Category Archives: PuzzleNation

To Be Continued . . .

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Greetings, puzzlers, gamers, and PuzzleNationers! We hope you’re staying cool out there, and taking plenty of time to kick back and relax with your favorite tabletop roleplaying games, jigsaw puzzles, Sudoku collections, or crossword puzzle and wordseek apps :)! While winter is traditionally the hibernation season, we’ve decided to switch things up, and our blog and social media presence are going into hibernation for the rest of the summer. (Heat is bad for computers, after all.)

Never fear—Daily POP Crosswords and Daily POP Word Search will continue to update on a daily basis. We’ll just be a little quieter about it than usual. In the meantime, we invite you to peruse the blog’s archives! Maybe you’ll get some great ideas for new games to check out, or TV shows to marathon on those days when the sun is too intense for you to brave the outdoors.

Have fun! Happy puzzling!

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5 Questions with Constructor Christina Iverson

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Welcome to 5 Questions, our recurring interview series where we reach out to puzzle constructors, game designers, writers, filmmakers, musicians, artists, and puzzle enthusiasts from all walks of life!

It’s all about exploring the vast and intriguing puzzle community by talking to those who make puzzles and those who enjoy them. (Click here to check out previous editions of 5 Questions!) Today I’m excited to introduce our latest interviewee, Christina Iverson!

Christina is a crossword constructor and the assistant editor for the LA Times Crossword. When she’s not working on puzzles, she can often be found reading, knitting, biking or hiking. She lives with her husband and two young children in Ames, IA. Find Christina on Twitter at @xtinaiverson.

1. How did you get started with puzzles?

I’m a first generation crossword solver. I grew up with a love of words, books, games, and puzzles, but no one in my family solved crosswords. In my mind, crosswords were just about trivia, and using big words that no one really uses in real life. Not true! 

I realized that in 2018 when my son was a baby. My husband and I were trying to get him to fall asleep in his own bed at night before we went to bed (!). He’d usually last about 10 minutes before waking up again, crying. 

One night while our TV show was paused, I came back from our son’s room to find my husband working on a crossword puzzle. We realized that crosswords were more easily interrupted than TV shows, and started solving them pretty regularly together. I was really terrible at them at first, so I started solving puzzles by myself to get extra practice; it’s not as fun to solve puzzles with someone who knows the answer before you even understand what the clue is getting at.

It wasn’t very long before I started trying to construct my own puzzles. I’ve always been interested in creating puzzles and games; I invented my first board game when I was probably 5 or 6, made treasure hunts for my brother in grade school, and designed logic puzzles for my geometry teacher in high school. So it didn’t seem like much of a stretch to go from solving to constructing. 

The first puzzle I made was a puzzle for my husband, about our cat, George Melvin. I constructed on my own for a couple of months before I reached out to some mentors in the crossword community. Jeff Chen, Amanda Chung, and Ross Trudeau all gave me invaluable assistance at the beginning of my journey, and I don’t think I would have gotten published without their help.

2. What, in your estimation, makes for a great puzzle? What do you most enjoy—or most commonly avoid—when constructing your own? What do you think is the most common pitfall of constructors just starting out?

I think a great puzzle is one that brings a smile to your face. For me, it’s mostly about having fun theme entries and a good “aha” moment, and also keeping the grid clean and free from yucky crossword glue. 

I think the most common pitfall of new constructors is that they can be so enthusiastic that they move on to the next constructing stage too quickly. They often underestimate the importance of the theme entries, and move on to making a grid before having a solid theme set. The theme makes or breaks the puzzle, so if the theme isn’t well-conceived and well-executed, it doesn’t matter how great the rest of the puzzle is. They also often move on to writing clues before ironing out issues in a grid. I think many new constructors remember too vividly the times that they have run into words they didn’t know in a puzzle, and can have the attitude that all crosswords are full of obscure words and lots of abbreviations. (I definitely had this misconception when I first started out!) 

3. Do you have any favorite crossword themes or clues, either your own or those crafted by others?

My favorite puzzles to solve and construct are Sunday grids, and I especially like ones with wacky theme entries. I always try to make the theme entries as silly and fun as possible. One of my favorite puzzles I’ve made was in The New York Times with my frequent collaborator Katie Hale, and had R sounds switched for Ws. For example, “Cause for celebration at a pachyderm sanctuary?” led to AN ELEPHANT IN THE WOMB. 

And one of my favorite clues that always stands out for me was in a themeless puzzle by Matthew Stock—“Ground shaking stuff?” was the clue for PEPPER. So clever!

