2025 Snowflake Challenge: Day 14: Puzzle Time

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Challenge #14

In your own space, create your own fandom challenge.

Tomorrow [29 Jan] is National Puzzle Day in the US so I invite all puzzle lovers to indulge in the next 48 hours and comment below what kind of puzzles you like [including links if applicable, I will collect them].

Any kind of puzzle is welcome: wordle, jigsaw puzzles, riddles, mazes, crossword puzzles, codes and ciphers, escape rooms, organized sophisticated puzzles like Cain's Jawbone or simple magic tricks.

Comments

[prisca]

I've bought an Exit puzzle lately, because I love Exit games. Never finished a puzzle before, though. We will see.

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Ah, I am tempted to try one of these EXIT games with my family. I recognize them, but we've never done something like that before.

[prisca]

Oh yes, give it a try; these games are so much fun. Just don't start with an expert one (like I did ... not the best idea)

[barbaratp]

Amo palavras cruzadas, mas infelizmente nunca acho bons aplicativos que sejam iguais aos da revista coquetel que eu utilizava (digo isso no passado porque minha mãe se apropriou das revistas que comprei para mim e as está usando).

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Oh, that's too bad that your mom took your puzzles!

[barbaratp]

Eu comprei acho que dois livros da Coquetel com palavras cruzadas, sudoku, cruzadinhas, caça-palavras e outros desafios mentais. Estava um comigo e outro com ela, enquanto eu fiz o meu em contrapartida minha mãe deixou o dela de lado. Quando o livrinho dela sumiu o meu foi afanado por ela que às vezes fica horas tentando descobrir uma única palavra. É engraçado até, já que ela não tinha muito interesse, agora não passa uma noite sem ficar quebrando a cabeça a procura das respostas. Eu comprei um nível médio-avançado para mim e o dela se não me engano era mais fácil. Ela diz que o achou é claro, mas até hoje não me mostrou ele. Enquanto isso fiquei sem ele e não é a primeira vez que ela pega minhas revistas e livros de desafios.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

My partner loves puzzles, especially 3D puzzle games.

I'm not so much a fan of puzzles, but I love shape toys that can fit together in different ways. We have a couple of Penrose tile sets.

Re: Thoughts

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Ah the Penrose tile is new to me. Interesting!

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

They're fun because you can make so many different designs. We've got the wide kite/narrow kite version.

[write_out]

I love jigsaw puzzles! Just like with rereading books, I will put the same puzzles together over and over.

Right now I'm working on the 1000 piece London Tube Map puzzle, found here (I also have the Adventures on the Underground puzzle).

Re-marks and Cavallini puzzles are also some of my favorite (I love the book cover puzzles, esp). I've gotten a lot from Barnes and Noble. I've also got a few Michael Storrings puzzles that are fun.

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

These are all great! I have done a lot of Michael Storrings, too.

[hamsterwoman]

Ooh, I didn't know about National Puzzle Day. In the last couple of years, I've fallen down the rabbit hole of variant sudoku, which is something I did not realize existed until I watched this video (that got linked in a fannish community) and got hooked first on the puzzle-solving channel and then on solving them myself. My favorite of these puzzles recently have been these rat maze puzzles which combine, well, mazes with a number of variant sudoku constraints, along with a cute rodent drawing, which automatically makes them the best :)

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Oh, wow. I never knew about this. It hurts my head a little but amazing.

[fred_mouse]

I would like to recommend the Simon Tatham collection of puzzles - I originally encountered them when we did all our computing on a desktop machine, but recently discovered that they are available for iOS and Android. A lovely range of logic puzzles, all of which have a range of difficulty levels. I don't like all of them, but there are enough interesting ones that I can swap between them, and once I've worked out some of the rules, I find them meditative.

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Oh, that's interesting. I did not know about that. Thank you for sharing!

[smallhobbit]

I daily do Yeardle which is a guess the year game; Waffle a word game; and Jigsaw Puzzles which I think you pointed out to me.

I also do the puzzles on iNews, but I have a subscription to that - make tracks, 11 lives (which we use to call hangman); guessword (their version of wordle); codeword; jigsaw. I may do others, including the sudoku.

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

I like Waffle (now that I understand the rules).

[smallhobbit]

Yes, it's a good challenge.

[greetingsfrommaars]

will crack open the jigsaw puzzle that's been sitting on my table for a while! it's a Country Life puzzle called "Country Store" that I got from the community shelf in the basement of my building. I do also enjoy various logic puzzles (sudoku, kenken, hidato, nonograms...)

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Oh that's a Buffalo Games one, too. That's good. The pieces fit together very nicely.

Ah, okay, nice. I may make a sticky post of different kinds of puzzles. That might be a fun thing to do for 2025

[greerwatson]

I always work through most of the puzzles in my daily newspaper; but the kind I love most, and use to relax (or pass the time during TV commercials!) are sudokus. Especially the jigsaw sudokus, with their tricky shapes.

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Ah, this has definitely been an education in all the different kinds of sudoku! Thank you for showing me that one!

[spiralsheep]

Sometimes my friends and/or their kids drag me out geocaching* with them and we've found an amazing variety of fun puzzles and puzzle boxes. There are some that are so much fun everybody wants a turn, such as the pinball puzzle box, and some so frustrating that they enrage people temporarily, such as a fiendish math code unexpectedly encountered in the middle of an open field, lol.

* I like the walks but am not as keen on the treasure hunting as they are.

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

OH, interesting. I am not knowledgeable at all about how geocaching works. Sort of like the treasure hunt equivalent to escape rooms. But it sounds fun. I would like it, I think.

[spiralsheep]

There's a free phone app, I think? With relatively simple box locations to walk to, but the more complicated puzzles are usually only available to paid members (mostly to stop them being easy to find and vandalise). Anyway, I don't know much about it either, except it's a treasure hunt for walkers and people can pick and choose their own variations on the game.

[musyc]

Well, I missed the actual day BUT. My mom absolutely loves White Mountain and Ravensburger jigsaw puzzles. And I have had a subscription to https://www.griddlers.net for nearly twenty years!

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Those are good brands of puzzles. Solid interlocking pieces.

Oh, that's a very cool site. Thank you for sharing. I am thinking of doing a sticky post with a collection of puzzle types.

[tinny]

Oh, fun! For offline puzzles, I love regular jigsaw puzzles. I'm currently working on these two:


[amazon.de link]


[amazon.de link]


For online activities, I like Quordle, Squaredle, QuadNerdle, and Connections.

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Oh, those are gorgeous.

I think I may gather all the links people enjoy and put them in a sticky post. People do a variety of online puzzles, I've found.

[silveradept]

One of the puzzles that I find particularly satisfying is 3Doku, which takes the usual sudoku rules and expands them to a 4x4 cube, so you have to work out 1-16 on each cube face, each cube row (that wraps around the cube) and each cube column (that also wraps around the cube). The puzzles are simple early in the week and progress in challenge and trickiness until the hard and fiendish ones available on the weekend. I also like it because there are plenty of accessibility options available for the puzzle so that you're not trying quite as hard to have to recognize all the little numbers and figure out where they go and where your next move is coming from.

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Ah, that sounds really, really interesting. I'm going to give it a try and I think I am going to make a sticky post of all the different kinds of puzzles people enjoy.