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here's a canonical list/set that doesn't actually exist, but totally could exist in a parallel universe or something: water temperatures

obviously you may think the list should look different - it's not actually a standard, after all - but the point is that it very much could be standard if some guy in the 17th century sat down, wrote a list, and got it published or something. similar to how we have ROYGBIV today

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because my living space is kinda small + not incredibly permanent, i usually like not having a lot of stuff and only holding onto the actual essential items i need to exist and work online. but that means i've sort of heavily biased myself into doing digital puzzles only, and although that's not a bad thing i do sometimes wonder if i had a bigger space (and more propensity to spend money) would i like having and solving more physical puzzles, like wooden packing puzzles or jigsaws or rubik's cubes or etc. or maybe even just crosswords + logic puzzles but on paper. could be a thing for future me to think about

when i went to mit mystery hunt 2025 in person for the first time i did get to look at a bunch of physical puzzles, but mit mystery hunt isn't really the space to dive deep on any of them lol. but it does seem like trying to own stuff like that is an expensive hobby, more so than the ones i have today

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workworkworked through all of workworkwork by letibus / blaž urban gracar (the guy who made lok and abdec) today. it's extremely awesome and i cannot recommend it enough:

do be warned: it's pretty tough!

without spoiling too much, i can say that mechanically, it's clear early on that the concepts introduced have the potential to get extremely complicated, and while the puzzles do push the envelope to some really mind-bending levels, the setups all have a good way to get pieced together through a few key logical insights. it was really fun to never really feel like i was totally lost and had to trial-and-error until something worked, despite the mechanics seeming super like they would be that sort of experience. just really solid, really smooth, really hardcore puzzle solving

also no one else makes visual presentation for puzzles like this. the graphic design in this puzzle book is absolutely wild even by letibus standards - just an insane amount of vividness and texture and environmental evolution throughout the experience. super fresh stuff.

(i'd say this is the 100% definitive nothing-going-to-top-this candidate for best pencil puzzle of 2025, but blaž is working on getting herd released also, so it could very well be that instead. no way is anyone else in the space getting anywhere close though lol)

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Sudokuvania: Digits of Despair is one of the most impressive works of pure game design I have ever seen.

Before I say anything else, I am going to be talking about a game that is VERY new and has pretty terrible search optimization, so in case this blog post somehow came up near the top of results for someone, here is the as-of-this-writing-current 1.02 release, and for good measure, here is the official FAQ page with the full version history, any future patches, and an FAQ for some of the more confusingly worded stuff that crops up later into the game. Now on with the praise-heaping!

So... Sudokuvania pretty much exactly what the name implies. It's a -vania, that is, a Metroidvania, and specifically one styled after one of the ones that's actually in the latter Castlevania series so that naming convention actually makes sense. Exploring a big castle, fighting bosses, getting various items letting you explore more areas, maybe breaking out of the borders of the map to find cool secrets here and there.

Also, it's a variant of sudoku. And I don't mean someone sat down with some videogame designing toolkit and made a videogame where some of the gameplay is solving logic puzzles on a grid you fill with numbers (I mean, I guess technically I do). I mean that link to the game I posted takes you to a website with a little built in standard app for solving sudoku puzzles and weird variations thereof, and the particular puzzle it's pointing to, somehow, manages to have a big map to explore, boss fights, special items that give you new powers, NPCs, and for good measure, fog of war. It is, again, an absolutely amazing hacky thing and I'm flabbergasted at how well executed it is. Now you're probably wondering how that even works, and that's why I'm writing this big gushy blog post. Here's what you see when you first load it up:

You're going to notice there is some absurdly small and kind of important text you can't possibly read, and that's because again, this is kind of a hacky thing this site so was not designed for. So it's kind of annoying but if you access this through the proper introduction page, it'll explain that the first thing you need to do is click the little gear icon in the floating tool palette, toggle on Visuals: Draw arrows above lines and Disable emoji replacement, then scroll all the way down to Experimental and turn on Test Large Puzzle UI. That enables you to zoom in and out with the scroll wheel, and right-click drag to pan around. It's... a little clunky because again, this website was NOT built for this, but tada, now you can zoom in, read the text, and start solving at a reasonable size. Then there's a couple gameplay concepts it does its best to explain, but... most people I've shown it to myself included needed extra explanation of a couple important early concepts. So let me just do a little color coding here to make this easier to get...

