Just a quick note to let everyone know that our latest site, Word-Searches.org, is now launched! We’ve got thousands and thousands of unique word search puzzles, covering hundreds of different categories. Play for fun, or register an account and compete for the Word Search Hall of Fame!
We’re constantly asked when we’ll start offering a word search puzzle site… well, ask no more! We’re currently in development on a brand new Puzzle Baron site devoted solely to word searches. The programming is about 85% complete at this point, we’re just ironing out bugs and getting things ready for prime time.
Like all our most popular Puzzle Baron sites, this one will have ongoing monthly competitions. There will be two separate competition tracks - one for timed games, where you’ll try to find as many words as possible within a certain number of limits, as well as one for “unlimited” games, where you’ll have as much time as you need to find all words on the board.
More information as it becomes available!
Bunch of little things I need to get done this month on the Puzzle Baron sites. I’m making the list public here as a reminder to myself (and as a means of motivation). Right now the major issues to deal with this month are:
Well, summer is practically here and it’s time to break out some good books for the beach/hammock weather that’s rapidly approaching. I’ve been on a lucky streak lately, book-wise - nearly every one I’ve picked up over the past month or so has been, if not a GREAT read, at least a good read. But there’s one author that’s really been a pleasure to read - Laurence Bergreen. I’ve picked up two of his titles recently and they were both fantastic reads.
Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
Laurence Bergreen
Of all the books I’ve picked up lately, this one takes the cake. Masterfully-written and richly detailed, it’s just an excellent overview of Magellan’s trip around the world. Well, to be precise, he didn’t make it around the world (he got whacked in the Philippines when he decided to involve himself in a local squabble). But a handful of his men did make it back, and that’s pretty darned inpressive considering the utter lack of knowledge and technology that existed at the time.
Bergreen did such a great job with this book that once I finished it, I looked him up straight away on Amazon to see what else he’d written about. Unfortunately most of his subject matter was a big yawn to me (i.e. Al Capone, James Agee and Irving Berlin). But he did have a relatively new(ish) book out about Marco Polo, so I resolved to pick that one up and see if it could hold a candle to Over the Edge of the World.
Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu
Laurence Bergreen
Ok, so Marco Polo may not have been quite as riveting as Bergreen’s book on Magellan, but this was still quite a good read. By default, the mere fact that Polo’s journey occurred some three centuries before Magellan, in a time long before the printing press had come to Western Europe, means that Bergreen had a lot less “meat” to dig into during his research. In fact the vast majority of material from this book comes simply from various editions of Marco Polo’s Travels, which considering how variable they are, and how many authors touched and altered them over the years, means that it’s a fairly hard task to pull fact apart from fiction.
Still, Bergreen does a great job incorporating material from other contemporary and near-contemporary sources - various Jewish, Muslim and Chinese authors who were writing about the same (or similar) events, people and places. In all, it’s still tough to determine which parts of these accounts were real and which were not, but Bergreen does do a fair job of countering recent claims that Polo essentially fabricated the whole of his travels. Altogether a solid read though, and I’d definitely recommend it.
Ok, ok - I know, the Puzzle Baron “home site” has totally sucked since its inception. I threw something together more or less haphazardly (believe it or not, I did it in December ‘07 while my wife was undergoing surgery) and never got around to making it into a proper site. Well, that is now remedied! I present to you the brand-spanking-new PuzzleBaron.com:
Love to hear what you think of it…
There’s no escaping it - when you spend 50 hours a week working on the Puzzle Baron family of web sites, it’s pretty much a given that you’re going to get sucked into playing a few (hundred) puzzles from time to time. One of the questions I get the most is: “Which puzzles do you play?” Well, here’s your answer.
It depends.
Vague enough for you? Truthfully though, it does tend to vary from month to month. For a long time I was a tried-and-true cryptogrammer - and I guess that makes sense, since www.cryptograms.org was the first site I ever launched under the Puzzle Baron brand. From there I battled a new-found addiction to Drop Quotes, which offered the same joy of uncovering a witty or amusing quote but required a whole different set of solving skills in order to properly master.
