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!

One of the policies we have for all of our Puzzle Baron sites is that registration does not require an email address… we recommend you do provide one, so that you can use all functionality on the site, get password reminders, email notifications, etc., but we also understand that a large number of people don’t want to give out their email address just to play a game.  This policy has worked great for more than two years - but now we’re getting absolutely inundated with spammers.

For now, the policy will remain - email addresses are still optional - but we are clamping down a bit on what new registrations are allowed to do on the site.  For 99.9% of people, this will cause no problems whatsoever - you can still play games, accrue statistics, etc. as normal - but you may not be able to post to the forums, customize your profile, contact other players, etc. until you’ve spent a certain amount of time on the site, played a certain number of games, etc.  This way we’ll know for sure that you’re actually playing the games and that you’re interested in using the site for something other than spamming links and inappropriate content in our forums.

So far this has been rolled out on:

1. www.Cryptograms.org
2. www.WordTwist.org
3. www.DropQuotes.com
4. www.Sudokus.tv
5. www.Acrostics.org
6. www.Logic-Puzzles.org

And we’ll continue to roll this out to all our remaining sites.  If this solution works, then great - if not, we may need to eventually review our email/registration requirements.  My hope, though, is that we won’t need to go that far.

Thanks for playing, as always!

- Stephen

I have to apologize to the acrostics lovers out there - we dropped the ball on Acrostics.org in 2008 in a big way.  Our plan was to add thousands of new puzzles, upgrade competitive play and create our usual Hall of Fame and statistics areas, but other projects continued to get in the way. As a result, the site has languished for most of the year.

Well, all that’s going to change in 2009… promise!  My #1 priority in the new year is to finally and properly develop Acrostics.org into the full-fledged site its always meant to become.  I’ve already begun adding new puzzles, with more than 150 new ones added in the past week - but that’s just the beginning.  By February I hope to have at least 1,000-1,500 new puzzles available.  I also plan to completely revamp the site and chuck all old statistics, so that we’ll have a fresh start on the competitions for all registered users.

Thanks everyone for your patience - I promise the revamped site will be worth the wait!

- Stephen

We’re currently focusing on two main bugs on Version 2.1 of the new Wordtwist board (flash version).

1.  Backspace key takes a player out of the game - this issue isn’t happening for everyone, and we’re still not sure what the common element is amongst all who are experiencing it.  This is the #1 issue we’re currently working on, as we’ve received at least a dozen complaints about this happening with various players.

2.  Intel Mac players not able to type words at all - we’ve received at least four or five complaints from Intel Mac users that the board just won’t accept letters at all.  We’re looking into this issue as well and hope to have a solution shortly.

In other news, we’ve fixed the word-list display so that it looks more like the old version (i.e. background colors for each word).

Thanks for your patience while we sort all this out!

Just a quick note that we’ve done some serious database maintenance on Cryptograms.org.  There have been a number of complaints about the server slowing down, response time taking longer and longer, etc.  I’ve archived nearly seven million game records in order to speed things up a bit.   Hopefully our players should notice a significant improvement from here on out.

This morning we released the latest and greatest version (2.1) of the new, Flash-based Wordtwist playing board.  Thanks to everyone who’s been providing feedback on the new board!  We’re doing our best to incorporate most, if not all, of your suggestions into the code.  For those who aren’t familiar with the new playing board, here’s a quick overview:

New features include:

Mouse-over functionality - players can now use a click-and-mouseover method to submit words.  Simply click on the first letter of the word you want to submit, then (without holding down the mouse-button) just mouseover each subsequent letter, in order, until you reach the final letter in the word.  Click once more on the last letter, and the word will automatically be submited.  Letters that have been selected will appear as a bright orange color, while letters that are available to be used next (i.e. those that are contiguous to the last letter and which have not yet been used) will be highlighted in light orange.

Board rotation - by popular demand, players can now rotate the board 90 degrees simply by clicking the new “rotate” button.   Not all players will use this feature, but for some the rotation feature helps them to visually pick out word patterns which might otherwise not be noticed.

Improved timer handling - the timer in this version is vastly improved over our previous board.  Players should no longer run into problems where the timer doesn’t start, doesn’t finish, runs too fast or too slow, or stops mid-way through a game.

Audible DING! at time’s up - also by popular demand, a simple bell DING! sound will play when the timer reaches zero.

Those are the main improvements in the Flash board vs. the original game board.  Version 2.1 contains several bug-fixes discovered by our players in Version 2.0 - we’ve fixed the “focus” problem so that the cursor should always remain in the text box, and we’ve vastly improved the frame-rate so that our faster typists should find that the application keeps up with your typing.  We still have a few issues being reported which we’re still working on:

- Some users are complaining that using the back button doesn’t erase letters but rather forces their browser to go back a page.  We’re looking into this.

- Some users are saying the new board is harder on the eyes than our old board.  We’re still not entirely sure why this is, as we’ve tried to keep the design as close as possible to the original, but if you’re finding that the new board gives you eye strain or other problems, PLEASE send in your feedback and be as specific as possible when describing the precise problem.

If you have any other feedback or comments on the new board, please feel free to post them here.

Thanks as always for playing!

- Stephen