Monthly Archives: August 2013

Announcing a puzzly contest!

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Hello puzzlers and PuzzleNationers! It’s big announcement time!

That’s right, it’s a special bonus Friday post! In honor of the PuzzleNation Blog’s one-year anniversary, we’re announcing our first PuzzleNation Community Contest!

The idea is simple. Tell your friends about PuzzleNation, and have them join our blog readership, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter! And when they do, make sure they tell us YOU brought them to the PuzzleNation Community!

For example…

Ask your friends to “like” us on Facebook and then post this on our wall – “Thanks for recommending PuzzleNation, your name here.”

(We’ll be keeping track of our most enthusiastic PuzzleNation contestants through Facebook comments, Twitter replies, and blog notes.)

Why you ask? Well, we’re giving away a prize bundle of our Classic Word Search iBooks (all three volumes) to three puzzle fans: one for bringing in the most Twitter followers, one for bringing in the most Facebook fans, and one for bringing in the most blog readers!

It’s a great way to bring new eyes to PuzzleNation and expand the membership of the puzzle community!

And guess what? That’s not all! We’ll also be selecting a few names at random to receive one of our Classic Word Search iBooks as well! So if you’re shy about recruiting friends to PuzzleNation, there’s still a chance for you to receive a terrific prize!

We’ll be running our Community Contest for the next week, alongside our usual blog posts and daily Facebook content. Thank you so much for the enthusiasm and support, and we hope to see some new faces among our loyal puzzle fiends very soon!

5 Questions with Jordan Diehl and The Great Urban Race

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Welcome to the third edition of PuzzleNation Blog’s newest feature, 5 Questions!

We’re reaching out to puzzle constructors, video game writers and designers, writers, filmmakers, and puzzle enthusiasts from all walks of life, talking to people who make puzzles and people who enjoy them in the hopes of exploring the puzzle community as a whole.

And I’m excited to have Jordan Diehl as our latest 5 Questions interviewee!

Jordan is a Senior Manager for the Great Urban Race, a city-spanning puzzle competition that combines puzzle-solving, scavenger hunts, and physical challenges to create a unique, whirlwind challenge based around the landmarks and curiosities of a given city. (Previous GUR events have taken place in Seattle, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, and many other American cities.)

Teams gather to tackle the numerous mental and physical obstacles in a certain amount of time as they explore the city. Players are allowed to have remote help as well, often recruiting friends as “tech support” to hunt down locations for them en route. (I’ve served as tech support for my sister on several occasions. Check out our previous GUR adventures here.)

It’s a terrific workout, a great mental exercise, and some serious fun.

With the latest edition of the Great Urban Race hitting New York City in two days, Jordan was gracious enough to take some time out to talk to us, so without further ado, let’s get to the interview!

5 Questions for Jordan Diehl and the Great Urban Race

1.) The race is a combination of mental dexterity and physical endurance, often requiring contestants to solve on the fly. How much does each city impact the puzzles the contestants encounter? Do you choose certain cities with puzzles/questions already in mind, or do the cities dictate the puzzles?

Great Urban Race is all about finding the hidden gems of the city we are in, so we like to incorporate interesting and historical facts about the city whenever possible when creating puzzles!  We have a group of cities that are perfect for Great Urban Race, and we love visiting those on an annual basis. (Full list on our website here) There are some types of puzzles that we can incorporate in multiple cities, but in general we like to be pretty city-specific.

We do puzzles of all levels of difficulty, but some of our favorites are Sudoku, logic puzzles, as well as word-puzzles.  Our site is actually being updated now with some example clues—those can be found here.

2.) The Great Urban Race has held events all over America. Which city offered the most challenging race, either in terms of puzzles or the physical challenges?

The cool thing about Great Urban Race, both as a participant and as an Event Director, is that every year AND every city are completely different and pose their own challenges.  Each race has at least one challenge that will put Masterminds (what we call our participants) out of their comfort zone in either a fun or scary way—some past examples of this have been jumping off a 50 ft platform onto a large inflated airbag, rock climbing, walking on fire, and eating some pretty gross things.  It’s our favorite to plan but also the most challenging piece of each race for us as well!

3.) How many people contribute to each race’s puzzles? Do you have a resident puzzlesmith, or does everyone get a chance to contribute?

We have a team of eight dedicated Event Directors for Great Urban Race.  Everyone gets a chance to contribute to the city’s puzzles, but we do have one “Cluepervisor” who is our resident expert on writing clues and thinking of new and exciting challenges.  The Cluepervisor and her team have a pretty awesome job—they take everyday items and think of how to make it a fun challenge for our participants and do a LOT of puzzle solving for inspiration.

4.) What’s next for The Great Urban Race?