An elephant recently out of the womb.

4. How did you end up as Patti Varol’s assistant editor for The LA Times? And what’s next for Christina Iverson?

I have been submitting puzzles to the Crosswords Club and Daily POP for a while, so Patti was familiar with me and my work. In February, I had made a puzzle for the Boswords Winter Wondersolve, an online crossword competition. The constructors were all interviewed over Zoom, and Patti was watching. I mentioned in the interview that I’d love to be doing crossword things full time some day. About two minutes later, I had an email in my inbox from her about a potential job opportunity. Rich Norris was retiring in March, and she was looking for an assistant once she took over as editor for The LA Times. I enthusiastically said yes, and I’m so glad I did! I think we work together well and make a great team. 

I really like what I’m doing right now, and don’t see any big changes coming up on the horizon. I do hope that I’ll have more time for constructing once my son starts school in the fall, as right now I’m mostly just constructing on the weekend, and doing LA Times work during the week.

5. If you could give the readers, writers, aspiring constructors, and puzzle fans in the audience one piece of advice, what would it be?

You do you, and don’t let other people dictate what the right way is to solve puzzles. Puzzles are all about challenging yourself in a fun way. If it’s more pleasant for you to solve with a thesaurus and Wikipedia, then do that. If you enjoy speed solving, have fun that way.

And for new solvers and new constructors both, remember that no one is amazing the first time they do something, and that it takes time and practice, but you can have fun the whole time. 

Christina’s work can often be found in the Daily POP Crosswords app! Download now and keep an eye out for her name, and enjoy our other contributors’ puzzles while you’re there. You can find delightful deals on the Home Screen for Daily POP Crosswords and Daily POP Word Search!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

A Rising Tide

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The New Yorker declared in 1959 that the “most important person in the world of the crossword puzzle” was a woman: Margaret Farrar, then the crossword editor of the New York Times. Here in the twenty-first century, whether the most important person in the world is a woman or not seems to be a thornier question. A 2014 work of criticism by constructor Anna Shectman reported that the crossword world was very much dominated by men, and that this problem had only worsened in the previous two decades. An important development since that piece’s publication is the Los Angeles Times’ recent announcement that PuzzleNation’s own editor, Patti Varol, will be taking over as its crossword editor, but while this is a huge step forward, a lot of work remains.

In her Washington Post piece earlier this month, “I’m a Black woman who creates crossword puzzles. That’s rare, but it shouldn’t be,” Portia Lundie summarized the central ironic issue at play: “crosswords as we know them were standardized by a profound woman, yet the authority on language still seems to be in the hands of a few White men.”

For Women’s History Month, rather than looking back at Margaret Farrar, we want to look forward: toward the women making crossword history in the here and now, paving the way for a more equitable future. Toward Anna Shectman, Portia Lundie (see the “Three of a Kind” crossword for more of Lundie’s work), and other profound women seeking not to standardize crosswords, but to complicate the idea that standardization should be the ideal.

We don’t believe in just one spider-themed hero, just one important woman, or just one approach to constructing crosswords!

These days, The Inkubator is a funded and functional crossword subscription service, sending puzzles by women and nonbinary constructors to subscribers a few times each month. As their mission statement puts it, the project serves as “a venue for women to exhibit and get paid for high-quality puzzles, especially (but not exclusively) puzzles that may not have a chance at mainstream publications due to feminist, political, or provocative content.”

Back in October 2018, The Inkubator was just a dream with a Kickstarter. Around this time, Hailey Gavin interviewed co-founder and constructor Laura Braunstein about her vision for The Inkubator’s future. In response to a question about the suffocating nature of mainstream crossword norms, Braunstein put forth the inspiring challenge: “If this is a pluralistic culture and people are threatening that, could the puzzle be a place where we fight back? Could the puzzle be a place of resistance?”

Braunstein nods to another project, spearheaded by Deb Amlen, Amy Reynaldo, and Patti Varol. Women of Letters is a puzzle packet by some of the industry’s top constructors who happen to be women. The puzzles serve as an incentive for solvers to donate to women-centric causes—if you give at least ten dollars to one of the charities listed on the project’s page, and email your screenshot to WomenofLettersCrosswords@gmail.com, you’ll receive the packet in return. By combining a platform for crossword-constructing women with a call for financial support for activism, Women of Letters shows us a concrete way in which the puzzle can be a place of resistance.

