Tag Archives: Puzzle history

The PN Blog 2021 Countdown!

Posted on by
Reply

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!

fennfound6

#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.

littlegirlatgrandmas

#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.

Case of Golden Idol steam logo 616 x 353

#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.

house-rules

#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.

png-clipart-brain-cognitive-training-question-mark-mind-brain-people-head

#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.

51DA14425CL._SX276_BO1,204,203,200_

#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.

bad puns

#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.

Ht5pbTN7_400x400

#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.

original

#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.

   dailypopwsicon

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!

The Founding Fathers of Cryptography?

Posted on by
Reply

It’s Veterans Day, and on an occasion dedicated to giving thanks to all those who served the United States honorably during either war or peacetime, it seemed appropriate to turn our puzzly gaze toward at American history for today’s post.

In fact, let’s look to America’s formative days. We’ve written in the past about George Washington and his creation of America’s first spy ring, and how heavily they relied on encryption and codebreaking techniques to protect America’s earliest secrets.

But as it turns out, Washington was far from the only Founding Father who was a strong proponent of cryptography.

Second president John Adams used a cipher to send letters to his wife Abigail when he was traveling. That cipher was designed by James Lovell, a member of the Continental Congress Committee on Foreign Affairs.

President #3 also relied heavily on ciphers and secret methods of communication. Thomas Jefferson created special ciphers specifically for Meriwether Lewis to use during the Lewis and Clark Expedition to protect the intrepid duo’s findings.

He even developed his own method for encryption. Some call it the wheel cypher, but it’s more commonly referred to as the Jefferson Disk.

These 36 wheels, threaded onto an iron spindle, allow the user to twist them until a message reads out. Each wheel has the letters of the alphabet in a random order.

So how did it work? Well, according to Monticello.org:

As an example, the sender of the message shown in the picture, “COOL JEFFERSON WHEEL CIPHER,” spells the message out and then looks to any other line of text – possibly the one directly above, which on this version of the cipher begins with the letter “N.” The sender then copies the rest of the letters from that line into the correspondence to spell out “NKYG NSUS NXML CQYO TYUH HFTD.”

The man who succeeded Jefferson as president, James Madison, employed encryption for both official documents — like letters between himself and members of the Continental Congress — and communication with other key figures. For instance, he sent a partially encrypted letter to Jefferson that described his plan to introduce a Bill of Rights.

Madison’s fellow contributor to the Federalist Papers, John Jay (later the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) always employed ciphers for diplomatic correspondence when traveling outside the US.

[This wooden puzzle is known as Franklin’s Kite.]

And as you might expect, the influential inventor, statesman, and polymath Benjamin Franklin had his hands in codecracking and cryptography as well. He not only created some of the ciphers employed by the Continental Congress, but he also published a book about encryption in the 1740s: George Fisher’s The American Instructor.

The Continental Congress, for their part, passed a resolution ordering ciphers to be used for all messages that couldn’t be safely transmitted otherwise.

In the end, as in the beginning, America doesn’t just love puzzles, it’s founded on puzzly principles.

[For more content involving American history and puzzles, check out our multi-part series on the history of the NSA, as well as the story of how a Tap Code and other puzzly spycraft techniques kept a soldier’s love story alive.]

dailypopwsicon

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!

Farewell, Maki Kaji.

Posted on by
Reply

maki kaji 1

When you get right down to it, the puzzle world isn’t all that big. There are a few names that everyone knows, and plenty of names that people should, but generally don’t. And sadly, too many of those names aren’t celebrated until after they’re gone.

Maki Kaji is one of those names you should know.

He passed away recently, and different articles and obituaries called him everything from “puzzle enthusiast” to “Sudoku creator,” but the title he most deserves is the one he put on his business cards: Godfather of Sudoku.

Honestly, he’s one of the three most important people in the history of Sudoku.

Howard Garns is credited with creating Number Place for Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games in May 1979 (though a French variant of the puzzle appeared in the newspaper La France in the 1890s). Wayne Gould stumbled upon Sudoku puzzles in a magazine, then designed a generation program and sold it to the Times in London, kickstarting the craze in the UK that spread elsewhere.

maki kaji 2

[Maki Kaji at Brazil’s first national Sudoku competition in São Paulo in 2012.]

But it was Maki Kaji who championed the puzzle all over, using it in his puzzle magazine Nikoli starting in the early 80s, then taking advantage of the UK boom and selling it in dozens of countries. (Gould didn’t have the resources, so many newspapers and publishers came to Maki Kaji for them.)

The name Sudoku came from him. (In American puzzle magazines, it was Number Place or To the Nines.) Originally the puzzle was called Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru, or “numbers should be single,” before taking the suggestion to shorten it to Sudoku.

