Tag Archives: united kingdom

Cross Worlds with Crosswords (and Other Puzzles)!

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puzzlegeography

You may be familiar with the board game Schmovie, hashtag games on Twitter, or @midnight’s Hashtag Wars segment on Comedy Central.

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 #PennyDellPuzzleGeography, mashing up Penny Dell puzzles and countries, cities, landmarks, tourist spots and more!

Examples include Stepping Stonehenge, Sri Linkwords, and Istanbul’s-Eye Spiral!

So, without further ado, check out what the puzzlers at PuzzleNation and Penny Dell Puzzles came up with!

Match-Up Picchu

Warsaw Squares

The Shadow of Liberty

Bricks and Mauritania

Empire State Building Blocks

Around the Block Island

Sutokyo

Leicester Anagram Magic Square / Amazon Magic Square

Fill-Indonesia

TimbukTwo at a Time

Three Sommes

Across and Down Under

Ups and Churchill Downs

Torontop to bottom / Top to Foggy Bottom

Rhyme Times Square / Times Square Deal / Time Squares / Times Squares

Charing Crossroads

Around the Great Bend

Bermuda Triangle Seek / Bermuda Try-Angles

Paris in Rhyme

Build-a-PyraMidland

Arctic Circle Search / Arctic Circle Sums / Arctic Circles in the Square

Hidden Circle in the Squares / Piccadilly circles in the Square

9 of Diamonds Head

MarbleHeadings

Classified Addis Ababa

Grand Tours / Rio Grande Tour / Grand Canyon Tour

Boston Common Bond

In the Middle East

End of the Maginot Line

HidDenali Word Squares

Make the MaConnection / Make the Connecticution

It’s Ural Move / It’s Your Mo-ja-ve

United KingDomino Theory

Quote Niagara Falls / Niagara Quotefalls

Montauk Point the Way / West Point the Way

QuotaGramercy Park

SpinWheeling

Right of Appian Way

Dubl-In and Around

TripLexington

Madriddle Me This

Cancuncellations

Helsinkey Word

Mexicombos

Mount Skill-O-Gram-jaro

Pentagon Match

Missing Sphinx

Word Thames

Crypto-Bolivia

Continent Search

LouisiAnacrostics

Three from Rhine

Middle of the Abbey Road

A-spenwheel

Lake Tahoe Many Squares?

Acropolistics

Egyptograms

Catacombies

Crackerjacksonville

The Appalachian Word Trail

Little Fancy Five Points

Little Rock Puzzler

Mount Places Pleasant / Places, Belize

Eiffel Tower Power / Flowrida-er Sunshine Power

Florida Keywords / Turkeyword

Trafalgar Squares

Minsk Bag / Mixed Baghdad

Dublin Crosser

Amsterdiamond Rings

Birminghome Runs

Madaga-stars and Arrows

Sum-alia Triangles

Alaskan Penin-syllacrostic

Puzzle Der-bai

M_ss_ss_pp_ng V_w_ls

Who’s Whousatonic

Ottawat Is It?

Picture Paris

Chicago Fish

Crypto-Kalamazoo

Pencilvania Pusher

Stockholm Runs

Say That Againsville?

Okefenokeyword Swamp

Angkor What’s Left? / What’s Left Bank?

Finnish the Fours

Battleships Creek

Ken-Kenya

Sierra Leone and Only

Tierra Dell Fuego

Caribbean carnival

Red Rock Challenge

There were a few submissions that deserve their own section, as several of our intrepid puzzlers went above and beyond.

One offered a tourism pitch for a puzzly destination: Mount OddsandEverest: Only a HopSkipandJump ToptoBottom

Another offered the following exchange and puzzly directions:

1: “Excuse me, how do you get to these Places, Please? Could you Point the Way?”
2: “Just follow the Word Trails until you get to the Borderline. If you see the Quotefalls, you’ve gone to far. At the Four Corners, Keep On Moving until you reach the Crossroads. Then it’s just a walk Around the Block and you’ll be at the Crypto-Zoo!”

Finally, one offered a quick tour of her favorite puzzle locale:

One of my favorite locations to visit is Anagram Magic Square, where if you take your PLACES, PLEASE, you can ESCAPE A SPELL to anywhere on earth. You can travel to PARIS in PAIRS, or dine on ALPHABET SOUP at an UPBEAT L.A. SHOP. And whether you’d rather see a SLICK DUBLIN BOG or a GLIB LISBON DUCK, you can find it in the BUILDING BLOCKS of this amazing place.

Have you come up with any Penny Dell Puzzle Geography entries of your own? Let us know! We’d love to see them!

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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!

The GCHQ Strikes Again!