Even if it didn’t link arms with other causes, Women of Letters, like The Inkubator, would be a remarkable example of women fighting for a pluralistic culture. It is a radical act just to represent an alternative set of perspectives to those typically laid out in the grids that we allow to define valuable knowledge (“Crosswords are strange arbiters of cultural relevance,” after all). These projects are especially radical because they put a name to how these constructors’ perspectives defy institutional norms, shining a light on gender’s importance. Portia Lundie put it elegantly: “In my opinion, there’s no such thing as a view from nowhere,” no such thing as an objective relationship to language or to knowledge of the world around us.

A pluralistic culture can only be represented in the plural, by a rising tide of women, all with different views from different places, lifting all boats. Solidarity matters more than figureheads when it comes to making real change.

Daily POP walks the walk, regularly bringing you puzzles constructed and edited by women.

You can find delightful deals on puzzles on the Home Screen for Daily POP Crosswords and Daily POP Word Search. Check them out!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

The PN Blog 2021 Countdown!

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2022

It’s the final blog post of the year, so what do you say we revisit all of 2021 with a countdown of my ten favorite blog posts from the past year!

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#10 The Man Who Found Forrest Fenn’s Treasure

One of 2020’s most baffling stories was the announcement that Forrest Fenn’s treasure, a mystery sought by thousands for most of a decade, had been found, but the lucky solver was remaining anonymous. Lawsuits were filed, fraud was claimed, and what should have been the resolution to a great mystery ended up sparking several more.

This year, we finally received some information from the solver himself, and it seemed to resolve those lingering questions and quiet the conspiracy theorists (for the most part, anyway). It seems poetic to start off our countdown with the conclusion of another puzzly endeavor.

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#9 Bringing People Back to Puzzles

It’s always disappointing when one bad experience with a new hobby or endeavor spoils an entire world for someone. I’ve seen it happen with puzzles more than once, and I always consider it a privilege to get a second chance at introducing someone to the world of puzzles.

So it was a real treat to write this post and offer some advice to other puzzle fans, helping to equip them when and if the opportunity arose to reintroduce a friend to one of our favorite pastimes.

#8 Holiday Puzzly Gift Guide

Every year, one of my favorite activities is putting together our Holiday Puzzly Gift Guide. I get to include the best products sent to me for review by top puzzle and game companies, mix in some of my own favorites, and draw attention to terrific constructors, game designers, and friends of the blog, all in the hopes of introducing solvers (and families of solvers) to quality puzzles and games.

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#7 First Look: The Case of the Golden Idol

Sometimes, we get to be pioneers, trying out new games, new products, and new puzzles before anybody else, and that’s always a treat.

This time around, not only did we get an early look at an in-progress investigation-style puzzle game, but we brought in a friend of the blog to give it the full review treatment. (We’ve done this in the past with video game and app reviews.) We get to share new voices with our marvelous readership and venture into exciting new puzzly frontiers while we do it.

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#6 Board Game House Rules

It’s always fun to ask the PN readership to contribute to posts, and this was a fun topic to explore with the readers. We asked for house rules used in popular board games, and the sheer variety and creativity employed by game fans to spice up classic board games made for a terrific blog post and one of our favorite discussions of the entire year.

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#5 5 Questions

Across dozens of interviews over the years, we’ve talked to game designers, pop culture figures, and puzzle luminaries about what makes them tick, and each time, we learn something new about puzzling and those who puzzle.

This year, we focused mostly on folks that were relatively new to puzzles, not only to give them greater exposure, but to get a glimpse of where the world of puzzles is headed in the future. And based on those we had the wonderful opportunity to sit down with, the future of puzzles is very very bright.

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#4 Superman and Crosswords

Puzzles are lurking anywhere and everywhere in popular culture if you know where to look. Often I find them in television shows, mystery novels, odd historical moments, and many other places, and I thoroughly enjoy chronicling those experiences for the readership.

And one of the highlights of the year for me was discovering an old Superman radio show adventure where he literally had to solve crosswords in order to save Lois Lane and stop the bad guys. It was silly and delightful all at once, providing yet another example of how puzzles find their way into all aspects of life.

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#3 Puns

Puns come in all shapes and sizes, running the gamut from clever and hilarious to shameless and groan-inducing. So it was long overdue to write a post discussing the role of puns in puzzles and defending puns from some of their many detractors.

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#2 Ten Years

We marked ten years of PuzzleNation this year, and to get to celebrate that milestone with our loyal fellow solvers was absolutely a high point of the year.