Lately though I’ve been drawn into good old-fashioned pencil-and-paper puzzles, thanks to my focus over the past two months on our new Printable Puzzles site. In particular I’ve been solving at least 1-2 crossword puzzles each day. I’d forgotten just how much fun this things were. Back when we used to live “inside the Beltway” I’d make a point of grabbing the Washington Post a few days each week just to get my hands on their relatively easy crossword puzzle offerings, but since we moved out to the country in 2005 I just never got back into the old cruciverbalist kick. Until now. 
Of course the biggest surprise to me personally has been my recently-forged love affair with Reverse Word Search puzzles. I’ve never enjoyed word search puzzles all that much, to be absolutely honest. I know they’re a big draw, and I made a point of including them in the Printable Puzzles site to satiate all you word-search fanatics out there, but they just never “did it” for me. Then I was exposed to the “reverse word search” idea after some conversations with one of the puzzle editors I work with from time to time at PIL. My first reaction, if I remember correctly, was along the lines of “meh”, mostly because it had the term “word searc” in the title, but like the trooper I am, I dug into it a bit deeper and started creating my own. Lo and behold, I was hooked on the very first one I tried to solve.
It’s a deceptively simple idea - given a mostly empty grid, with just a handful of letters pre-filled-in and circled, fill in the grid completely using only the exact words given. Every circled letter that is already filled in is the first letter of one or more of the words in your list, and that’s all you’re given to get started. Using just that information, every word will be placed on the grid either horizontally, vertically or diagonally (and backwards or forwards) exactly once, with not a single empty grid space left when you’re done.
I’m almost embarassed to admit how many of these I’ve solved in the past few weeks. They’re strangely immersive, and much more challenging and stimualting than a regular word-search. Give ‘em a try and see what you think!
One of the most-requested features on all of our sites is a proper way to print a puzzle and be able to solve it the old-fashioned way, with pencil and paper. We made some baby steps in that direction on a few sites over the past year or so, but really none of the results were all that spectacular - 9 times out of 10 you’d print the puzzle page and it would get split between multiple pages, or just completely explode into an absolute unreadable mess once it made its way through your printer.
Well, problem solved!
As of April 19th, we’ve now launched our newest site Printable Puzzles - and this is where we’ll be making all (or nearly all) of our online puzzle sites available in crisp, clear and PRINTABLE PDF format! Every puzzle has been painstakingly recreated in Adobe PDF format so that it will print at full print-quality on any printer, anywhere in the world. All you need is the free Adobe Reader software (or Acrobat) to view and print these puzzles.
Right now we’ve got Logic Puzzles, Acrostics, Cryptograms and Sudokus available on Printable-Puzzles.com, but we’ll be adding Drop Quotes, Patchwords and many more over the coming weeks and months. New puzzles from every category are added every morning (365 days a year) so you’ll never run out of pencil-and-paper fun during your commute or during those fleeting time-away-from-the-computer moments.
Enjoy, and if you have any feedback on the new site, please let us know!
Just found out that a few days ago, on April 12th, PC World magazine published an article about “Great Pencil and Paper Games Online” which featured not one but two Puzzle Baron sites! Both Wordtwist and Logic Puzzles were featured with positive reviews. Thanks PC World! You can read more at:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/162970/great_pencilandpaper_pastimes_online.html
Just a quick note to announce that several of our Puzzle Baron brand puzzles are now featured on the Entertainment section of the Yuma Sun newspaper web site at: http://www.yumasun.com/sections/games/
Their web editor, Joaquin, has done a fine job integrating our syndicated puzzles into their site. Now readers of the Yuma Sun will have access to daily cryptograms, drop quotes, patchwords and logic puzzles.
Thanks Joaquin!
It’s official - monthly competitions are now LIVE on DropQuotes.com! We’ve waited a while to implement this as we wanted to get a “critical mass” of users onto the system first, but now it looks like we’ve got plenty of folks solving drop quotes, and more than enough to allow for some healthy (and fun!) competition!
The competitions will work just as they do on our other sites - three competitions per month, and all registered players are automatically entered:
#1 - Highest Total Points
#2 - Solving Percentage
#3 - Fastest Solver
Enjoy! And if you’ve not tried DropQuotes.com, what are you waiting for? This may come as a surprise to most folks, but of all the sites we run here at Puzzle Baron, DropQuotes.com is actually my personal favorite, and the place I generally go when I want to solve some puzzles myself. It’s a very different kind of puzzle-solving experience - sort of like a mix between a cryptogram and an acrostic - but once you get started on it, it’s incredibly addictive!