Long-time readers know that we often host in-house wordplay contests. Not only do we invite our friends at Penny/Dell Puzzles to participate, but our fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers as well!
It’s the holiday season, so we embraced it with this month’s game! Yup, it’s a Penny Pressmas and a Jingle Dell Rock!
Essentially, we challenged our fellow puzzlers to unleash their punny creativity on all things holidays. They could mix and match puzzles with holiday songs, seasonal trappings, and more!
They could create their own puzzly holiday and tell us about the traditions and celebrations! Heck, they could make a puzzly holiday card, if they wished! Anything that struck their fancy, so long as it was puzzle-fueled and holiday flavored.
So, without further ado, let’s see what they came up with!
Some submissions stuck to our traditional holidays:
Here We Come A-Puzzling
Holi-Daisy
It’s the Most Wonderful Timed Framework of the Year
God Bless Us Every One and Only!
Blackout! Friday
The First and Last Noel
Merry Christmas to All Fours, and to All a Good Night!
Others suggested new puzzly holidays:
Saturnabout-nalia
Fest-and-Last-ivus
Boxes Day / Letterboxes Day
All Four Kwanzaa
Yule Know the Odds
“I tried to make a crossword without a certain letter in it… but I couldn’t manage it. Alas, my No-L puzzle will have to be submitted another holiday.” — a participant who wishes to remain anonymous.
One clever puzzler submitted this delightful visual mashup! Do you get it?
And finally, your humble PN blogger couldn’t resist throwing in his own little bit of puzzly holiday fun for you…
He knows when you’re sleeping And he knows when you’re awake Plus he knows if you’ve been BAD or GOOD (based on which answer fits in the available grid squares) Perhaps be good for goodness’ sake
You might not know his name So let’s all take time to meet him now Oh who could this figure be Let’s all say his name aloud
Volumes of puzzles to deliver each year In dozens of places, and even right here! Now you know of the legend, you’ve read all the rhymes Gotta ask Sylla Claustic to make it on time!
Do you have any punny puzzly holiday ideas? Let us know in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!
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You may be familiar with the board game Schmovie or hashtag games on Twitter.
For years now, we’ve been collaborating on puzzle-themed hashtag games with our pals at Penny Dell Puzzles, and this month’s hook was #PennyDellPuzzlePlants. Today’s entries all mash up Penny Dell puzzles with trees, flowers, shrubs, landscaping, gardening terms, and more things associated with the world of plants!
Examples include: Sunflower Power, Broccoli and Mortar, or Sodoku.
So, without further ado, check out what the puzzlers at PuzzleNation and Penny Dell Puzzles came up with!
Wood Seek: Missing Wist…eria
Sweet AlysSum Totals
Snow Drop-Ins / Snowdrop-Outs
DianthusGrammless
Lottomatoes
HydranJigsaw Puzzle
BattleRoseHips
Piece by Piece Lily
Stargazer Lilies and Yarrow
Clematis Figures
Maxi-Pointsettia
Pointsettia the Way
Blackout-Eyed Susan
Bull’s-Eye Spirea
DaffoDilemma
Forsythia ‘n’ dAftodils
Forsythia-Fit / Forsythia Corners
Four-Fit-Me-Not
Four Leaf Clover-Somes
These Three Leaf Lucky Clover
Three’s ComPansy / Three’s ComPeony
Chestnut Solitaire
Fiddlehead Ferns-Frame
Fiddleheads & Tails
ChamomileFlage
ColumBingo
Crisscross-santhemum
Amaryllist-a-Crostic
Carry-Clovers
Violetter Power
Stretch Jacob’s Ladders
Secret Mums the Word
Hedge-agrams
Shasta Daisy
Tossing and Turnips
Two At A Time-lips / Tulip at a Time
Delphiniumber Square
Dellphinium
Penny Cypress
Rake It from There
Thymed Lattice Framework
Cold Framework
One intrepid puzzler wrote a lovely little piece about looking for puzzly ideas for the hashtag game around the house:
For inspiration, I looked out over my MonStara and Spiderweb house plants and on to my garden, which is a bit of a mishmosh: the Digitalis Display is next to the Face to Fatsia, the Johnny Double Jump Ups border the AbaColeus, and the Starspell of Bethlehem shadows the patch where I tried growing Share-a-lettuce last year, but the bunnies ate it. Perhaps they took it literally. At least the Sudokudzu and MixMustard haven’t invaded and overtaken everything!