We delved behind the curtain for a brief history of the company, and released a special puzzle pack for readers to enjoy.

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#1 Fairness and Accessibility

Throughout the year, we discussed efforts to make puzzles more inclusive and accessible than ever. More women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community are constructing than ever before, and we happily contributed to the discussion of fairness in puzzles wherever possible.

One of my favorite posts on the topic this year was our dissection of the concept of “the average solver,” and pointing out how this concept can be helpful or hurtful, depending on how it’s employed. We received a lot of great feedback and some very kind words of support on these posts, and it was incredibly worthwhile to participate in these discussions with our fellow puzzlers.

Thanks for spending 2021 with us, through brain teasers and big ideas, through treasure hunts and trips to the past, through puzzle launches and landmark moments. We’ll see you in 2022.

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Treat yourself to some delightful deals on puzzles. You can find them on the Home Screen for Daily POP Crosswords and Daily POP Word Search! Check them out!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

PuzzleNation Blog Looks Back on 2021!

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2021 is rapidly coming to a close. As we do every year, we look back on another eventful year in the world of puzzles and games.

And we are incredibly proud of the contributions both PuzzleNation Blog and PuzzleNation made to the puzzle community as a whole.

Over the last year, we explored board games and card games, strategy games and trivia games, dice games and tile games, do-it-yourself puzzlers and pen-and-paper classics. We met game designers, constructors, and creative types of all kinds, many of them relatively new creators that are part of a new generation of puzzle innovators.

We unraveled math puzzles and diabolical brain teasers. With our fellow PuzzleNationers, we tackled visual puzzles, trivia, optical illusions, and logic problems. We played punny hashtag games galore, exploring everything from mysteries and art to geography and weather, Halloween puns and puzzly theme songs.

We delved into puzzle history, pondering hidden codes in music, cryptography in Ancient Egypt, and secret messages on old swords. We explored the puzzly endeavors of Voltaire and Frederick the Great, how the Founding Fathers relied on coded messages, and even delved below the waves to investigate ENIGMA machines discovered decades later.

We got to see the fourth and fifth Crossword Mysteries films. We defended the noble art of puns, searched for the greatest fictional TV escape room, and found the ultimate jigsaw puzzle table.

We marked 150 years since the birth of Arthur Wynne, 15 years since the debut of the Wordplay documentary, and 10,000 days of Will Shortz puzzles.

We found puzzly ways to celebrate everything from Independence Day and Halloween to Thanksgiving and Christmas. We lamented the sad losses of luminaries like Maki Kaji and Stephen Sondheim.

We watched computers continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible in puzzles. Computer programs helped design word squares/magic squares of incredible size and 3-D design and printing led to bigger and more complicated Rubik-style twisty puzzles. The crossword-solving program Dr. Fill even won the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament!

And speaking of ACPT, it was fascinating to watch as crossword tournaments and events continued to migrate into the virtual space.

Boswords continued to lead the charge all year for virtual puzzle events, launching the Winter Wondersolve event, the Spring Themeless League, their traditional summer tournament, and the return of the Fall Themeless League.

Lollapuzzoola also returned in virtual form, as did ACPT (although the organizers did hold out hope for an in-person event).

But arguably the biggest topic of the year, one we returned to over and over in 2021, was the power of puzzles and how influential puzzles can be.

We discussed how crosswords reflect what’s going on in society, and celebrated how the constructing community was continuing to grow more diverse. We watched as projects like the Expanded Crossword Name Database sought to make the cluing and grid entries more inclusive.

PuzzleNation Blog happily contributed to the discussion, pondering what made something “puzzle-worthy” and questioning how discussions of “too familiar,” “too safe,” and “too family friendly” can be exclusionary.

We asked who is the average solver and discussed how that concept can be employed in negative ways, and championed puzzles that were more fair and accessible to solvers than others. (We even mentioned ways you might bring people back to the world of puzzles after bad solving experiences.)

And honestly, that’s just the blog. PuzzleNation’s good fortune, hard work, and accomplishments in 2021 went well beyond that.

In a tumultuous and uncertain year, we focused on honoring our promise to our fellow puzzlers: maintaining and producing the best puzzle experience possible.

Penny Dell Crossword App, Daily POP Crosswords, Daily POP Word Search, Penny Dell Sudoku… no matter the platform, our team worked hard to produce engaging puzzles at all levels, and we are immensely proud of the work the PN team performed this year.

