Posts

Jumbo Anagram Magic Square

Image
The quote, most of the anagrams, and several clues have been carefully chosen to represent the theme. 1. The type of product that the dot product is 2. Like some aircraft and most mammals 3. Shaved down 4. Get on the wrong side of 5. Teams on set or in planes 6. Tall building 7. Fruit that looks like a distorted peach 8. Divine assistance 9. Road that often requires off-roading 10. They participate in hat tricks 11. Punctual, perhaps 12. Someone who takes things away from your house 13. Typeface that shares its name with a purple flower 14. Certain public transit vehicles 15. Stays in place for some time 16. Try to game the system 17. Bread treat often with small bits baked in 18. Thumbnails, from a menu standpoint 19. Wise guys 20. Stories that might be called tall 21. Coin call that more often makes sense 22. White ___ orchid 23. Not all heroes wear these 24. The rabbit and the tree it goes around 25. In the open for all to see 26. Weapon known to reduce the risk of traveling alone 2...
Read more

Update: May 2026

 It's been a busy week for me despite being the start of summer. I came up with a couple large yet clearly attainable ideas and managed to finish one and make firm progress on the other. The former will be posted here early in the week and the latter will be posted when it's complete. I've been finding that all these multi-step challenges are easier to approach when broken up and taken one step at a time. The following puzzles were shared on 2/2 but I've been holding onto them since they feel too brief for a dedicated post. Elision is a slightly controversial cryptic crossword technique in which a wordplay indicator and what it applies to are bundled together in a compound word. For example, "Evenhanded sum (3)" might be ADD because it's spelled by the even letters of handed. These two words are entire clues: Introversion (4) (First letter: O  ) Newspaperman (6) (First letter: S   )
Read more

Nurikabe (Loop) Doppel

Image
These were made on 5/16/26. https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?nuriloop/6/6/p5h2l2q5i https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?nurikabe/6/6/p5h2l2q5i
Read more

Update: April 2026

 This month has been as busy as it tends to be. In addition to projects not related to puzzles, I've also been working more consistently on making a pack and designing for something larger. I've stopped working on the solver because it feels a bit disenchanting to approach logic puzzles without looking for the underlying logic. I've also put the patchworks to rest again but made a bit of progress in the fan project that I put on hiatus a while ago. Additionally, I've been daydreaming of a sort of digital puzzle book with rule deduction where the central mechanic involves dominoes, but since it would likely be fully illustrated, I don't think I could complete it this year even if I prioritized it heavily.  A few days ago, I noticed that a bad actor was squatting on a previously expired domain I was linking to. I sincerely apologize if anyone was led there because of my negligence. I've removed links where unnecessary and retracted posts where important. At least ...
Read more

Robotic Walk

Image
 I consider this genre to be on the more difficult side amongst the walks due to how the way the path is allowed to move is dependent on how it moves in other not given and often remote sections of the grid. Although it may seem looser at first than Fire Walk or Ice Walk, the alternating pattern introduces an aspect of parity that tends to increase the nuance of deductions. These three puzzles were made yesterday. https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?roboticwalk/7/7/5a0540e82sg3zy69l https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?roboticwalk/7/7/vs32q61gfuo7g1zl8p https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?roboticwalk/9/9/al04440i4g2220al0p3h3h3z5h3h5j3g4s3k5p
Read more

225

I think the main appeal of the 2025 puzzle, at least for me, is how much care was taken in coming up with entries that belong in one category but allude to another. It would not surprise me if every category represents 45 other categories with its entries. It's a bit like setting up a lot of puns. I was inspired to try to do something similar on a smaller scale. It was fun but taxing to keep all the possibilities in mind and form connections between them. The following list of 225 things can be grouped into 15 categories of 15 things. To make it approachable, I'd say the puzzle is solved when all 15 categories have been identified, which doesn't necessarily require sorting all the things. 5 11 13 311 400 Aerie Alfa All fours Alpha Andalus Angerona Angers Anvil Archie Aria Math Arial Aries Arizona Arles Astros Atlas Ballade Bastille Black Jack Bodhi Bond Bordeaux Born Bourré Boxing Brave Bravo Brest Bridge C4 Caelum Caelus Caen Cambria Math Cancer Candara Canine Carpenter Ca...
Read more

Update: March 2026

 I've been making progress with lots of different kinds of puzzles this month. For the classics, I finally found the time recently to buy a puzzle game about a week and a half after its release; I've been spending so much time solving it that I've already unlocked part of the postgame. For other games, I've reached the two-thirds point in my latest pack and I've recently been invited to help design puzzles for a small project. For mysteries, I figured out on a surface level what happened to the Kudamono editor: I'm pretty sure it's just being migrated to a new domain, and I'm feeling optimistic that nothing is truly lost. For metapuzzles, I continued work on coding my puzzle solver to the extent that it can solve the example Norinori puzzle in a reasonable amount of time. Currently, my largest stumbling block is trying to figure out how to represent whether two specific cells are orthogonally connected as a Boolean expression of whether specific cells co...
Read more