The latest addition to my puzzle collection, Galaxies are elegant puzzles in which symmetry forms an essential component. You are presented with a grid containing circles, in seemingly random positions. You fill in the lines of the grid to form an island, or galaxy around each circle. The galaxy shapes must be rotationally (or 180° [...]

Eighty-seven year old puzzle constructor Yochanan wrote to tell me he has posted scans of his hand-made crossfigure puzzles. You’ll find 80 puzzles, divided into 4 collections here. I find these puzzles to be excellent. However, because they are scans from a book, it helps to zoom in on each page to make the puzzles [...]

Apparently, “Kennie” was a little too close to “KenKen” for Bob Fuhrer, who sent the following missive this morning: Dear Mr. Bumgardner, I am President of Nextoy, LLC and KenKen, LLC, which owns and controls all rights in the KenKen® and Kendoku® brands of mathematical logic puzzles. I have recently learned that you are publishing [...]

Apparently, the paltry few KenKen puzzles published in the Times weren’t enough, so a number of you wrote to me asking for KenKen puzzles. I’m publishing a new kind of puzzle called a Kennie. It’s similar to a KenKen, but has a few minor differences. Kinda like those chocolaty sandwich cookies that aren’t exactly like [...]

This weekend, I counted all the words on Project Gutenberg. This has been done before, notably, here. My script crawled most of the English language books on Project Gutenberg (about 20,000 titles), and counted how often each word appears, and how many books each word appears in. The script ran for about 20 hours. You [...]

The Griddle is a beautifully designed puzzle site by David Millar. It will especially appeal to more advanced solvers who are bored with the same-old same-old. You’ll find a new puzzle variety, in PDF format, nearly every day, including some interesting variants on Sudoku, Kakuro and Slitherlink. Check it out!

I received some interesting hand-made Crossfigure puzzles from Israeli puzzle constructor Yochanan. He says he learned the technique of making these puzzles when he was “still a fairly young man, about seventy or so,” from L.G. Horsefield. These numeric crosswords are similar to Kakuro and KenKen puzzles, but have greater variety in the clues. Here’s [...]

A few friends recommended I check out the May issue of Wired, so I finally picked up a copy at the airport today. They were right — this is the best issue of Wired I’ve seen in a few years! Wired is one of many magazines that has been noticeably suffering from the downturn in [...]

I’ve added a new collection of Slitherlink puzzles to the site, which feature six-different tile layouts. Enjoy!

There was a 5.4 earthquake here in southern California today, and it had a curious effect: All the heavy black areas were knocked off of my Kakuro puzzles. While they are slightly less attractive, I’m told they use up considerably less ink and toner this way, so I guess I’ll keep ‘em. I hope you [...]