I'm not a fan of April Fools' Day. Perhaps it's because, hello, I spend all year making stuff up, and once a year a bunch of amateurs are going to try it? Please. But what really fails to impress me on April Fools' Day is...a bad puzzle.

By the time anyone reads this, they'll presumably already have gotten the news about Google Treasure Maps. It ( Read more... )

All right, all right, I should get these down on metaphorical paper. I'm going to talk freely about the answers to the puzzles, so if that bothers you, go do the puzzles first or something.

( cut for extraordinary length and because mostly you don't care )

The CiSRA competition having ended, I have any number of thoughts which I ought to get around to posting, but lest I forget, the two major lessons I learned are:

1. If there aren't any other particular constraints on either your clue phrase or your answer, you might as well make it unambiguous.
2. If the theme for your puzzle very nearly works but ( Read more... )

Why can't I get a job solving puzzles all day? I suppose I have one, in some sense, but. Saxikath and I are now in fifth place in the CiSRA puzzle competition, not that we're competing for anything, but they're good puzzles. We're "Just a Couple of Hacks" (because Tah + Saxi = Taxi, taxis are hacks, get it?), and have gotten the exalted position ( Read more... )

A question about one of the entries in the 3/8/09 puzzle:

( Cut, obviously, for the spoileriffic nature )

Before the Hunt, I mentioned that I'd written a puzzle early Friday morning. Specifically, I'd promised a puzzle to my aunt in North Carolina for an inauguration-themed party.

So if anyone's curious: Four More Years?. It's designed to be solved by non-puzzlers, of course; it's geared to be of fairly easy difficulty.

As for me, I have, this morning, already:

• Written a puzzle
• Had the puzzle testsolved
• Printed it and prepared to send it out
• Discovered that I'd written it to lead to the wrong final answer
• Rewritten the puzzle
• Printed it and sent it out.

And the Hunt starts in two hours. How was your morning?

Today's Abstruse Goose. Not a very hard puzzle, perhaps, but I found it interesting.

Once again, in the category of "unclear on the concept" puzzles, this one from TangaThere's a lot wrong here-the solution method has problems, I think, and the pictures are too small to make out clearly. But the real issue...well, let the author explain. In case you don't want to go look, it's an odd-one-out puzzle, and the third and fifth lines ( Read more... )

I'm no good at Con reports, not really. So a few semi-random passing comments.

( Cut for length. And to spare non-NPLers the boredom. )