Review: Puzzlebook Trilogy: 303 Puzzle Quizzes by the Grabarchuk Family

The members of the Grabarchuk family, for those unfamiliar with them, make puzzles for Puzzles.com. "Trilogy 303 Puzzle Quizzes" collects into one omnibus volume their three previous Kindle books : "Puzzlebook: 100 Puzzle Quizzes (color and interactive!)," "Puzzlebook: 101 Puzzle Quizzes (color and interactive!)" and "Puzzlebook: 102 Puzzle Quizzes (color and interactive!)." The puzzles are colorful, geometric and ingenious.

Puzzles

The puzzles are indeed colorful. Most of the puzzles are graphic and geometric, so color helps the solver visualize. Moreover, color gives the puzzle creator an additional tool. The 19th century puzzler Sam Loyd once wrote: "By giving no two pieces the same shape, other ways of doing the puzzle are prevented, and the feat is more difficult of accomplishment.” Similarly, giving the pieces of a geometrical puzzle different colors and then making the solution depend on putting the right colors together offers another way for a puzzle creator to make a puzzle with a unique solution.

The Grabarchuks' collection is varied, but the puzzles fall into a number of types. Here are descriptions of a few to give readers a taste:

Counting

A number of puzzles require the solver to count the number of times a given geometrical figure or letter appears in a complex design.

Geometry

Plenty of puzzles present the solver with views of four very similar geometrical figures and ask which one isn't like the others.

Matchsticks

In these puzzles, the solver is presented with matchsticks placed in a geometrical array. The puzzle is to remove as few as matchsticks possible to change the diagram in some way.

Coins

The solver is asked how many ways there are to form a geometric figure, say a square or an equilateral triangle, by placing coins on the vertices of a geometric figure.

Double Letters

The solver is presented with a number of pairs of double letters. To solve the puzzle, the letters must be arranged--with a few overlapped--to form a word. A semantic clue is also given.

Viewing

I read plenty of Kindle books, but I don't have a Kindle. I used to read with Kindle for PC, but I switched to the Kindle Cloud Reader and have never gone back. Using Kindle Cloud Reader, I worked through these puzzles on a large laptop PC with a 17" diagonal screen. A brief note below the copyright notice in “Trilogy 303 Puzzle Quizzes” explains how this collection may best be viewed:

Optimized for 3rd font size; "sans serif" typeface; "medium" line spacing; "default" words per line; and "portrait" screen rotation.

The settings I used were nothing like the recommendations. I prefer large letters, wide margins and sepia pages. I didn't find my unusual choices interfered with my enjoyment of the puzzle collection.

Navigation

Each volume has a visual table of contents. Puzzle elements are used as icons. To go to a puzzle, click on the icon. Below each icon is a descriptive title. For example, the first puzzle in the collection has an icon of yellow arrows on a white field. The arrows point in different directions. The name of the puzzle is "Nine Arrows." Thus, the solver has a visual and verbal hint about what the puzzle is like.

It is not necessary to go to the page of icons to move from puzzle to puzzle. You can also move through the book by clicking on answers. The puzzles are multiple choice with two to four answers for each puzzle. To select an answer, the solver clicks a button. If the answer the solver selects is incorrect, the button leads him to a page with the emoticon ;( and the message "Your answer is incorrect. Please try again." Below the statement is a button marked Return to puzzle. If the answer is correct, the button takes the solver to a page where the solution is shown. This page has two buttons: Back to Puzzle and Next Puzzle. To skip a puzzle, simply click on the right arrow to go to the next one.

The puzzles in each volume are numbered and rated as to difficulty with one to five stars. Easier puzzles come first. At the end of volumes one and two is a five star puzzle. Solving that puzzle correctly takes you to an answer page with Back to Puzzle and Next Puzzle buttons. Clicking Next Puzzle takes you to the first puzzle of the next volume. The end of volume three doesn't work the same way. The answer page for the last five star puzzle in the collection has no Next Puzzle button, and absentminded solvers who click the right arrow on the screen to move along will go to the section of "Wrong Answer" pages. This was the only problem with navigation I found.

Recommendation

I recommend buying this volume if you enjoy working geometric and logic puzzles. I worked through this puzzle collection in less than a month. There are more than 300 in the collection, so I have to admit to an addiction to these puzzles. I'm looking forward to purchasing the fourth volume in the series, which the Grabarchuk family recently released.

You can find more information about Trilogy 303 Puzzle Quizzes on the Grabarchuk family website: http://www.grabarchukpuzzles.com/puzzlebook/303puzzlequizzes/index.htm.

Please note that some Kindle devices do not have color screens. The owners of such devices may not be satisfied with this Kindle book.

A slightly different version of this column appears on Triond's Quazen website: http://quazen.com/games/puzzles/review-trilogy-303-puzzle-quizzes-by-the-grabarchuk-family/

Pirates of The Caribbean 5, the Crossword

Newspapers, magazines and puzzle websites pay the authors of professional-quality crossword puzzles $50 to $1000 for each puzzle.  Compensation at this level dwarfs the income most bloggers or self-published novelists receive for their efforts.  Always on the lookout for new opportunities, I put together a crossword based on what little we know about “Pirates of the Caribbean 5.” 

