up your stamina bit by bit until you can do the whole 26 miles. While you’re doing that, we puzzlers are stretched out on the sofa, clipboards in hand, content to leave the strenuous pastimes to other folks.

But even as sedentary a hobby as puzzling has its hardcore adherents. Look around a little and maybe you’ll find a “puzzle hunt” in your town, one that will take you from place to place, solving crafty puzzles with a team of friends for two or three hours. If you enjoy that, you might decide to step up and participate in the MIT Mystery Hunt, a weekend-long event requiring the brainpower of a team of dozens of dedicated solvers.

The Mystery Hunt has gotten its share of media coverage over the years, and you might believe, after reading one article or another about the annual event, that this is the top of the mountain — that puzzlers can’t possibly get more fanatical than this.

Well. Let me introduce you to “The Game.”

Since its origins on the West Coast in the 1970s, the Game has specialized in over-the-top puzzles that leap dramatically off the page — and that participating teams solve while driving around in a van for 24 to 36 sleepless hours. Early versions of the Game may have gone a little too over the top: Wikipedia describes a puzzle, if that’s the word for it, in which a team member was left at a strip club “stripped of all clothes and spectacles, dressed in nothing but a hospital gown.”

More recent iterations of the Game have been less likely to embarrass or threaten its participants, but the endurance component remains a core feature of the event. The latest version of the Game, Miskatonic University, was held in the Boston area this past weekend. After a fun Friday night introductory event, things really got going Saturday morning at 9:00 a.m…. and ended the following day at 4:00 in the afternoon. Somewhere in there I took a couple of fifteen or twenty-minute naps.

Miskatonic was a H.P. Lovecraft-themed puzzle event created by an army of kick-ass volunteers headed up by Sarah Leadbeater, with puzzles by constructors Nathan Curtis and Nathan Fung. Did the puzzles, as advertised, leap dramatically off the page? To some extent, yes. Sometimes, and especially in the first half of the event, they were variations on familiar puzzle types, set in offbeat locations. We were excited for what might await us at a miniature golf course, but what awaited us was a small maze puzzle that we solved sitting at a picnic table. Similarly, we were delighted when we went to a “children’s center” and were handed a school-cafeteria milk carton — but inside the carton was a fairly standard diagramless crossword.

Other puzzles more successfully used their environments. Some of the puzzles at the Friday night event, for example, could have been solved in your own living room with only minor modifications — but it was a thrill to solve them instead at Hammond Castle, the gorgeous medieval castle that was plonked down in Gloucester, MA in the 1920s.

Solvers who found the puzzles fun but were expecting a little more zing were rewarded by their patience: Saturday night, teams were sent to a community center and were met with a suite of puzzles bursting with innovation: A “beer pong” puzzle put a bunch of classic red Solo cups to creative use; another puzzle was locked in a gorgeous puzzle box that could only be opened with the crafty use of an assortment of gears; and most brilliant of all was a simple guess-the-word puzzle enlivened to the max by a Ouija board whose planchette moved all by itself (with the help of magnets and some ingenious programming).

I had the good fortune to be on one of the event’s stronger teams, anchored by Dan Katz, who routinely grasps in a matter of moments puzzles that are meant to take much longer. (Glancing briefly at a bunch of stacked-up specimen jars, each containing a sad little stuffed animal: “A lot of them are missing at least one eye. Have you tried counting up the eyes and seeing if they form Braille?”) We and a handful of other teams pretty much had the run of the community center for the first hour, solving puzzles alone in a room that would become much more crowded later on. By the time all 34 teams had arrived, the center was a scene of bustling chaos, held together admirably by Sarah Leadbeater, who seemed to be everywhere simultaneously — helping stuck teams, fixing broken puzzle elements, redirecting teams from too-crowded rooms to slightly less crowded ones. The puzzles were the main event, but her awesome powers of organization were a dazzling sideshow.

After the night at the community center, teams hit the road again, and by sunrise were at an Irish lodge for breakfast and my favorite puzzle of the weekend. The walls of the lodge were decorated with children’s drawings. We were instructed to make a drawing of our own, and were given crayons for the task. But, aha: This was still a Lovecraft-themed event, and the drawings were all charming depictions of multi-eyed tentacle monsters. And we couldn’t simply create any old multi-eyed tentacle monster — we had to create one that perfectly matched its name (“Thaathlog”). What did this mean? It meant analyzing the drawings on the wall and the names of the various monsters to determine the rules for monster creation. For example, it turned out that the color of each monster was determined by looking at which ROYGBIV letter was contained the most times by the monster’s name, and if a second ROYGBIV letter appeared, well, now you knew what color to make the monster’s spots. There were seven or eight such rules to suss out, some quite tricky — it was a just-right balance of puzzle challenge and theatricality. Also, our monster, drawn by teammate Jennifer Braun, came out great.

Wait, but “Thaathlog” contains one each of the letters O and G, so which one determines the color? The one that comes first. (And if no ROYGBIV letters were present, our tentacle monster would have been brown.)