Of course, despite his close association with Sudoku, Maki championed puzzles in all forms. He founded Nikoli (also known as Puzzle Communication Nikoli) with two school friends in 1980, four years before adding Sudoku to its roster of puzzles. It was Japan’s first puzzle magazine!

maki kaji 3

One of the goals of Nikoli was to feature what they called “culture independent” puzzles, meaning puzzles that didn’t rely on a specific language or alphabet. (Talk about accessibility!)

“When we create our puzzles, we want people to enjoy them and not feel stressed by them,” he said.

Because of this culture-independent style, Nikoli was famed for its many logic puzzles, because they relied less on words and more on numbers, symbols, and elegant grid positioning. Popular puzzles included familiar ones like Sudoku and Kakuro, as well as less familiar puzzles like Nurikabe and Hashiwokakero.

nikoli puzzles

“I don’t want to just be the godfather of Sudoku,” Maki said. “I’d like to spread the fun of puzzles until I’m known as the person who established the puzzle genre in Japan.”

One of his key tools was a section in Nikoli that invited readers to submit their own ideas for puzzles. It quickly became the most popular part of the magazine. Readers submitted new puzzles, which other readers then refined and expanded on. Nikoli is credited with introducing hundreds of new logic and number puzzles to the world through this puzzle-loving fan-fueled pipeline.

Of course, even the Godfather of Sudoku ventured into crosswords from time to time. In fact, in 2017, it was reported that he published the world’s largest ever crossword, with 59,365 across clues and 59,381 down clues on a printed grid 30m long, kept in a scroll.

Go big or go home, I guess.

maki kaji 4

[Constructor Peter Gordon (and his Sudoku license plate) with Maki.

Maki stepped down as president of Nikoli just last month, and the company released this statement in response to his passing:

Kaji-san came up with the name Sudoku and was loved by puzzle fans from all over the world. We are grateful from the bottom of our hearts for the patronage you have shown throughout his life.

But, naturally, it takes a puzzler to truly honor a puzzler, and I think Thomas Snyder (aka Dr. Sudoku, no slouch himself when it comes to the famed number puzzle) offered the perfect tribute on his Art of Puzzles website:

A wordoku puzzle dedicated to Maki Kaji.

snyder wordoku

The puzzle world is a far richer and more varied place thanks to the creativity, hard work, and passion of Maki Kaji. You probably didn’t know his name before. But hopefully, you’ll remember it now.

Farewell, Maki. Thank you for bringing so many new eyes to the world of puzzles.

[Source links: Kotaku, The Guardian, Wikipedia.]

dailypopwsicon

Have you checked out our special summer deals yet? 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!

Two Crossword Anniversaries This Week!

Posted on by
Reply

exercise-brain-crossword-670x335

Crossword history isn’t exactly a field of study that dates back to ancient times — I mean, we only celebrated the centennial of the crossword back in 2013 — but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a huge amount of historical crossword material out there to be commemorated.

In fact, this week marks two fairly meaningful crossword anniversaries, one to be celebrated today, the other tomorrow.

The first crossword anniversary to observe is the 150th birthday of Arthur Wynne.

[Image courtesy of express.co.uk.]

In 1913, Arthur Wynne created the first modern crossword puzzle — which he called a Word-Cross puzzle — and over a hundred years later, we are still enjoying the ever-increasing variety of puzzles and clues spawned by that “fun”-filled grid.

Wynne was born on June 22, 1871 in Liverpool, England, but moved to the states in the early 1890s, spending time in Pittsburgh and New York City before creating his Word-Cross puzzle for the New York Sunday World.

Of course, the crossword as we know it — with its square grid and the black-and-white square patterning — are due not to Mr. Wynne, but to his former associate, future first New York Times crossword editor Margaret Farrar.

But, speaking of figures who helped elevate crosswords to greater prominence, that brings us to our second anniversary.

Tomorrow marks the 15th anniversary of the release of the influential crossword documentary Wordplay.

Wordplaymp

Wordplay introduced several famous names in crossword tournament circles, like Ellen Ripstein, Trip Payne, Tyler Hinman, Jon Delfin, and Al Sanders, as well as highlighting many celebrity crossword solvers like Jon Stewart, Ken Burns, Bill Clinton, and more. The documentary also chronicled the 2005 edition of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, bringing national attention to the tournament (and inspiring a Simpsons episode about crosswords).

Wordplay sparked a 40% increase in attendance the year after it aired, and the growing interest in the yearly event caused the tournament to actually change locations to a larger venue in New York City for 7 years!

