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Archive for the 'Puzzles' Category

A Panoply of Puzzle Books

Tuesday, December 13th, 2022

In the past month I’ve published four puzzle books, you can read about them here. It is no secret that the puzzles in my books are produced using computer software that I write. I’ve been writing such software for nearly twenty years. I’ve spent a lot of time working on that software, and I’m proud […]

Montague Island Mysteries book review

Monday, April 18th, 2022

Over the course of the Pandemic, I’ve purchased a LOT of puzzle books, and I thought I’d review some of the better ones over the next few blog posts. First up is one of my favorites, Montague Island Mysteries by Wayne Schmittberger. I picked up this book because I’m a fan of old fashioned logic […]

Diabolical Two Not Touch

Saturday, September 19th, 2020

Diabolical Two Not Touch is the latest addition to my Star Battle puzzle offerings on Amazon. My original Two Not Touch book series contains puzzles which start at the same difficulty as my puzzles in The New York Times and then get increasingly more difficult. The three new diabolical books start where the previous books […]

I get so Haunted that I fall in your dreams

Monday, August 31st, 2020

Why, hello there! My name is Phil, and I’m going to be talking about a spooky new puzzle type in a moment, but I thought I’d take a moment to introduce myself first. You may have seen my name already associated with a couple of recent additions to the Krazydad oeuvre; after being in contact […]

Binox Puzzles are here!

Monday, April 30th, 2018

I get a lot of requests for new puzzle varieties (all different kinds) but I started getting a lot of requests for one particular puzzle the past couple of years. I didn’t notice at first, because the different requesters were using different names: Binairo, Tic-tac-logic, Binoxxo, Binario, (I later discovered it is also called Takuzo, […]

Where are the logic puzzles?

Thursday, June 22nd, 2017

I sometimes get emails that ask where the logic puzzles are. “I thought your site had logic puzzles, where are the logic puzzles?” they ask. My site does indeed have logic puzzles, by which I mean puzzles in which you employ logic to solve them. Pretty much every puzzle on my site meets this description. […]

Krazydad books are coming!

Wednesday, March 1st, 2017

Hey folks, I’m currently working on a series of puzzle books which will be available on CreateSpace and Amazon, starting sometime in March, 2017. [ UPDATE: They’re available! ] I’m starting with a Suguru collection. Each Suguru book contains 300 puzzles and is priced at $9. The puzzles in the books are all new, and […]

An advanced Kakuro technique

Wednesday, January 18th, 2017

I got a letter a few days ago, asking for help with a particularly intractable Kakuro puzzle: 8×8, Volume 14, Book 99, Puzzle #8. Since my Kakuro puzzles are arranged by difficulty, this is a particularly hard one, since it is in Book 99. Here you can see where the solver got stuck: I was […]

Serpentomino Puzzles for Christmas

Tuesday, December 13th, 2016

There’s a snake in my inbox! Bulgarian puzzle constructor Galen Ivanov sent me two collections of interesting new puzzles, Serpentominos, of his own design, which I’m passing on to you, as a Krazydad Christmas present. These puzzles share some characteristics with Pentominos, Dominos and similar mathematical recreations, and are quite different from the Sudoku and […]

Crossword plagiarism scandal

Tuesday, March 8th, 2016

A fascinating piece over at fivethirtyeight describes a recent discovery of plagiarism in the crossword construction world.