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!