(It has since returned to the Stamford Marriott, its traditional setting, despite actually topping the biggest NYC attendance in 2019, and again virtually in 2021.)

But the impact Wordplay had on the tournament itself, and interest in crosswords in general, cannot be overstated.

And this week, we celebrate both crossword anniversaries, one marking the genesis of crosswords, and the other marking how far crosswords had come, and how much farther they could go in the future.

It’s a pretty cool confluence of dates, to be sure.

dailypopwsicon

Have you checked out our special summer deals yet? 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!

A Mysterious Message, Inscribed on a Sword, Found in a River

Posted on by
Reply

_103722388_d0c23635-6379-4bf7-bac8-478493c2d1c7

A few years ago, a very curious news story broke about an 8-year-old girl pulling a thousand-year-old sword out of a lake in Sweden.

Saga Vanecek — which sounds like the heroine of a YA novel series begging for a Netflix adaptation — discovered the sword while playing in the lake. The Jönköpings Läns Museum estimated that the sword is at least a thousand years old, and could be as old as 5th or 6th century.

No one is sure how it got there, but everyone agrees it’s an amazing find. (And many agree that Saga should now be queen. Hey, there are worse ways to choose a ruler.)

But there’s another story about a sword found in a body of water with an even stranger mystery attached: the River Witham sword.

river witham sword 1

There are actually two River Witham swords — it’s just the right river to go sword-hunting in, I suppose — but we’re talking about what’s known as the River Witham “knightly sword.”

It was discovered in the river in 1825 and turned over to the Royal Archaeological Institute. It is now in the hands of the British Library.

And for more than two centuries, the meaning of the inscription has remained a mystery.

Inlaid along one of the sword’s edges, spelled out in gold wire, curious eyes find the following chain of letters:

+NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI+

Is it an abbreviation? An encryption? Or simply patterning in the shape of letters? No solid answers emerged during decades of study.

Eventually, the British Library decided to crowdsource the puzzle in the hopes of finding a solution. In 2015, officials from the library officially reached out to the public to finally crack the code detailed along the blade.

All sorts of amateurs and professionals weighed in, exploring possibilities in Latin, Welsh, German, Irish, Sicilian, and others. They compared it to the medal of St. Benedict and other medieval engravings in search of patterns.

And the British Library shared one contributor’s thoughts as an addendum to their original post about the River Witham sword.

alphen blade

[The Alphen aan den Rijn sword-blade.]

Historian Marc van Hasselt compared the sword to others from the same time period, roughly around the year 1200, and believed it was safe to assume the language was Latin.

He compared the inscription from the River Witham sword — +NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI+ — with an inscription on a Dutch sword-blade found in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands. That blade was inscribed on both sides:

+BENEDOXOFTISSCSDRRISCDICECMTINIUSCSDNI+

+DIOXMTINIUSESDIOMTINIUSCSDICCCMTDICIIZISI+

He explains his thought process:

To elaborate, let’s compare the River Witham sword to the sword from Alphen: both start with some sort of invocation. On the River Witham sword, it is NDXOX, possibly standing for Nostrum Dominus (our Lord) or Nomine Domini (name of the Lord) followed by XOX.

On the sword from Alphen, the starting letters read BENEDOXO. Quite likely, this reads as Benedicat (A blessing), followed by OXO. Perhaps these letter combinations – XOX and OXO – refer to the Holy Trinity. On the sword from Alphen, one letter combination is then repeated three times: MTINIUSCS, which I interpret as Martinius Sanctus – Saint Martin. Perhaps a saint is being invoked on the River Witham sword as well?

Unfortunately, the British Library’s investigation seems to have stopped there after the intriguing contributions of van Hasselt.

But, thankfully, there is always SOMEONE on the Internet trying to solve a seemingly unsolvable mystery. I did a bit of sleuthing and found a post on medium.com, originally posted in February of 2017, with a very through breakdown of a potential solution to the River Witham sword!

river witham sword 2

[A closer look at the River Witham sword inscription.]

The author of the piece, Stieg Hedlund, started by focusing on the W in the inscription, since the classical Latin alphabet didn’t have a W. Surmising that the inscription was an initialism — which is common for Latin inscriptions — he started looking for an aristocratic name starting with W.

Why aristocratic? Well, not just anyone in the 1200s or 1300s could afford a sword with gold wire inscriptions.

He quickly settled on some variation of William for the W, and then narrowed his search to Willem II of Holland, a count, and the initialism CHW on the sword could mean Comes Hollandia Willelmus, his name and title in Latin.

william of holland

Following that line of thought and digging into the history of Willem II revealed that he ruled not only Germany, but the southern Belgian region of Hainault as well.