The map is not, in fact, one great big grid. It's 9 squares (and one rectangle that's not quite square over on the east side). Each of these is its own 9x9 Sudoku grid (well, the starting one is 6x6 and has those mutant 2x3 cells instead of the usual 3x3, and there's that weird eastern mutant). If you're solving stuff in one square, you completely ignore everything outside that square, except for where they overlap, in which case the numbers you're placing have to fit for both puzzles. So if we look at the light grey/green intersection on the left, those three overlap cells respectively can't be 4 6 or 5 (and whatever use you deduce in the grey box, but the pure green cells completely ignore all that, you're just focusing on the green 9x9 (which is going to have the overlap as a starting point, naturally).

The next bit that through me off a ton is the way fog of war works. Let me reasonably zoom in and do a little solving here. One second...

Here's the whole starting area all marked up to hell like you do when you're kinda bad at Sudoku and don't know how to spot a starting point. Penciling in little numbers in the corners. You'll also notice a that... most of the map is covered in this dark grey fog of war. A lot of in-game stuff mentions that you shouldn't go clicking out into the fog of war, because it'll show you names of later areas and preview certain special rules and all, but that's talking about clicking WAY off from what you can see. You are 100% allowed to solve stuff out in the fog of war, and it's pretty stingy about de-fogging. Don't go blindly guessing because then you can maybe end up sequence breaking but... yeah. Sorry I'm spoiling the Front Gate, it's basically the tutorial though. Anyway, first move is obvious, only one place we can put that 6, and suddenly...

Tada, important space so it rewarded us with a little fog clearing. You can also see that this will handily point out stuff in your pencil notes that can't be true, but only if A- it's untrue for standard sudoku reasons not special stuff, and B- it's not in the fog of war (or on the other side of some. You also maybe noticed that weird green thing under that first hint 6? That's something we need a tool for, you don't worry about it until you have that tool. Solving this out some more...

Little more de-fogging, both of the puzzle area and the margins where we're getting new information on playing the game in general. Now right here if you're observant, you'll see that bottom right corner has to be a 6. It's out in the fog of war, but you can mark it if you know what it is. And...

I was cropping it out before but the big purple number pad is always floating off to the side there, and the green text box over it, which among other things has an area name and flavor text for whatever grid you're in. This won't ALWAYS happen when you place numbers in fog of war, but there was a trigger on this 6 to load in a little piece of the first real area, and oh hey, we unlocked "Guide THERMO!" That's our first tool, and it's described up in the upper left.

So tada, from here out in addition to standard sudoku stuff, you've got these "bronze Guide THERMOs" that show up here and there and have this extra rule. You basically never get free numbers in the grid past the Front Gate, it's all slow-marching into new areas using what you're bringing in plus some easy starting examples of how your new tools work, plowing on from there. The fog of war is pretty stingy but it keeps you focused. You'll also notice the rules here mention bosses, all the 9x9 ones have one. It's clearly marked, and you should PROBABLY expose it from the fog first, but any time you're in the area really you, if you scroll around in that green text box or hit the rules button when in a grid, there's a link you can click to go fight it. The boss fights are all separate puzzles (site's good about auto-saving so don't freak out if it takes over your tab and you have to hit back after). These are very themey, sometimes VERY evil (especially boss #1, feels a bit overtuned) self-contained 9x9 puzzles, probably using the same tools their area is themed around, and I don't think there's a single pre-placed number in any of them. Beat the boss puzzle, it gives you some flavor text and a number to place in its cell back in the main castle puzzle, plug that in and you're always going to unlock something cool. Usually a new item, sometimes other weird stuff, and it just goes on like that.

Don't expect to be able to fully solve a given grid in one go. It's a Metroidvania, backtracking is expected. Even if you've fully de-fogged a grid, later stuff might reward you by straight up adding new symbols you couldn't see before or doing weird stuff with fog. It IS all solvable with pure logic... but there ARE a few places that do that thing I hate in tougher sudokus where you just kinda have to pencil in in a different faction and explore 2 possible futures for a bit to see which eventually contradicts itself. And of course the last couple of grids do some really evil mind-bendy stuff.

But yeah aside from a couple gripes where the way a tool works could maybe be a lot more grammatically clear, that first boss being a lot to deal with as you're first getting your feet wet, and a particularly cruel twist later on, I don't really have any complaints. Well, it might need a cool soundtrack. Maybe play some Castlevania music. Maybe switch it up for some real proper boss music when you're nearing victory.

Again I am just completely blown away that someone made something so meaty in a standard sudoku site's normal UI, and really managed to make it feel so much like playing a DS Castlevania. Some real proof of game design being an art form here. And now you too can just completely lose a day or two to it!

