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When I was a kid I had a book of cryptographic puzzles (think like letter cyphers or Zodiac Killer/The Riddler stuff) that were individual puzzles that also had a meta puzzle that could only be solved by analyzing all the completed puzzles and little side puzzles in the margins. I know there’s no way you all would know that particular book but does anybody know anything that would scratch that itch?
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# ? Mar 27, 2022 21:40 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 04:11 |
Thirteen Orphans posted:When I was a kid I had a book of cryptographic puzzles (think like letter cyphers or Zodiac Killer/The Riddler stuff) that were individual puzzles that also had a meta puzzle that could only be solved by analyzing all the completed puzzles and little side puzzles in the margins. I know there’s no way you all would know that particular book but does anybody know anything that would scratch that itch? Like this? edit: Actually, here, you want Matt Gaffney's weekly meta crossword. He's also produced a few physical books of these. Parahexavoctal has a new favorite as of 03:44 on Mar 28, 2022 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2022 02:30 |
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If the cryptic chat has got you curious about cryptics, I'm about to stream today's Guardian cryptic crossword over on my twitch. Mondays are generally the easiest of the week, and I make sure to explain the thought process behind all my answers. It's a nice chill time! (With some silliness) https://twitch.tv/brainmage https://twitch.tv/brainmage
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# ? Mar 28, 2022 13:13 |
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Flint_Paper posted:If the cryptic chat has got you curious about cryptics, I'm about to stream today's Guardian cryptic crossword over on my twitch. Really great stream man, very entertaining and educational
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# ? Mar 28, 2022 16:05 |
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Parahexavoctal posted:Every now and then, when I've got a deadline, I have to temporarily block myself from visiting Otto Janko's logic puzzle archive (yes, it's in German, but English versions of the instructions are provided also, and Chrome will automatically translate). Ooh thanks. I play slitherlinks on Simon Tatham's all the time. I'll check out Krazydad's now too!
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# ? Mar 28, 2022 19:43 |
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sephiRoth IRA posted:Really great stream man, very entertaining and educational Aww, thank you! A few people who've been watching for a while are now solving cryptics on their own for fun as a result. I feel like some sort of terrible cult leader. I'm so glad you enjoyed it!
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# ? Mar 29, 2022 10:51 |
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https://store.doverpublications.com...nAaAhOpEALw_wcB This guy is no joke fuckin HARD, but the difference between the ones you can do in ten minutes and the one you spend hours over days solving are totally indistinguishable at the start. So you are always coming off stomping a problem that looked JUST LIKE this loving one you can't figure out how to attack. It's a perfect skinner box of random reward/punishment. Got it to waste time on a 13 hour flight barely noticed the time and spent the next three months working through it.
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# ? Mar 30, 2022 04:18 |
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There's a fun book called Maze of Games I received as a gift years ago that blends a story with mazes and multiple types of puzzles, mostly word-based like crosswords and ciphers. I've been working on it off and on for a while and have inserted multiple loose sheets of paper with my scribbles trying to solve all the connected pages. There are multiple sections where you have to complete a maze with movement rules and restrictions to determine the order you complete the puzzles in. Each puzzle then has a letter or word that link together to solve that chunk of the book. I believe the author is also a board game designer. http://www.lonesharkgames.com/maze/
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# ? Mar 30, 2022 18:13 |
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KleenexCMW posted:There's a fun book called Maze of Games I received as a gift years ago that blends a story with mazes and multiple types of puzzles, mostly word-based like crosswords and ciphers. I've been working on it off and on for a while and have inserted multiple loose sheets of paper with my scribbles trying to solve all the connected pages. There are multiple sections where you have to complete a maze with movement rules and restrictions to determine the order you complete the puzzles in. Each puzzle then has a letter or word that link together to solve that chunk of the book. I believe the author is also a board game designer. That looks really neat, bookmarked to pick up at some point
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# ? Mar 30, 2022 18:22 |
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Thanks for all the suggestions everyone, along with the fun posts about crosswords and cryptics. Re: The Maze of Games; Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but one of Mike Selinker's coworkers accused him of some toxic poo poo back in November,so I'm very hesitant to recommend anything he worked on. He has apologized and apparently is taking steps to better himself,but I'll let you folks decide if that's enough. It's a drat shame, as he wrote a pretty good book called Puzzlecraft with Thomas Snyder on how to design various types of puzzles with plenty of examples. And the puzzle community is generally a very welcoming place when assholes don't pop up. In less sad news, the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament is this weekend, and you can get the puzzles for home solving at their website. I also want to shout out the Crossword Links Substack, which collects links to mainstream and indie puzzles alike.
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# ? Mar 30, 2022 20:59 |
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Parahexavoctal posted:Other time sinks include Jim "Krazydad" Bumgardner's puzzle archive (especially the Variety Slitherlinks) The super tough mazes are taking me 1--2 min. But I like mazes. Here are a few straightforward ones I generated some time ago. (No entrances, just get from the lower left to the upper right... Then for more fun, get from the upper left to the lower right!)