This gives him “Comes Hollandia Willelmus Dei gratia, Rex Germania et Hainault Dei nutu” to cover CHWDRGHD in the inscription.

When he turned his attention to the first five letters, he agreed with the supposition of Marc van Hasselt and others that it referenced “in Nomine Domini” and the XOX represented the Holy Trinity.

So that covers NDXOXCHWDRGHD, approximately two-thirds of the inscription. What about XORVI?

Well, Hedlund believes the solution lies in Laudes Regiæ, a Catholic hymn most famous for its opening words: Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat! (In English: Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ commands.)

Abbreviated versions of these words were often used by kings and royalty to solidify their position by tying themselves to the church. On a coin issued by Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in 1384, you can read one rendition of the phrase: XPiσtoC VinCIT XPiσtoC RegnAT XPiσtoC InPERAT.

He believes XORVI is an abbreviated version, reading “XpiσtOσ Regnat! (xpiσtoσ) Vincit! (xpiσtoσ) Imperat!” where the capital letters form the inscribed message.

So, the completed message would read:

(in) Nomine Domini
Comes Hollandia Willelmus Dei (gratia), Rex Germania et Hainault Dei (nutu)
XpiσtOσ Regnat! (xpiσtoσ) Vincit! (xpiσtoσ) Imperat!

Or, in English:

In the Name of the Lord; of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost
Count of Holland Willem by the grace of God, King of Germany and Hainault by the will of God
Christ reigns! Christ conquers! Christ commands!

It’s a compelling case, and certainly the most complete interpretation and explanation I’ve been able to find.

Imagine. All of that in that brief, beautiful, confusing inscription. It’s fascinating, and makes the mind positively whirl with possibilities.

Oh, and if you find any centuries-old swords while you’re perusing the nearby waterways, let me know! We might have a new mystery to solve.

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

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

A Puzzly Discovery Under the Sea!

Posted on by
Reply

We’ve talked quite a bit about the importance of Enigma machines in the past.

The quest to crack the unbreakable Nazi code machine spanned the Atlantic Ocean and resulted in never-before-seen collaborations between analysts, codebreakers, and puzzlers from all walks of life, dedicating hours upon hours every day to trying to unravel the secrets of German communications. Cracking the code would be the key to intercepting crucial information and outmaneuvering the Nazi war machine.

We’ve discussed those twin decryption locations — Arlington Hall in the US and Bletchley Park in the UK — as well as the efforts of codebreakers like Elizebeth Smith Friedman to dismantle the work of Nazi spymasters both during and after World War II.

The story of Alan Turing is inextricably linked with that of the Enigma device, even though there were three Polish mathematicians — Rejewski, Rózycki & Zygalski — who had already demonstrated that the Nazi code was breakable and even managed to reverse engineer an Enigma machine.

Strangely, we rarely talk about the Enigma machines themselves. They were dangerously efficient, as explained in this article from Atlas Obscura:

When the Nazis needed to send confidential messages, they entered the dispatches into the machine, which substituted every letter using a system of three or four rotors and a reflector, encrypting the message for a recipient Enigma machine to decode.

Getting Allied hands on one during the war was a top priority, so much so that the standing orders on German ships and U-boats was to throw them overboard and let the sea claim them, rather than risking the chance of the Allies getting ahold of one.

underwater enigma

But the sea doesn’t always keep secrets forever, and a recent dive by a marine biologist team discovered the remains of an Enigma machine in the Bay of Gelting:

He noticed a contraption tangled up in the fishing line the crew had headed down to collect. The device, which at first seemed like an old typewriter sitting under at least 30 feet of water, was a Nazi Enigma machine, likely one of hundreds abandoned and thrown overboard in the dying days of the German war effort.

And those devices still contain valuable information decades later.

Each Enigma machine has a serial number, and if this machine’s number is still legible after decades underwater, it could reveal which ship or Nazi unit the Enigma machine belonged to. This would allow researchers to track the use of the device and what impact its use or its absence had on the war effort overall.

Yes, it’s not just mussels and fish that call this device home, but a readily accessible history of the device itself, if we can only read it.

underwater enigma 2

And now, instead of being protected at all costs by German officers, this machine is now protected by archaeologists and researchers, sitting in a tank of demineralized water in order to flush out the salt and salt water that has so corroded the machine over time. It will spend almost a year in that tank before any restoration efforts can proceed.

Successful recoveries of these machines are understandably rare, and this is a chance to add to the historical record of codebreaking and puzzling during World War II. Here’s hoping we can stumble upon more of these lost treasures in the future.

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

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!