Members of the PuzzleNation readership also got in on the fun when we spread the word about this hashtag game online!
Twitter user @pauliscool1927 quickly replied with an idea, offering up the delightful ReallyLily as an option!
Have you come up with any Penny Dell Puzzle Plants entries of your own? Let us know! We’d love to see them!
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One of the best things about Halloween is guessing what people’s costumes are. Clever costumes can be great fun, and I’m a huge fan of costumes that only cost a few bucks to put together, because they really let your creativity shine through.
Punny costumes lend themselves to the low-budget costume genre brilliantly. So it’s only appropriate that we celebrate Halloween in the puzzliest way possible by looking at some punny costumes!
It’s simple. I post a picture, and you guess what the costume is.
For example:
They’re deviled eggs!
I’ve compiled ten costumes for you to figure out. Let’s see how many you can get!
PuzzleNation’s Punderful Halloween Costume Game!
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
#7
#8 and #9
#10
How many did you get? Have you seen any great punny costumes we missed? Let us know! And Happy Halloween!
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I have always suspected that riddles were our first experiments with puzzles and puzzly thinking. Long before crosswords, Sudoku, codebreaking, and magic squares, the potential for wordplay and outside-the-box thinking would have appealed to storytellers, teachers, philosophers, and other deep thinkers.
Who doesn’t enjoy unraveling a riddle, parsing the carefully constructed sentences for every hint and nuance lurking within, and then extracting that tiny purest nugget of a solution from the ether?
Riddles appeal to our love of story and adventure, of heroes with wits as sharp as their swords. Riddles are the domain of gatekeepers and tricksters, monsters and trap rooms from the best Dungeons & Dragons quests.
And so, for centuries upon centuries, even up to the modern day, riddles have been a challenging and intriguing part of the world of puzzling.
We can trace them back to the Greeks, to Ancient Sumeria, to the Bible through Samson, and to mythology through the Sphinx. Riddles abound in literature; we find riddles in Shakespeare, in the works of Joyce, Carroll, and Austen, all the way up to the modern day with The Hobbit and Harry Potter. Every locked room mystery and impossible crime is a riddle to be unraveled.
But this raises a crucial question: what makes a good riddle?
At first glance, it should be confusing or elusive. But after some thought, there should be enough information within the riddle to provide a solution, either through wordplay/punnery OR through looking at the problem from a different perspective.
Let’s look at an example. In this instance, we’ll examine the riddle from Jane Austen’s Emma, which is posed to the title character by a potential suitor:
My first displays the wealth and pomp of kings, Lords of the earth! their luxury and ease. Another view of man, my second brings, Behold him there, the monarch of the seas!
The answer is “courtship.”
The first half of the riddle refers to the playground of royalty — court — and the second half to the domain of her suitor — ship — and when combined they form the suitor’s desire. This riddle is confusingly worded, to be sure, but it makes sense when analyzed and it’s totally reasonable when the clever Emma figures out the answer… and turns down the suitor’s attempt at riddly courtship.
So, what’s an example of a bad riddle? Well, unfortunately, we don’t have to look too hard for an example of one. Let’s examine Samson’s riddle from The Book of Judges in the Old Testament, which he poses to his dinner guests (with a wager attached):
Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet.
The answer, bafflingly, is “bees making a honeycomb inside the carcass of a lion.”
This is borderline nonsense unless Samson actually told you the story of killing a lion with his bare hands and later returning to the corpse to find bees building a hive inside. So, basically, this riddle not only screws over his dinner guests — who lost a wager to buy fine clothing if they couldn’t solve the rigged riddle — and serves as an excuse to brag about killing a lion. Samson is a jerk.
This is a bad riddle, because it’s designed to be confusing, but does not offer enough information to get to the desired solution. It’s purposely unsolvable, and that sucks. Riddles shouldn’t be arbitrary or nonsensical.
James Joyce pulled this in Ulysses. Lewis Carroll pulled it in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. And each of these examples give riddles a bad name. (Even if they do serve a literary purpose, as scholars claim they do in the Joyce and Carroll examples.)
Even if you want the hero to seem (or be) smarter than the reader, the riddle should still make sense. When confronted with five riddles by Gollum in The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins solves four of them (and answers the fifth through charmingly dumb luck). It doesn’t hurt his character or make the reader feel like they’re being cheated when these riddles are resolved.
