Our first “official” Puzzle Baron book is now available at bookstores, both online and brick-and-mortar.  Puzzle Baron’s Logic Puzzles contains 200 puzzles from our online site, Logic-Puzzles.org.  Each puzzle has been completely rebuilt with brand new clues and a unique backstory. and contains the solving percentages and average times gathered from millions of online solves over the past several years, as well as the current all-time record holder for each puzzle (so your username may very well be inside!)

You can order the book directly from Amazon.com and get a whopping 33% discount off the cover price by clicking here.

Thanks for your support, as always!

Enjoy!

The best part?  Each crossword puzzle has its own unique identifying code.  If you get stuck on a particular clue, just enter that code into the “Hints and Solutions” page on the web site, and you’ll get back the answer you need (without revealing solutions for the rest of the puzzle and ruining it for you!)

Happy solving!  And if you have any suggestions for new puzzles you’d like us to add to the Printable-Puzzles.com site, please let us know!

Some of you may be familiar with “Clueless Crosswords,” also sometimes known as “Code Words”.   But for those who aren’t, it is essentially a regular-old crossword puzzle, but instead of clues for each word, every letter on the board has been substituted with a number, 1 through 26.  Your job is to completely fill in the grid by matching each number to its appropriate letter.  You’re given three letter/number combinations to get you started, and from there you use simple logic and vocabulary skills to fill in the rest.

For now, all puzzles use extremely simple English - no fancy words, no rare words, no “Scrabble words” ofany kind.  Once we expand the site a bit more we’ll have varying levels of difficulty, may will incorporate more varied and obscure vocabulary words.

There’s just over 1,000 puzzles currently loaded into the system for the 0.2 beta - feel free to give it a go!  The gameplay itself is more or less done at this point, what remains to be completed are the usual Puzzle Baron hallmarks, i.e.: user registration, forums, monthly competitions, trophies, records, stats, etc.  You may also notice we’re using a new design for this site - it may or may not be the one we finally end up with, but we’re trying out some new look-and-feel options.

Anyway, that’s the lot of it - please do give our Clueless Crosswords a try, and let us know via email or this blog post what you think!

Happy Solving!

Of course, there was usable content in there - but it took nearly eighteen months of going through the database, quotation by quotation, before we could get all the worthwhile quotes out of it.  We released the first batch of about 3,000 new quotes in early 2009 - and thankfully, finally, we released the remaining 13,000 just this week to both sites.  Each quote has been carefully checked for errors and duplication (though a few typos may have slipped past us, sorry!)

Anyway, a long, long project, finally over and done with.  If you’re a long-time player on either our Cryptograms or Drop Quotes sites, these should give you plenty of new meat to chew on for a while.  (You’ll know if you’ve got a new quote, because solving statistics and records won’t yet be available for them.)

As for the future of new quotes?  Well, we’re experimenting with some new ideas, including user-submitted quotations.  No news yet on that front, but watch this space.

Happy solving!

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!

1. Patchwords and Drop Quotes both need a “Recent Games” function. We’ve implemented this on many of our other sites and folks have found it useful - need to do the same on Patchwords and Drop Quotes.  Mainly this comes in handy for folks who play for “Percentage Solved” - due to the nature of internet gaming, an errant page refresh or a connection hiccup can result in games loading multiple times or half-loading, etc.  This will give folks another chance to complete a previously loaded game so as to maintain their percentage rates.
2. Drop Quotes is having a persistent problem with dashes. This one should be easy to fix but it’s been dogging me for a while - dashes are not coming out as spaces in the playing board every time, so occasionally a quote with a section like “something something - and then another….” will appear like “SOMETHINGAND”.  Very annoying.  (Sorry Drop Quoters!)
3. Logic Puzzle label images not always fully loading. Traffic for www.Logic-Puzzles.org has really taken off lately, and all the extra load appears to be causing label images to occasionally not load completely.   The fix for this is easy - I need to preload them in a better way during the initialization stage - so there should be no problems here.  Just a matter of putting in some time to figure out the best method.

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.

Love to hear what you think of it…