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the big crossword on puzzmo this week is really good. i'm not biased

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poll contains spoilers for deltarune chapters 3 + 4

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both of these games:

start with TOTALLY

contain 4 words in the title

the first two words are 15 letters combined

the second two words are also 15 letters combined

feature ragdoll physics as a primary source of appeal

support multiplayer

show two people on the cover art, one blue and one red

are playable on xbox game pass (at time of writing)

were initially released on april 1st

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crosswords | prev | next

the power of pokémon

new midi! this one wears its inspiration on its sleeve. thanks to Selbor and Ollie G on discord for playtesting!

solving link: https://crosshare.org/crosswords/oEpK9XKFgHNkNhHHr4rE/the-power-of-pokemon

will show + discuss the solution below!

SPOILERS AHEAD

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first of all i want to shoutout the very niche source for this puzzle's title: a song from the pokemon super mystery dungeon soundtrack

the phrase "power of pokémon" isn't really a codified thing in pokémon canon, except for this particular song name. it plays during a pivotal moment when you, the hero, get a huge assist from a whole host of legendaries as the calamity threatening the entire world unfolds. the whole sequence where this happens is an awesome rollercoaster and i always want more of that in pokémon games

of course for this puzzle, the word "power" is playing double duty: each of the four theme answers is a pokémon whose name begins with an si prefix denoting a specific "power" of 10, starting at 10^3 and increasing to 10^12.

what makes this theme extra tight is that these are the only pokémon whose names start with each of these prefixes! there are others that contain prefixes somewhere in the middle (for example, YANMEGA and REGIGIGAS contain "mega" and "giga", respectively), but requiring them at the start gives a unique set of four. their lengths are also perfect for this pokéball-shaped grid, which works out very nicely! had fun sneaking a bunch of small pokémon references into other clues here and there as well.

when writing clues for the pokémon, i wanted to take angles that highlight what's cool about them from an ecological or character-based standpoint, rather than their mechanics or stats. here's some more info that i didn't get to use!

KILOWATTREL is one of roy's partners in the pokémon horizons animated show. they were relatively small as a wattrel, but they were also the only wattrel in the group shown to have expressive, angular eyes (rather than wide, circular ones), which is pretty funny

MEGANIUM features prominently on the boxart for new pokémon snap, being the first "illumina" pokémon that you're likely to encounter in the first area in the game. he's pretty great and you can get a picture of him doing stuff like giving shaymin a ride

GIGALITH is one of the miscellaneous baddies in pokémon mystery dungeon: gates to infinity. the one in pokémon super mystery dungeon is implied to be the same one, and some dialogue there indicates that he's actually quite timid, despite appearances. gigaaahhhh…

and finally, TERAPAGOS makes for a great mascot for the "indigo disk" dlc of the scarlet & violet games. the one in the pokémon horizons show is nicknamed "pagogo" (adorable), and they've actually got four forms, if you count their dormant state as a gemstone. their terastallized form debuted the new 19th pokémon type "stellar", which at time of writing is the only instance of it.

one thing you should know about me, as a pokémon fan, is that i hold a strong belief that all pokémon are interesting and cool - there are literally zero of them that i would describe as "boring" or "forgettable" or etc. i'm definitely keen to keep featuring them in crosswords as long as i'm around to make it happen!

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exhibit a

exhibit b

exhibit c

exhibit d

exhibit e

exhibit f

exhibit g

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LYNE, LYTH, and LINELITH are all names of existing puzzle games

links to them: lyne | lyth | linelith

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obviously i'm a bit in deltarune mode right now but i can't say anything yet because. spoilers. so let's see other things to say instead

have you seen this upcoming game called Öoo? it's one of the cutest things ever including the animation the music and the name

if i had a nickel for every game that caught my interest whose name contains only O's, i'd have 2 nickels. the other is this one:

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crossword | prev | next

unrelated title

had this idea quite a while ago; right now seems like a good time to make it happen :)

weird gimmick today, have fun! https://crosshare.org/crosswords/ezcJYw6ybubfe1Pb1Sah/unrelated-title

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oh my god okay so. there's this rule discovery puzzle set made by the late jack lance commonly called from muddled to clean that i've looked at a few times and never managed to get far into... until now

and i want to post about it because i think my breakthrough involves a crazy idea that i realized way before i was intended to, completely by accident

(major spoilers for fmtc follow, including some solutions. please try the puzzle set yourself! it's available here, and if it's too hard you could also refer to this unofficial version for a hint or a confirmation.)

so here's the story: i initially looked at this on my home computer, and starting with set 1 i'm presented with the first puzzle:

because this is a rule discovery game, it's unknown what the black circles mean, but what is given is that the goal is to draw a single closed loop, so on this grid i reasoned that due to the symmetry, the solution could really only look one way.