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# ? Mar 30, 2022 23:10 |
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somekindofguy posted:Re: The Maze of Games; Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but one of Mike Selinker's coworkers accused him of some toxic poo poo back in November,so I'm very hesitant to recommend anything he worked on. He has apologized and apparently is taking steps to better himself,but I'll let you folks decide if that's enough. Dammit, this is why we can't have nice things.
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# ? Mar 30, 2022 23:35 |
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I was going to post about that one myself - I have dumped an unreasonable number of hours down map, rectangles, light up, net, pattern, and untangle of the wordle-alikes, I've been playing (alongside the original) quordle (four wordles at once, 9 guesses) worldle (geography based on the silhouette of a country or territory - decent, but the game has a massive boner for selecting tiny antarctic islands) heardle (the new zero-thousand dollar name that tune) framed (six increasingly-obvious screenshots of a movie, you provide the title) and I just started waffle, which has the same five-by-five-minus-four grid as squardle, but is based around the letters all starting on the grid and you having 15 moves to swap letter tiles until all six words are in place - every puzzle can be solved in ten moves with perfect play, so your score is 1-5 on any given success) I am really loving bad at crosswords - when my partner and I used to get games magazine, she'd get the real-deal cryptics and poo poo, I'd get the easy one with the clues in the black squares but my favorite puzzle in there was always paint by pairs (or, as the puzzle manufacturer calls it on their website, link-a-pix) where you have to take a grid like this and fill in lines between matching numbers of the length indicated by the number to get a picture like this (this is an easier one)
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# ? Mar 31, 2022 12:06 |
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Heardle is a weird one for me, I'm at the exact combination of not really listening to modern music and being very hit or miss on stuff I "should" know from growing up in the 90s that I haven't gotten a single one I've tried. It seems like a fun little challenge if you're more musically aware though, it's just different from the other word or math puzzles. What's he planning to do with that thing
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# ? Mar 31, 2022 17:04 |
hexwren posted:I was going to post about that one myself - I have dumped an unreasonable number of hours down map, rectangles, light up, net, pattern, and untangle Yeah, conceptis has a bunch of great stuff, even if their web site is stuck in 2005
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# ? Apr 2, 2022 14:49 |
for those of you who like cryptic crosswords but think they're too easy: in 2005, the lunatics at National Puzzlers League made a book of variety cryptic crosswords. But now it's out of print. So they put it online as a free PDF.
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# ? Apr 23, 2022 02:35 |
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hexwren posted:
https://octordle.com/ How about 8 wordles at once, with 13 guesses total?
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# ? Apr 24, 2022 08:51 |
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Pfft, get with the times, man, we're on Sedecordle now
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# ? Apr 24, 2022 13:53 |
gently caress it-- here's Kilordle https://jonesnxt.github.io/kilordle/
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# ? Apr 24, 2022 14:08 |
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# ? Apr 24, 2022 15:24 |
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This is bullshit
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# ? Apr 24, 2022 15:27 |
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if 16 isn't enough and kilo is too much, here's https://duotrigordle.com/ (32 boards, 37 guesses) which I've done for the last few nights and is pretty okay I knew about oct and sedec but they've weirdly felt like more of a pain in the neck than anything smaller, but 32 is big enough that it feels different somehow? idk. I think five guesses over the total is a little tight sometimes, especially if you have to take any 50/50 guesses at all, but I think I'm two-for-four on completing it at this point
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# ? Apr 24, 2022 19:16 |
There's also https://www.redactle.com/, which is kinda like semantle except you are trying to guess one of the top 10k wiki articles by guessing words/numbers in the article (like if it was 'College of Cardinals' you'd have to work around to find sentence patterns that can reference time periods, then go on to general people and geography terms, then try things that could relate to that like religion, zero in on catholic and keep trying terms that would fit what you've uncovered. It's rather fun.
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# ? Apr 24, 2022 20:37 |
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Watermelon Daiquiri posted:There's also https://www.redactle.com/, which is kinda like semantle except you are trying to guess one of the top 10k wiki articles by guessing words/numbers in the article (like if it was 'College of Cardinals' you'd have to work around to find sentence patterns that can reference time periods, then go on to general people and geography terms, then try things that could relate to that like religion, zero in on catholic and keep trying terms that would fit what you've uncovered. It's rather fun. I guess the fun of that one highly depends on the article you get. I had some concept. All I could find is that an university did something with it and that there was an example during WW2. Edit: I gave today's one a try. Given the context, it was a bit ridiculous but I did manage to solve it because it's my field of study. It was fun finding the most common word of that article. Unfortunately, since all the LaTeX formulars broke down, I had no clue which probability distribution they were talking about until I eventually brute forced it. It was the exponential distribution but it could have also been something like the Chi-Squared one. cant cook creole bream has a new favorite as of 22:44 on Apr 25, 2022 |
# ? Apr 25, 2022 21:48 |
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The rules of the 1000 are such that you dont guess each word but the position of letters. I took 113 guesses.
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# ? Apr 26, 2022 01:00 |
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Amoeba102 posted:The rules of the 1000 are such that you dont guess each word but the position of letters. I took 113 guesses. Yeah, it's actually really simple due to that. As long as you make sure that every new word has at least one letter in a position where that letter hasn't been before, you can't go above 130.