Triond readers and obsessed, pitiable souls who search day after day for new information about “Pirates of the Caribbean 5,” welcome. I invite you to solve my puzzle.  After the puzzle, I discuss how close (not very) I came to creating a crossword that a puzzle editor might buy.  The answer to the puzzle appears at the end of the article.  

Pirate Music

First, some pirate music from Elizabeth Velez Urie put you in the mood:

Puzzle

Across

1. This actress may return for "Pirates of the Caribbean 5."

3. Sparrow's actor's last

6. Eighth of a piece of eight

7. Pirate talk or Accident Risk Assessment Report

8. Utah or University of Tennessee

10. Will it be an epic film or an epic ____?

12. Four ______ theme parks have Pirates of the Caribbean rides.

13. ____ was I ere I saw Elba.

15.  The two-eared Van Gogh brother

17.  Negative response

19.  Hear "Hi-yo ______" in the next Depp film. 

 

Down

1.  Body of water between Miami and Maracaibo

2. Tow-toed sloth kept as pet by pirates

4. "Pirates of the Caribbean 5" is expected to ____ billions.

5. First two words of movie series title.

8. Unmanned Aircraft System

9. In the video Elizabeth Velez Urie plays a hornpipe on a ___ whistle.

10. POTC 1,2,3,4 and soon _.

11. Not right

14. Latter Day Saints

15. Movie starring Charlton Heston, "Ben-___."

17. Netherlands, National League etc.

18. Output Voltage

Problems

Unau PD-US Image by Davepape via Wikipedia.

A good crossword puzzle must satisfy aesthetic standards of symmetry and language.   After I made the puzzle, I reviewed the writer's guidelines for five possible markets for crossword puzzles.  The puzzle above has numerous problems:

• It’s the wrong shape.  A puzzle fit for publication must have 180 degree rotational symmetry; that is, the puzzle must be the same shape when you turn it upside down.  My puzzle has bilateral (mirror) symmetry.
• The sides have an even number of squares.  Saleable crosswords have an odd number of squares on each side.
• A good puzzle can have very few three-letter words and no two-letter words.  I have two three-letter words and four two-letter words.
• I used a partial phrase, “_______ __ the Caribbean.”
• I have one word of crosswordese.  Most experienced crossword solvers know unau is a vernacular name for a two-toed sloth and Ea was a god of the Babylonians, but they don’t want to see these words very often. (I used unau for fun.  Besides, I read somewhere that pirates kept them as pets.  I swear it.  Really.)

I could go on and on.

I do plan to make some more crossword puzzles, but I’ll try for a saleable puzzle next time.  This one was just for fun.  

In case you were wondering, the author of a Sunday crossword in the New York Times receives $1000 on publication.

Answer

This article originally appeared on Triond's Quazen website:  http://quazen.com/games/puzzles/pirates-of-the-caribbean-5-the-crossword/

A Tik-Tok of Oz Puzzle

 PD-US via Wikipedia

I have an unrealized ambition to create a series of puzzles based on the Oz books of L. Frank Baum.  These fifteen books, containing hundreds of characters, color plates and line drawings, provide ample material for puzzles of many kinds.   I offer the first of the series below.

In case you’re unfamiliar with him, Tik-Tok is a mechanical man Dorothy Gale meets and winds up when she’s trapped by the wheelers in “Ozma of Oz,” the third volume of the series.  A popular character, he figures in many of the later books, and Baum later wrote a book around him, “Tik-Tok of Oz.”

The puzzle has three parts: a passage with a few words omitted and replaced with blanks, a set of scrambled words, and a word search puzzle in which the scrambled words appear unscrambled.  Once you’ve puzzled out the words, use them to fill in the blanks in the passage.  The passage is the speech from “Ozma of Oz” in which Tik-Tok explains his origin.  I edited the speech very slightly to improve continuity.

If you get stuck unscrambling the words, try picking them out of the word search, where they appear unscrambled, or guessing them from the blanks in the passage.  On the other hand, if you’re good at unscrambling words, you’ll have a word search puzzle to enjoy once you’ve figured out the passage.

In the Oz books, Tik-Tok speaks with a mechanical voice, which Baum represents by stringing the words together with hyphens.  Robotic speech is all about us today, so I give the answer to this puzzle in an unusual form, an Xtranormal video I made in which Tik-Tok tells his story.

Tik-Tok of Oz (PD-US)

The Passage

Wordsearch

The answer spoken by Tik-Tok himself:

Puzzles are for Fun

You won’t get rich making puzzles.  Once upon a time you could make money constructing puzzles for magazines, but now most of the puzzle magazines you see on newsstands print only computer-generated puzzles.  (If you have a mental picture of sweating bots shoveling digits into the flaming furnace of a Sudokumatic 2012, you’re not far from wrong.)  A good crossword puzzle, on the other hand, still requires considerable human ingenuity and can fetch $200 or more.

This puzzle was computer generated.  After picking out the words in the passage I wanted to hide in the word search portion of the puzzle, I created the word search and scrambled the words using armoredpenguin.com.  Next I sat down to solve it myself to guard against mistakes and to check on the difficulty of the puzzle.  My memory isn’t particularly strong.  I was taken aback by the scrambled word “clpdietcoma” and had to consult the word search.

I hope you enjoy my puzzle.

Answers

An earlier version of this article appeared on Triond's Quazen website: http://quazen.com/games/puzzles/review-trilogy-303-puzzle-quizzes-by-the-grabarchuk-family/