Our regular season is in full swing and will conclude November 2nd in San Diego.  We are so excited to announce that our 2013 National Championship will be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico.  The top 25 teams from each city qualify for this event where the stakes are even higher and the cash prizes are much bigger as well.  New this year, we will be distributing the cash prizes as a total of $10,000 between our top 8 teams.  We’ve also re-launched several of our 2014 locations and registration is available now!

5.) What is one thing you’d like every competitor (and aspiring competitor) to take away from the experience?

We are focused on providing a fun and unique experience for our competitors. We want you to be challenged both mentally and physically, but also give you a Saturday to remember! The cool thing is that it can really be what you make of it—you could run upwards of 8-10 miles and have a really great body and mind workout or take public transportation and run less than 2 miles but learn a lot about your city and complete some really fun challenges along the way.  There’s definitely something for everyone in Great Urban Race!

Many thanks to Jordan Diehl for her time. Check out the Great Urban Race on their website for plenty of race pics and details! I can’t wait to see what they’ll cook up next.

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our Classic Word Search iBook (three volumes to choose from!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

Happy Birthday, PuzzleNation Blog!

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That’s right, my fellow puzzle fiends and PuzzleNationers! One year ago today, the very first PuzzleNation Blog post went live on WordPress, and we’re overjoyed to embark on a new year of sharing puzzly goodness of all sorts with you!

After 365 days, 170 posts, and hours and hours of discussing the best and brightest, the weirdest and most wonderful, the most fascinating aspects of the worldwide puzzle community, we’re still going strong and busier than ever!

With the recent launch of our Classic Word Search iBooks (Volumes one, two and three!), as well as our interview feature 5 Questions (new one coming Thursday! Check out the first two installments here and here!), we’ve been looking forward quite a bit lately.

So we thought we’d take this opportunity to look back and chronicle some of the awesome achievements that our homebase, PuzzleNation.com, has accomplished since its launch.

It started with seven games — Tanglewords, Classic Crossword, StarSpell, Classic Sudoku, Crossword Raiders, Classic Word Search, and Guessworks — later adding Diggin’ Words, Classic Fill-In, and Invisible Word Search to the roster of playable puzzle games.

(Stormy, Barkley, Copernicus, Sam, Veronica, Lorenzo, and Kana, the Diggin’ Words dogs, wish the PuzzleNation Blog a happy one-year anniversary!)

Looking back, it’s kind of amazing when you consider how many puzzles have been solved since the launch of PuzzleNation.com.

The top 3 PuzzleNation puzzle games solved the most times since launch are (#3) Invisible Word Search, (#2) Diggin’ Words, and (#1) Classic Word Search (with nearly twice as many solves as Diggin’ Words).

Those same 3 puzzle games were the top 3 puzzles solved in the last 2 months.

The top 3 puzzle games in the first 2 months of PN’s existence were Classic Word Search, Guessworks and Crossword Raiders.

(Classic Word Search… clearly a favorite among puzzlers, since it was the most popular puzzle both then AND now!)

(Also, ignore the little blue triangle at the top of the pyramid. That’s just a festive party hat.)

 Classic Word Search also had the biggest increase in solves since launch. Not double, not triple, but SIX TIMES as many Classic Word Search puzzles were solved in the last two months as there were in the first two months!

Another notable improver was Tanglewords, which doubled from about 1,000 solves in the first two months to about 2,300 in the last 2 months.

But each of those games means puzzle points collected by PuzzleNation users…

Which does make you wonder…

How many points have puzzlers collected since PuzzleNation.com launched?

As it turns out, a staggering amount:

Look at some of those totals! Over 31 million PuzzlePoints for Classic Sudoku! Over 63 million PuzzlePoints for Guessworks! And a mindboggling 770 million PuzzlePoints in Diggin’ Words! (No wonder those dogs always look so thirsty!)

As you can see, even the smallest sliver of the pie represents thousands and thousands of solves by PuzzleNation players!

All this adds up to over half a MILLION puzzles solved since launch!

And the PuzzleNation Blog is proud to be the voice of PuzzleNation and the place where you can find all things puzzly (and PuzzleNation-y) on the web!

Thank you for a terrific year, and here’s to many more good things to come! (Including a big announcement later this week, so stay tuned!)

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our Classic Word Search iBook (three volumes to choose from!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

Puzzles and games: A community of hobbyists

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A friend of the blog passed along a fascinating article analyzing the current gaming market.

The piece encompasses console games, PC games, mobile games, and MMOs (massive multiplayer online games, like World of Warcraft), and not only categorizes different types of gaming experiences, but predicts the future of the gaming business as a whole.

From the article:

“The concept of one true gamer community will be less feasible as evergreen hobbies grow in popularity. Instead, we have a crazy mixing bowl of diverse, separate, long-term communities. Few will share the same values or goals. Few players will consider themselves having anything in common with players of a different game.

