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.

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!

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!)

There are two new case studies on the Puzzles page — the charity project Puzzles for Democracy, and an exciting recent project, the Rule The Word Challenge, commissioned by the Scripps National Spelling Bee for its fun-filled “Bee Week.”

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!

Back in the fall, I started getting itchy to do another puzzle project for charity. The Social Distancing Puzzles had done pretty well, raising thousands of dollars for Feeding America at the height of the pandemic. For my follow-up, where did I want to focus my efforts?

I decided that I was most interested in supporting an organization that sought to protect democracy and bolster voting rights. Too many politicians and pundits seem intent on nibbling away at both of those — or even taking big painful bites. It has been alarming to watch, and I have felt quite helpless to do anything about it.

So, a fundraiser, then. But what should the puzzles look like? The Social Distancing Puzzles had a neat hook, where two or more people could co-solve the puzzles without necessarily being in the same room–the project literally encouraged social distancing. What should the hook be this time?

The answer came soon enough: I would make one puzzle for each of the 50 states!

On the heels of that: No. It’s a good hook, but I am not making 50 puzzles. A charity project is all well and good but let’s not go insane here.

But I still liked the general idea. So I turned to the puzzle community — I recruited some people I knew, and some people I didn’t know; I sought out crossword types and logic types and adventurous hunt puzzle types.

Ultimately over 30 puzzle constructors joined, and together we indeed made a puzzle for each of the 50 states — plus one for Washington, D.C.

Fifty-one puzzles in a big ol’ pdf! And you can get them all with a contribution of any size to Common Cause, which since 1970 has been fighting those who would erode our country’s democracy.

Please give generously, and please enjoy the puzzles!

Another MIT Mystery Hunt is in the books, and in many ways it was a wonder. Teammate, the constructing team, packed the weekend with innovation after innovation. Early puzzles were preceded by a loading screen that was itself a puzzle — and if you failed to notice its puzzly nature, the loading screen stuck around for longer and longer, as if the site was having a breakdown, when really it was the constructors saying “You might want to pay a little more attention to this.” Damned clever. Grasping the meaning of the loading screen allowed you to step behind the curtain of the Mystery Hunt, and explore a Puzzle Factory where various AI puzzle bots needed help completing the very Mystery Hunt you were at that moment solving. Widgets on the factory floor actually changed elements of certain puzzles, requiring serious coordination between solvers to set things properly so that everything could be solved. This was all really quite special and ingenious, and exactly why the Mystery Hunt holds a special place in the hearts of so many hardcore puzzle people.

The 2023 Mystery Hunt was also, as has been observed by many, far, far too difficult overall. There was hardly a softball to be found — every puzzle seemed to take hours and hours. Many answers could only be gleaned after a grueling amount of work, or a pile of challenging ahas, any one of which could throw the solvers permanently off the track. The constructing team themselves saw the trouble early on, and began to give away free answers — a necessary but demoralizing thing to have to do. Even so, the Hunt extended into Monday morning, many hours later than is ideal.

Gauging the difficulty level — and thus the length — of your puzzle event is one of the most daunting challenges faced by a constructor or a constructing team, and this is by no means restricted to the Mystery Hunt: I run several small puzzle events each year, some for children and some for adults, and even though these events might be only an hour or two in length, it takes a lot of effort and forethought to get the timing right. Still, there is no question that the Mystery Hunt is on a whole other level of challenge in terms of calibrating the difficulty — it’s so sprawling and complex, and often it is put together by teams without a lot of experience in large-scale events, who are learning as they go along.

And so I would like to offer a word of advice to future Hunt-writing teams. I have theories about how you can accurately estimate your Hunt’s endpoint; I have thoughts about how many puzzles a Mystery Hunt needs to have. But neither of those topics is nearly as important as the following nine words:

YOUR PUZZLES DO NOT NEED TO BE INCREDIBLY HARD.

Keep this maxim at the forefront of your minds as you plan your event, and success is all but assured.

To be clear, the first time I captained my team, Palindrome, as we ran a Hunt — back in 2008 — we did NOT understand this, and I in particular did not understand this. Not only were our puzzles too hard overall, but in several places I personally required solvers to all but read my mind in order to understand how a final answer was meant to be extracted. It was not a particularly good Hunt, and Palindrome spent the bulk of fifteen years trying to reclaim victory so we could show what we could do now that we had some experience under our belts.