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# ? Apr 26, 2022 10:43 |
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Flint_Paper posted:Mid-way through the first lockdown I decided to start streaming cryptic crosswords on twitch as a sort of desperate grab for human contact. I've been doing it every weekday lunchtime for nearly two years now (Christ!), and my love/hate relationship with cryptics hasn't changed. Thanks for this post. I'm pretty decent at typical crosswords and can do most Saturday's NYT. Last month I decided to try cryptics and just hit a wall, day after day, where I simply couldn't understand the clues EVEN LOOKING AT THE ANSWERS for many of them. I think these links should be helpful in breaking through, cheers!
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# ? Apr 26, 2022 13:48 |
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Leon Sumbitches posted:Thanks for this post. I'm pretty decent at typical crosswords and can do most Saturday's NYT. Last month I decided to try cryptics and just hit a wall, day after day, where I simply couldn't understand the clues EVEN LOOKING AT THE ANSWERS for many of them. I think these links should be helpful in breaking through, cheers! Glad I could help! Two years in and I'm still getting horrified/surprised every time I do one, but it's definitely possible to start learning to spot tricks/signs/indicators etc. Later stream today - 5pm ish UK time - so feel free to drop in! I think a couple of folks from the thread pop in now and again, and there are Pre-Existing Chat Goons. I do try and breakdown the solutions once I've actually found them, and some people have accused me of being educational, so it might help! In other puzzle news, this was a sweet article about "generation puzzles", which I hadn't heard about before: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/04/puzzle-will-outlast-world/629651/ Flint_Paper has a new favorite as of 15:55 on Apr 26, 2022 |
# ? Apr 26, 2022 14:19 |
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Flint_Paper posted:In other puzzle news, this was a sweet article about "generation puzzles", which I hadn't heard about before: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/04/puzzle-will-outlast-world/629651/ quote:Jacobs’ Ladder is a physical manifestation of so much of what I love about puzzles. Doing them can make us better thinkers—more creative and more incisive
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# ? Apr 26, 2022 18:18 |
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actually wait does he make puzzles for video games because if so that would explain a lot
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# ? Apr 26, 2022 18:19 |
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I'm sorry, but if my folks willed me a puzzle that takes 1.2 decillion moves to solve, that poo poo would be at Goodwill by Saturday afternoon
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# ? Apr 26, 2022 19:08 |
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That's nothing, I have a puzzle that takes even longer to solve. It's a crossword but the rules say you have to wait for the universe to revert to a singularity and explode again, eventually forming stars, planets, life, and crossword puzzles anew in between each letter
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# ? Apr 26, 2022 19:13 |
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flavor.flv posted:That's nothing, I have a puzzle that takes even longer to solve. It's a crossword but the rules say you have to wait for the universe to revert to a singularity and explode again, eventually forming stars, planets, life, and crossword puzzles anew in between each letter Are you sure you're not just really bad at crossword puzzles?
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# ? Apr 26, 2022 19:18 |
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Tunicate posted:Says the man whose 'puzzle' has a known solution where the only difficult part is how incredibly tedious and time consuming it would be to implement. And then someone takes the stickers off the Rubiks cube.
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# ? May 13, 2022 07:18 |
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I have just solved this month's Viz cryptic crossword and I feel like a KING. A rude, rude king. (For non-UK goons, Viz is a comic/magazine with a base, crass, scatalogical and northern sense of humour, and the cryptic is puerile, gutter-minded, and hard as nails. Plus it takes some definitions/wordplay from it's own glossary of made up rude words, which makes things even harder.)
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# ? May 17, 2022 10:27 |
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Flint_Paper posted:I have just solved this month's Viz cryptic crossword and I feel like a KING. A rude, rude king. That sounds both hilarious and terrifying.
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# ? May 17, 2022 15:43 |
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Captain Hygiene posted:
Stick tongue in, up inside vag on Sunday (4) Depraved goblin hosed sprite on the bottom (7) loving good French man (7) Producing red poo poo, appears nervous (7)
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# ? May 17, 2022 16:05 |
Flint_Paper posted:Stick tongue in, up inside vag on Sunday (4) SNOG IGNOBLE ? DITHERS
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# ? May 18, 2022 06:13 |
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Yes! The one you missed was bonking. Because it's slang for loving, good French = bon, man = king because of chess
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# ? May 18, 2022 10:13 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 04:11 |
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So I just found this picture of a random daily local newspaper puzzle I took 10 years ago. I've tried solving it several times but I'm just dumb I guess. I have come to a possible solution: [4], but the logic by which I found it doesn't feel to be the author's intent: in each row and column adding the largest and smallest digit, and then the remaining digits produces consecutive results (but only for that row/column, the results don't span a specific range of numbers across the whole puzzle (result 14/15 appears three times), though it seems it could have been set to do so). I'm sure it's something way simpler I'm not seeing, this is not a paper known for its puzzles.
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# ? Jun 15, 2022 07:19 |