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Last year, one of the toughest puzzles I encountered all year was the GCHQ Christmas Card.

The GCHQ — Government Communications Headquarters — provides security and intelligence services for the British government. Back when they were known as GC&CS — Government Code and Cypher School — they were responsible for funding Bletchley Park and its successes cracking the German “Enigma” code during World War II.

And last Christmas, they released a puzzly Christmas card that challenged the staunchest puzzlers, with over 600,000 submissions, but only 3 successful solutions!

This year, they’re doing things a little bit differently.

View post on imgur.com

[Click here for a larger version.]

This puzzle is the first step in a larger event that the GCHQ expects will take MONTHS to solve. (Their official due date for submissions is February 28, 2017!)

The big change here is that instead of a series of webpages available free to the public, they’re releasing this puzzly master challenge as a book containing over 140 codes and puzzles.

But it’s for a good cause, as “all GCHQ’s proceeds from sales of the book will be donated to the Heads Together campaign, supported by HRH The Duchess of Cambridge, who wrote the foreword for The GCHQ Puzzle Book.”

The Duchess writes:

I have always been immensely proud of my grandmother, Valerie Glassborow, who worked at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. She and her twin sister, Mary, served with thousands of other young women as part of the great Allied effort to break enemy codes. They hardly ever talked about their wartime service, but we now know just how important the men and women of Bletchley Park were, as they tackled some of the hardest problems facing the country.

In a new century, their successors at GCHQ continue this intellectual tradition. Like their Bletchley predecessors, they have become well known for valuing and understanding the importance of mental wellbeing. This is so important when dealing with such discretion and the pressure which comes with this.

William, Harry and I are very grateful that this book is supporting our Heads Together Campaign. I hope it will not only amuse and challenge readers, but help to promote an open discussion of mental health problems, which can affect anyone, regardless of age or background. Together, we are aiming to change the national conversation around mental health from stigma and fear to openness and understanding. Those who buy this book and support the Heads Together campaign will be playing a part in helping people get the important mental health care they deserve.

Puzzles and charitable works: a perfect holiday match, to be sure.

For US shoppers, the book is available as a Kindle ebook through Amazon.com, but if you want a paperback copy, you’re better off ordering it from Amazon.co.uk. With shipping and conversion, it still cost me less than $20.

And 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!

Puzzly World Records!

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I was perusing the latest edition of The Guinness Book of World Records, and wouldn’t you know it, there was a whole two-page spread devoted to puzzly world records!

It seems appropriate to start with Rubik’s Cube records, since we just featured a speed solver in Friday’s post.

There are lots of world records involving twisty puzzles. The most Rubik’s Cubes solved while riding a unicycle? 18. The most solved underwater? 5 cubes in 1 minute, 18 seconds.

What about the smallest Rubik’s Cube? It’s only 10 mm, and it can be turned and solved just like a regular-sized Rubik’s Cube.

You know, friend of the blog Hevesh5 has helped set a few world records, but that should come as no surprise, really. Domino records are being set and then shattered all the time. I recently stumbled across a video where a top domino artist and his team set the record for the most mini-dominoes toppled:

And for something a little grander in scale, check out this video of a curious domino world record: the longest human mattress domino toppling:

How about the largest domino ever toppled? Prudential Financial created a domino that was over 30 feet tall, 15 feet wide, and 4 feet thick, which they toppled as the last domino in a chain where each domino increased in size until the world-record domino fell.

And for an amazing endurance test, a team of 60 people maintained a domino circle that toppled for 35 minutes, 22 seconds, continuously replacing dominoes as they fell around and around and around again.

Here’s one for the Scrabble fans in the audience. The highest opening score in a Scrabble tournament is 126 points for the word MUZJIKS (using a blank for the U), played by Jesse Inman in the 2008 National Scrabble Championship.

Speaking of personal achievements, Ashish Dutt Sharma of Rajasthan, India, created the world’s largest word-search puzzle! Inside a grid of 129,600 letters, you can find over TEN THOUSAND words on Sharma’s list.

Of course, given its size, it’s actually impossible to have a definitive list of words in the puzzle, because of the vast number of potential letter combinations in the grid. All the words that were intentionally placed in the list mix with hundreds more formed unintentionally.

[Image courtesy of Getty Images.]

To close out this rundown of world-record puzzles, let’s return to the time of King William III and Queen Mary II of England, who commissioned a hedge maze in Hampton Court Palace in Surrey, which still stands today, more than three hundred years later, as the oldest hedge maze in the world.

These are just a sample of the amazing puzzly accomplishments that have been achieved all over the world by intrepid puzzle fans. I can’t wait to see what my fellow puzzlers come up with next.

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!