For 2022, I (once again the captain) was laser focused on making sure the Hunt ended at a reasonable time. Not including the “Star Rats” prologue set of puzzles (which were released a month early), solvers faced approximately 167 puzzles across Hunt weekend, including metas. Of these, 47 were solved by a group of testers in about an hour, and 83 puzzles required two hours. We expected the remaining 37 puzzles to take three or four hours.

So fully 75% of our Hunt’s puzzles were solvable in under two hours: Does that mean our puzzles were easy? I don’t think so, no. They were in many ways typically bananas Mystery Hunt puzzles, just the sort of thing someone who attends the weekend expects to see: There were many puzzles about esoteric subjects, and rarely were there any instructions. And when our puzzles tested at two hours or less, that was because of an effort by a team of four to eight people working together — a single solver would have taken far longer. “Easy” is not the first word to leap to mind as I page through the archive of the 2022 Hunt, nor do I recall anybody complaining about the simplicity of our puzzles in their post-event write-ups.

With the data from our testsolves, and with the knowledge that teams would be working on different puzzles in parallel, we felt comfortable that a team would find the coin by Sunday at noon. In the event, the winning team crossed the finish line just before 10:00 a.m. Had the proportions of our puzzles been reversed — if 75% of them had been three- and four-hour solves, and just a quarter in the one-to-two-hour range — we could well have needed to resort to desperate measures to make sure someone won at a reasonable time.

Am I suggesting that Palindrome ran a perfect Hunt in 2022? Not hardly. There was a midpoint meta that proved an unexpected bottleneck for many teams, and it was pointed out in several places that we could have done a better job integrating the Hunt’s storyline. But for the most part I think we absorbed the lessons we learned back in 2008, the most important of which is to resist what I call Mystery Hunt Fever: The uncontrollable desire to amp up the difficulty of your puzzles again and again, draining away much of the puzzle’s fun in the process.

It is possible that this important lesson can only be learned with direct experience — Lord knows that was my main teacher. But I lay it out here in case it does someone a little good. The Mystery Hunt may have a reputation for extreme difficulty, but that reputation obscures the truth of the matter: Your Puzzles Do Not Need To Be Incredibly Hard.

The MIT Mystery Hunt is just a few days away, which means it’s time to sharpen your puzzle-solving skills on something that is in no way actually a puzzle. A puzzle by its nature is something purposefully constructed, often with painstaking effort so as to have the right difficulty for its intended audience. When I was part of the Mystery Hunt constructing team last year, many of the puzzles took weeks or longer to put together.

As opposed to a round of Spaghetti, which I construct by choosing five words at random from a pocket dictionary.

You’re saying to yourself, “Wait, how can a handful of random words be a puzzle?” To which I respond: It isn’t. But in the game of Spaghetti, we pretend these words are a puzzle, and then we try to solve it.

If that sounds ridiculous and impossible, you are both right and wrong. It is ridiculous. But we have seen over the years that it is not impossible — every time we run this bizarre experiment, participants point out complex patterns in the given words. Sometimes those patterns are convoluted and absurd, and there is a certain amount of fun in that. But other times what the solver discovers is so surprising and elegant it makes you wonder if the words really are chosen at random (they are).

Here are the five words for this round of Spaghetti:

VERIFY
WHITE
EMULSION
JOCULAR
SQUAT

To help you arrive at your solution, you may add a sixth word of your choosing to this list. Perhaps obviously, don’t just say “The answer is [whatever]” — you need to explain how you arrived at that answer.

Even if you can’t come up with a solution to this puzzle (and why should you, seeing as it is NOT A PUZZLE), check back on this post throughout the day, and read the submissions from other solvers. Give a thumbs-up to the solutions that you like. You can vote for as few or as many comments as you wish. The player who submits the solution that attracts the most likes will be the winner of the game.

(Pictured above: What DALL-E returns on the prompt “spaghetti puzzle.”)

It’s a new puzzle hunt! Eleven fun and varied puzzles, including a metapuzzle. Originally commissioned by the Mohonk Mountain House and run during its “Wonderful World of Words” weekend. Now you can solve it at home — do it solo or grab a friend or two!

Come meet Eureka K. Jones and his amazing inventions right here.