That’s another quality of a great riddle. Even if you don’t solve it, when you DO find the answer, it should feel like you were outwitted and you learned something, not that you were involved in a rigged game.
Oh, and speaking of learning, that reminds me of another example of a challenging yet fair riddle, one that comes from Ancient Sumeria (now, modern-day Iraq):
There is a house. One enters it blind and comes out seeing. What is it?
The answer, as you might have puzzled out, is “a school.”
Riddles can be devious or tricky; they can rely on misdirection, our own assumptions and biases, or careful word choice to befuddle the reader. But they should always be learning experiences, like the house you enter blind and leave seeing.
What are some of your favorite riddles, fellow puzzlers? Let us know in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you!
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You may be familiar with the board game Schmovie or hashtag games on Twitter.
For years now, we’ve been collaborating on puzzle-themed hashtag games with our pals at Penny Dell Puzzles, and this month’s hook was #PennyDellPuzzleSports. Today’s entries all mash up Penny Dell puzzles with teams, athletes, famous quotations, and more things associated with the world of sports!
Examples include: Seventh Inning Stretch Letters or Basketball For One.
(The entries leaned heavily towards baseball — understandably, since it only returned a few weeks ago.)
So, without further ado, check out what the puzzlers at PuzzleNation and Penny Dell Puzzles came up with!
Puzzly Athletes!
CrackerJackie Robinson
Simone Biles Says
Tara Blipsinski
Wayne Grepsky
Puzzly Teams!
Arizona Diamond Ringbacks
MilwauKeyword Brewers
Minnesota Twin Crosswords
Philadelphia Fill-Innies
Tampa Bay Sunrays
Washington Wizard Words
Orlando Magic Squares
Chicago Bull’s-Eye Spiral
Puzzly Sports Terminology!
FenWord Ways Park
Doubleheader Trouble
A Few Fielder’s Choice Words
Box Scoremaster / Lucky Box Score
Perfect Dart Game / Perfect Fit Game
Right of Way field
End Zone of the Line
End of the Line drive
BaseLine ‘Em Up
Base Pathfinder
Baseball Diamond Mine
Grand Tour slam
Draw the Defensive Lineman
False Start and Finish
Game, Set, Match-up!
Hall of Framework
These Three-Pointers
Super Bowl Game
Scramble Across & Touchdown
Picker-Upper Deck Home Runs
Puzzly Famous Quotations!
“Are you ready for some Quotefalls?!”
“…The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Delete”
“I never said most of the Everything’s Relative I said.” – Yogi Berra
“This is like Deja vu All Four One again.” – Yogi Berra
“It ain’t Overlaps til it’s over.” -Yogi Berra
“Window Boxes isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” — Red Sanders
“…it seems to me they give these ball players now-a-days very peculiar names… Well, let’s see, we have… Guess Who’s on first, What’s Left on second, You Know the Odds is on third…”
Several of our puzzlers went above and beyond, crafting calls from the announcers at these puzzly events!
The Call of the Game presented by Hall of Framework puzzle announcer Neil Simon Says:
“There’s two Drop-Outs here in the bottom of the Nine of Diamonds, One & Only one man on base, and Wade Mind Boggler steps up to the plate for the Tampa Bay Sunrays. This will be his First and Last at bat of the Word Games World Series. The Pitcher Sleuth looks to his What’s Left, then checks his Right Angles, sets his feet and Square Deals the pitch. It’s swung on by Mind Boggler and holy cow it’s a walk-off Home Run! That Baseball for One was crushed to Bits & Pieces! The Scoreboard says it all folks with a Three-to-One victory for the Sunrays. Who in the world could Picture This kind of ending? Just wow!”
Wide World of Sports reporting from the National Figure Skating competition:
Today, during the synchronized figure skating event, The Ice Chips team, sponsored by Penny Dell Puzzles, began their program divided up into Pairs and glided out onto the ice Two at a Time, and Step by Step taking their positions Face to Face. They gracefully began their number, first skating in a Mirror Image, then dividing up into Odds and Evens. A Small Change in the pace of the music brought a sequence of fast mohawks, turns, spread eagles, swizzles, lifts, and a Shuffle.
Have you come up with any Penny Dell Puzzle Sports entries of your own? Let us know! We’d love to see them!
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