no reason to think that the solution is anything else, right? maybe the idea is that black circles are always enclosed.

that seems to work for the next few grids:

i was able to see that if i treated black circles as "must be in the loop" and white diamonds as "must be outside the loop", then the grids in set 1 all solve uniquely. so that's a good start!

but then in comes set 2, and it's clear that i have an incomplete set of rules. even though this set doesn't introduce any new symbols, there's a lot of extra ambiguity in them that needs a rule to narrow down.

i think i didn't end up figuring out what i was missing, and i must have moved on with my day. maybe if i had figured out what was going on with this set right then, i wouldn't be telling this story.

fast forward several months, and i had basically completely forgotten any concrete details about the puzzles, including where exactly i stopped. i saw some renewed conversation about from muddled to clean while i was reading discord on my phone away from home, so i thought "heck it, let's give this another try"

so i took another look, starting from the top, with none of the context that i had before. just like last time, when i looked at the first puzzle in the first set, i reasoned that due to the symmetry, the solution could really only look one way. except this time, i was actually thinking this:

no reason to think that the solution is anything else, right? maybe the idea is that black circles are always on the loop.

that turned out to not be quite complete, but i was able to revise the logic and finish set 1 on my phone. i found that if i treated the black and white shapes sort of like masyu pearls, where the loop turns on black circles and goes straight through white diamonds, then the puzzles all solve in a unique way:

so once again, i'm off to a good start, but then on sets 2 and 3, instead of immediately getting stuck, i actually managed to piece these together. like, in set 2, i found that although you must go through all of the black circles, you don't have to go through all of the white diamonds - and in set 3, the loop just routes around walls.

i even got a decent understanding of what could be happening in sets 4, 5, and 6 - so at this point i was thinking, "oh cool, i should write all this down once i'm home" (again, not aware of any progress i had made prior)

imagine my amazement when i arrive back home, open up my past work, and learn that my past self had been approaching the puzzle totally differently! at first i thought i had just found what was actually correct and was onto a complete red herring earlier, but then i had the crazy thought: what if it's both? as in, all of the puzzles are actually doable both ways with a different ruleset, and i just happened to get stuck earlier on one versus the other

and so i took another look at my previous approach, and it turns out there was a way to deal with set 2 - turns out if you ensure that the loop touches the edge of the grid on all sides, there's always exactly one valid loop that does that.

from there, i worked through the later sets and finally got both of my solve paths thoroughly worked out (admittedly, with some hints gained from the unofficial upload with answer checking). i have this pdf where i'm doing it and its got both solutions overlaid on each grid

now i'm preparing to tackle set 7, eagerly awaiting the part where the twist i found actually becomes relevant.

i don't think i've ever experienced such a salient example of when coming back to a puzzle with fresh eyes lets you finally unlock everything. it's certainly not a good approach for solving puzzles quickly - you need to spend at least several months forgetting about your existing progress - but once in a blue moon it actually works! and of course when the puzzle is as elegant as a jack lance creation, it's all totally worth it.

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got a chance to grab and play through tangle tower yesterday (murder mystery game by the devs behind snipperclips) and had a great time. i like the scenario of the case and the charm of the characters despite the believability leaps the general plotline sometimes contains. plus the game looks amazing and, besides some mixing and compression issues, sounds great also

i also played the original detective grimoire some time ago and what i like about both of these is (spoilers ahead)

that in both cases, the final accusations revolves almost entirely around a single clue in a single piece of evidence. in detective grimoire, the lynchpin is the location of the missing piece in a 5-piece costume, and in tangle tower, it's a certain assumption you have about something depicted in an unfinished painting seen right at the start of the case.

the revelation of that single moment in both games is really powerful because the trick is so well conceived and executed - tangle tower especially, because that one is discoverable immediately upon investigating the crime scene for the first time! not a lot of mysteries go super hard on having one trick that sells the whole case - but these both absolutely pulled it off for me

i've seen complaints about tangle tower's full explanation has some holes, like how you have to accept that the murderer could get from point A to point B super quickly in order to pose as being a different person, or how their motive for committing murder in the strange way they did seems shaky at best. but my brain was willing to accept these. after all, you have to make the leap that water in a lake caused a species of beetle to mutate such that it can screech loud enough to crack metal and glass. it's not more crazy to me that someone could have gone sufficiently insane living their life in the tower, left and murdered their ancestors out of spite, and then murdered one of their closer relatives once they found out. their morality is definitely twisted and self-contradictory in an unrealistic way, but that honestly just feels in-character for this universe

all of this is to say, i'm excited to try the mermaid mask when it's finally done!