The early reviews are in, and I had a tremendously fun time remote solving the Mystery Hunt this year. Even though I missed the first many hours of Hunt as I was at work, and even though I was in bed at a normal time after we finished on Saturday before midnight (the pre-runaround part anyway), I felt I had a full experience from this 108+ puzzle ( Read more... )

As announced earlier this week, today's Friday Puzzle is a four-part holiday treasure hunt for my fans that travels through some of my past work including my books.

Each step will yield an answer or code that you should enter as a web address. Specifically, go to
grandmasterpuzzles.com/holiday2011/youranswer.html ( Read more... )

Writing a short post before an oppositely titled post later today. Besides my LMI test, this weekend featured Intercoastal Altercations 5, an online puzzle hunt put on by four talented puzzle designers (Foggy Brume, Mark Halpin, Eric Berlin, Nathan Fung), three of whom I've played with at different times on MIT Mystery Hunt teams and elsewhere. I ( Read more... )

As with last year’s entry, I’m doing this awards style and keeping the categories from last year. Commenters are welcome to recommend other “awards” for the best or worst in puzzles.
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So last weekend I took part in Decathlon 5, with a team including my best friend, currently in Boston, and some Stanford buddies. Aside from me, the rest were Bay Area event rookies. This meant I expected we would do okay, but likely not win. While this prediction proved true, I had a ton of fun that weekend.

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For those who want great sudoku puzzles, the Japanese qualifier - organized by Tetsuya Nishio - is available here. Apparently the Turkish championship's first part was this weekend as well although I did not compete (I'd already tested all their second round puzzles which were very good) but you can get those puzzles too if you missed them ( Read more... )

Brief update after this weekend's Bay Area Simulcast of Microsoft Puzzle Hunt 12. I played with Demonic Robot Tyrannosaurs which is an anagram of Coed Astronomy/Burninators. The t-shirts that were made for the team are incredibly cool. I was a free agent, invited in last week when a spot opened up, and was going to play with another team until ( Read more... )

We had a typo in our team's hunt email announcing the wrap-up, so I think I'll repeat it here and warp-up a quick summary of what I wrote for EfZ. When I find the actual links to the puzzles, I'll update them here, but I contributed the following as the main constructor (co-constructors if any listed):

The Orbital Nexus Round Concept and Meta - ( Read more... )

So some LJ friends have done yearly recaps, often with some focus on puzzles, so I thought I'd do my year in puzzles in award format (note to self: this may be the most ludricrous and self-indulgent thing you've ever posted):

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Thought I'd do a write-up about my test-solving of this Game and then some experience helping out with GC this weekend.

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