Every day, we delivered top-notch content for Penny Dell Crosswords App, Daily POP Crosswords, and Daily POP Word Search. Whether it was monthly deluxe sets and holiday bundles for PDCW or the world-class topical puzzles by some of the industry’s best constructors for Daily POP, hundreds of outstanding crosswords and word searches wended their way to our loyal and enthusiastic solvers.

But whether we’re talking about crosswords, Sudoku, or word searches, we’re proud to say that every single puzzle represents our high standards of quality puzzle content crafted for solvers and PuzzleNationers.

And your response has been inspiring! Daily POP Crosswords and Daily POP Word Search are rolling, the blog has over 2600 followers, and with our audience on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms continuing to grow, the enthusiasm of the PuzzleNation readership is both humbling and very encouraging.

2021 was a difficult year, but it’s one that also reminded us of the amazing things that can be accomplished when puzzlers come together. And we firmly believe that the coming year will be brighter, more exciting, and more creatively fulfilling.

Thank you for your support, your interest, and your feedback, PuzzleNationers. The new year looms large, and we look forward to seeing you in 2022!

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Treat yourself to some delightful deals on puzzles. You can find them on the Home Screen for Daily POP Crosswords and Daily POP Word Search! Check them out!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

Do You Accept the Challenge of “The Impossible Crossword”? You absolutely should!

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Part of the challenge for many crossword solvers is that you can’t adjust the difficulty of the cluing on a given day. The clues you get are the clues you get.

New York Times crossword solvers are intimately familiar with this, talking about Tuesday puzzles and Saturday puzzles and understanding what each means in terms of expected puzzle difficulty.

Our own Penny Dell Crosswords App offers free puzzles across three difficulty levels each day, but those are three distinct puzzles, not three different clue sets for one particular puzzle.

Having options for more than one set of clues is fairly rare. Lollapuzzoola has two difficulty-levels for their final tournament puzzle, Local and Express. GAMES Magazine previously offered two sets of clues for their themeless crossword, entitled The World’s Most Ornery Crossword.

The tournament final of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament offers different clue difficulties for three separate divisions. The Boswords Spring and Fall Themeless Leagues work in a similar manner, offering three levels of clue difficulty — Smooth, Choppy, and Stormy — for competitors to choose from.

The concept of Easy and Hard clues is not unheard of… it’s just rare.

And it’s only natural that someone, eventually, was going to take this concept and dial it up to a Spinal Tap 11.

The pair of someones in question are Megan Amram and Paolo Pasco.

Paolo is fairly well-known around crossword circles, having contributed puzzles to the American Values Club crossword, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, while also serving as associate crossword editor for The Atlantic.

And Megan is an incredibly talented television and film writer who has written for Parks and Rec, The Simpsons, and The Good Place. Anytime you saw a hilariously shameless punny name for a store in The Good Place, it was undoubtedly one of Megan’s.

Together, they unleashed The Impossible Crossword in the print edition of The New Yorker‘s December 27 issue, its first ever Cartoons & Puzzles issue. (It was made available on the website the week before.)

The instructions are simple: This crossword contains two sets of clues to the same answers. Toggle to the set labelled “Hard” to impress people looking over your shoulder. (And toggle to “Easy” when they look away.)

This 9×9 crossword’s Easy clues were fair and accessible, but the Hard clues were the real stars. They ricocheted between immensely clever, wildly obscure, and hilarious parodies of themselves.

For instance, the word JEST was clued on the Easy side as “Infinite ____” but received the brilliantly condescending add-on “Infinite ____” (novel that’s very easy to read and understand) in the Hard clues as a reference to the famously dense and impenetrable nature of the novel.

For the word APPS, the Easy clue was “Programs designed to run on mobile devices,” while the Hard clue was “Amuse-gueules, colloquially.”

(I had to look that one up. An amuse-gueule is “a small savory item of food served as an appetizer before a meal.”)

And those are just two examples.

When you finally finish the puzzle, this is your reward:

“You’re a genius! You can tell your mom to get off your case about going to law school.”

All at once, The Impossible Crossword manages to be a fun puzzle to solve on its own, a riotously fun gimmick that lampoons clue difficulty in general, and the most meta puzzle I’ve solved all year.

Kudos to Megan and Paolo for pulling it off. What a way to welcome the Cartoons & Puzzles era of The New Yorker while the rest of us close out another year of puzzling.

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Treat yourself to some delightful deals on puzzles. You can find them on the Home Screen for Daily POP Crosswords and Daily POP Word Search! Check them out!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!