We left the lodge a couple of hours shy of the event’s 24-hour mark, and my whole team was feeling pretty weary. Nonetheless, there were more puzzles to solve, including a reconstruction of the Greenway Labyrinth with letter-strewn magnetic strips, and a Jenga tower constructed by following a set of clues.

The event’s finale took place in a field on the edge of Boston’s Public Garden. I took one look at what they were setting up and said “No, sorry, this is where I draw the line.” At nearly the 30-hour mark, in the bright August sunshine, they were clearly preparing some kind of athletic event. This turned out to be a funny variation on Simon Says — or rather, Cthulhu Says. It had something to do with racing to be the first team to complete a mosaic made of Rubik’s Cubes — I didn’t entirely follow it, except to see that most people found it great silly fun.

Our graduation from Miskatonic U ended on a bit of a sour note: the event’s organizers — exemplary in every other way — had neglected to print enough of the final puzzle, the one that would tie all of the previous answers together. My team was one of the unlucky ones that didn’t get a final puzzle, and it was a bit like binging a long, magnificent television series and then the last five minutes of the final episode cuts out. And then when we did finally get the missing puzzle, important instructions had been torn away, leaving us stuck and frustrated for longer than was necessary. A bit of a downer that might not even be worth mentioning except that it was literally the final moments of the whole wild event.

Despite this, the event was a joy, and I was thrilled to be a part of it. And I’m glad that I was on a team that was strong enough to see all of the puzzles — many teams were skipped past various puzzles, depending on their pace, so that everyone could meet at the grand finale at the same time. A reasonable idea — indeed, probably the only way to go about an event like this — but a bummer for the teams who missed out on, for example, the self-operating Ouija board.

All in all, I have enormous admiration for the event’s organizers — the staff of Miskatonic University. These behind-the-scenes photographs barely hint at the mind-boggling amount of work that went into this, all done for the love of the puzzles and the puzzle community. Heartfelt thanks to all of them, and best wishes for many, many hours of catch-up sleep.

It’s Puzzlesnacks Day!

It’s Puzzlesnacks Day!

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When I was in high school and college, I was a rabid fan of Games magazine. Why? Because I loved turning the pages of a new issue, never sure what I was going to see next.

They had crossword puzzles in there, sure, but I usually ignored these. I was drawn to the more interesting puzzles: Grids where the words performed like acrobats in the circus, flipping around, going in circles, doing all kinds of unpredictable stunts.

I was a big fan of Will Shortz, Patrick Berry, Mike Shenk, Henry Hook, and many others who were not content to rely on the usual assortment of puzzle types. They wanted to give the puzzle-loving audience Something New, and boy, did they ever.

Here’s the thing, though: Those new and different variety puzzles? A lot of them were pretty damn tough. You had to be a devoted puzzle addict to want to tackle them.

There are a lot of people out there who say they like puzzles, but what they mean are easier, casual puzzles. They have no interest in trying to tackle, say, one of Mike Shenk’s Marching Bands, where words go absolutely every-freakin-where. I myself didn’t try a Marching Bands for many years. I was just too intimidated. And those dazzling three-star variety cryptics? Good heavens. Forget it. I knew I was probably missing something good, but I didn’t have a prayer of solving those puzzles.

But those variety puzzle types — the unusual and interesting puzzles that captivated me then and that I continue to adore now — don’t HAVE to be tough and intimidating. If you shrink them down a bit, and avoid obscure words in the grid’s fill — why, anybody can solve them, no matter their level of experience.

That’s what I’ve tried to do over the last few years, first under the name Puzzle Your Kids and then — when it became clear that adults also liked these puzzles — under the new name Puzzlesnacks.

Puzzlesnacks look a lot like those interesting puzzles I was drawn to back when I first started getting Games magazine. The words perform all kinds of stunts, and the puzzles will bend your brain in many new directions. But the puzzles are also much smaller — typically just 16-35 words, and with a vocabulary that pretty much anybody can tackle with confidence.

I’m imagining a door marked Love of Puzzles, you see, and I want to swing that door wide open, for kids and for adults who think the early-week newspaper crossword is the most interesting puzzle available to them.

I’ve been creating these puzzles for the last three years. And today the first full collection of Puzzlesnacks is officially available: 110 puzzles covering nearly 40 different puzzle types. You can find Puzzlesnacks at your favorite bookstore (I hope, anyway), or online at the usual places.

If you buy it, and enjoy it, give it a review on Amazon or Goodreads or your bookstore Web site of choice, wouldja? You wouldn’t believe how big a difference a few good, honest reviews make.

Thanks.

EB on NPR

EB on NPR

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I recently gave Will Shortz a little puzzle challenge, and he used it on his segment of NPR’s Weekend Edition. You can listen to it (or read the transcript) here. Submit your answer and maybe you’ll get to play a game with Will Shortz on the air!