This is the third of three internationally themed puzzles. See Wednesday’s puzzle for introduction.
This is most likely the easiest of the three, but requires more trivia/internet than the other two. Again hopefully the picture quality and handwriting is legible.
I’ll post a puzzle tomorrow for my nineteenth birthday, which is in under two hours from now! 😀
This is the second of three internationally themed puzzles. See yesterday’s puzzle for introduction (and a probably easier puzzle.)
As you might have noticed, I’ve been on vacation. I was in Italy, Greece, and Turkey, and I now have three puzzles, each of which I made in hotels and/or on plane rides. They are each themed around or related to one of the countries I was in. Hopefully the picture/handwriting is readable enough.
Greece will be tomorrow, Turkey after that, and then after that, a puzzle for my birthday.
Note: While these puzzles were originally published on Pi Day, there’s nothing time specific, so feel free to solve and submit puzzles at any time.
As long as you don’t swear by using tau, a controversy which some people seem to constantly get irrationally angry about, then happy pi day! If you’ve finished eating some celebratory pie while watching Life of Pi (played with a Raspberry Pi, of course) to better pi-bond with your friends, that means it must be time for the second installment of P.I. Hunt!
Last year dealt with determining the players for a made-up game, but this year, you get to jump into the action and be the player for a made-up game! You begin as an adventurer in the enchanted woods. You will have to solve puzzles to help you find items, and defeat any obstacles in the way of your adventure. The initial map of the woods you can explore is shown here:
The “S” is your starting cell. To the west, there is an edge of the forest.
To the north, There is a large expanse of desert, and a sign of parched parchment which dryly tells you that it’s far too far and arid for you to cross.
To the east, there is an ice demon. He looks at a list, and says something about his literally cool club being “over capacity” although you swear you just saw him let two snowwomen through.
To the south, there is a sea with a boat blocking the path preventing you from swimming past. It has white paint on it that reads “UNSINKABLE WIZARD SAILBOAT”.
When you have solved a puzzle, you can submit your answer by sending it to me at jack.l.lance@gmail.com. You should also contact me like this if you find any errata, or just want to make a remark or ask for help. You will only be able to unlock new puzzles, so submit answers whenever you solve a puzzle. (If you cannot solve any puzzle and have not seen P.I.HUNT 1, you may want to start with it, as it had an easier initial round for people with less experience to puzzles.)
This is a Wednesday word puzzle. Write one of “DO”, “RE”, “MI”, “FA”, “SO”, “LA”, or “TI” into each domino reading left to right or top to bottom to spell distinct words in each consecutive line of blocks of size 2 or more. When done, to prove that you solved it, anagram the letters in the circled squares and send it to jack [dot] l [dot] lance [at] gmail [dot] com
Most of these words are common English words. For fairness, I highlighted the 6 that are not, and they are in some order: A contraction, a common brand name, a first name, another first name, a stage name, and a rather uncommon English word.
I don’t usually make word puzzles, but this was an idea I had been toying around for for a while, and it fit this domino-themed week pretty well, in addition to people potentially feeling a lack of Wednesday word-related puzzles today for some reason. Considering my lack of experience with crosswords, and the constraints of this puzzle, I was really happy with how the letter-density in some areas turned out.
After solving two of the three metapuzzles from last time, solver Mike Sylvia requested to have another meta. Like usual, the words are given in alphabetical order. Also notice that the words “Jack” and “Mike” both appear in this puzzle, which is not a coincidence, but has no effect on the puzzle.
This one is harder than the other three, but hopefully it isn’t too hard.
I will resume normal grid puzzles next week with hitoris and hitori variations.
I’ve made a few metapuzzles. If you do not know what a metapuzzle is, I made a post explaining it here.
If you solve two (or three) of these, E-mail me your answers and I’ll let you choose some sort of puzzle that I will make for you. If you don’t, you can E-mail me for hints. I just want to promote metapuzzle-solving because I really like them 🙂
These are not necessarily in order of difficulty. The words within each meta are given in alphabetical order, meaning the order is arbitrary.
1:
2:
3:
(Note that the fact the words “JACKAL” and “LANCES” both appear in the puzzles is solely to add my personal signature into it, and doesn’t actually have any impact the puzzles at all)
Although this is supposed to be a Friday puzzle, many people are not familiar with the idea of metapuzzles. If you are, feel free to skip to the bottom block of text.
As many of you know I like hunt-style puzzles (examples from me, Thomas Snyder, and Grant Fikes) in which instructions are not given, and the puzzle leads to a one word answer.
Often in puzzles like these, there are puzzles called “metapuzzles”. These are puzzles that take a lot of answers, and has a new one word answer.
Here is an example:
One would be given these words and need to find an answer. So first, you might notice that each of these words has some letter way more than usual. For example, “Voodoo” has 4 ‘o’s in a 6 letter word! This seems significant. Taking the letters that appear the most in each word gives M-O-D-E, and since the mode is the most common element of a set, this is a suitable answer.
If you solve each meta, you can choose some puzzle type or variation you’d like to see me make on this blog. To start, enter the word “mode” with no caps under the page “Meta 1” under “Menu” in the top right corner.
Okay, the planned Friday puzzle I had for this theme has completely broken beyond repair, and I have given up on fixing it, so I’ll leave it as a challenge: Can you build a 6×6 Skyscraper skyscrapers? What this means is that clues on the side of the top could be given, for example, which would give the skyscraper number if each of the clues of a normal skyscraper represented a building.
Anyway, the puzzle for today is a hunt style puzzle, as promised. It is titled “Skyscraper Crossword” and I’ll make a password protected page so you can check your answer.
jacoblance.wordpress.com 