Social organizations such as PAX will still promote common ground, much like the Olympics promotes common ground between athletes. But day-to-day cross-pollination will be rare.”

And his conclusion is one that rings true for puzzle-games particularly:

“The shift comes from realizing that individual digital hobbies will soon to be the default play pattern.”

Puzzles and puzzle games are famously singular endeavors. Crosswords and Sudoku puzzles hardly lend themselves to group play (unless you’re asking for help), and often the only “interaction” comes in tournaments or other forms of competition wherein individuals are pitted against each other in isolation.

The expansion of puzzles and puzzle-games into the mobile market (tablets, smartphones, etc.) has helped solidify this. Whether it’s Angry Birds or our own Classic Word Search iBook, puzzle-solving games remain something of a solitary hobby.

(The big exception to the rule here is, of course, Words With Friends and other Scrabble variants.)

But the similarities between the PuzzleNation community and the gaming community don’t end there.

We too have our “grinders” (those who enjoy one particular game to the exclusion of others, posting impressive monthly scores) and our “aficionados” (those who dabble in all kinds of puzzles, peppering the scoreboards with their name across numerous puzzle variants).

You know, the line separating puzzles and puzzle-games is a tenuous one, and while I’ve spent a good deal of time myself parsing out the differences between the two, it’s always nice to be reminded how much puzzlers and gamers have in common. We’re two very enthusiastic communities with a lot of overlap.

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our Classic Word Search iBook (three volumes to choose from!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

The value of puzzles in school…

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A friend of the blog passed along an intriguing link the other day. A post on ReadingRockets.org raised a serious question about the legitimacy of using certain puzzles as teaching tools.

From the article: “We were recently told by an administrator that research shows that crossword puzzles and word search puzzles have no educational value.”

No educational value? Are they kidding?

Now, I admit that the concern for puzzles to be used as time-fillers instead of teaching tools is a fair one. But to dismiss them entirely is a bit premature, especially when you’re considering the potential for elementary school-age students.

Obviously, both crosswords and word searches have vocabulary-building aspects, but that ignores the true potential each puzzle adds to an educational environment.

Let’s start with word searches.

Properly employed, word searches can be marvelous tools for pattern recognition and efficient problem solving.

For instance, imagine giving a class a particular word to find amidst a field of options. Instead of “passively locating words”, as one commenter noted, they’re left to devise their own method for quickly and efficiently locating a word with eight possible orientations.

Do they scan top to bottom, or left to right for the first letter, or an uncommon letter? Do they rely on certain vowel or consonant combinations that might jump out at them? How a student solves a given puzzle can give insight into how they tackle other challenges.

Beyond this, I think they’re ignoring a simple fact regarding word search solving: the further you get into the solve, the harder the grid is to read.

Seriously. If you’re halfway through a word list, your grid is full of lines and circles distracting you from the other words in the grid. Those pattern recognition skills I mentioned earlier become even more important.

(These may seem like rudimentary solving skills, but they’re excellent launchpads for further educational lessons down the road.)

And what do crosswords bring to the table? Plenty.

Crosswords foster both a familiarity with wordplay and deductive reasoning. Solvers unravel puns and riddles, encounter synonyms and antonyms, as well as puzzling out answers from letters provided by crossing entries.

People who write off crosswords as too trivia-heavy are ignoring a field of puzzles that not only challenge cultural and historical knowledge, but pop culture, sports, and language.

Plus, can anyone deny the sense of accomplishment that comes with completing a crossword?

Anything can be a time filler when improperly employed. But puzzles are not only non-intrusive ways of introducing new words to a student, they’re exercises in efficiency and problem solving.

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our Classic Word Search iBook (three volumes to choose from!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

More Classic Word Search iBook news!

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Hello puzzle fiends and PuzzleNationers!

A few weeks ago, we launched our first puzzle book for iPad — Classic Word Search Volume 1 — and we promised more to come! Today, we are happy to deliver on that promise with the announcement of Volume 2 and Volume 3 of Classic Word Search, now available for download in the iBookstore!

Each volume has 65 puzzles to delight and engage you, and each puzzle has a unifying theme tying the word list together. Whether you’re hunting words related to Hitchcock films or Ice Cream Sundaes, these puzzles are guaranteed to bring a smile to your face.

These volumes are a terrific bargain for fans of puzzles and puzzle games alike!

You can highlight words in each grid with the mere swipe of a finger, and with our dynamic left/right toggle button, left-handed and right-handed people can adjust the game to suit their needs!

PuzzleNation is overjoyed to expand our library of Classic Word Search puzzles, and we’d like to thank you for supporting us in all our puzzle game endeavors.

And be sure to stay tuned! Or you’ll never know what we’ve got up our sleeves for next time.

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!