Puzzle contests are popular competitions in which the objective is to solve a puzzle within a given time limit, and to obtain the best possible score among all players.
One of the earliest puzzle contests was held about 1910. The publisher of the New York Herald offered a $5 gold piece to the reader who could form the most words using the letters from the shortest verse in the Bible. More than 400 readers submitted identical solutions listing 2505 words, and the publisher was obliged to pay $5 to each of them, since no provision had been made for ties.
Puzzle contests started to gain widespread popularity in the 1920s, and in 1927 the tabloid newspaper the New York Evening Graphic offered $50,000 in a contest. [1] By the 1940s and 1950s millions of players tried to solve puzzles published in a wide range of newspapers and magazines. The first puzzle contests in that era were designed primarily to boost the circulation of the magazine or newspaper. These contests were usually free to play.
The most popular contest of this era was the Tangle Towns contest. [2] Shortly after the New York Herald Tribune started publishing Tangle Towns in September 1954, the number of readers went up 72,000 to over 400,000. [3] It was believed the puzzle was directly responsible for this increase. [2] [4] These contests ran in newspapers in major cities. In this contest the names of local cities would be scrambled, such as WONKERY for NEW YORK. The player had to unscramble the name. As the contest progressed, two city names, and then three city names would all be scrambled together. The final tiebreaker would consist of several hundred letters from which the player would have to form 20 or 25 city names, with various scores assigned to different letters and letter combinations.
The largest prize ever paid in a puzzle contest is still the $190,000 prize offered in a 1947 contest sponsored by Unicorn Press. The final puzzle consisted of several dozen pictures which had to be identified. Then the resulting words had to be anagrammed in the style of a Word Rebus, with points added for each word used, and points deducted for individual letters that were included in the rebus. The puzzle was designed by William Sunners, a Brooklyn schoolteacher for a fee of $15,000 (roughly 4 years salary in that era).
In the 1950s the focus of puzzle contests became fund-raising. Organizations such as the Boy Scouts and the Salvation Army would advertise their contests in large-circulation magazines. These contests either had an entry fee to play, or required a donation to the sponsoring organization. The most popular format for these contests was a picture composed of digits. The player had to correctly add all of the digits. The final tiebreaker would require the player to draw a path through a grid of several hundred numbers to obtain the highest possible total.
The current era of puzzle contests, in which the contests are conducted almost entirely by mail, began in the early 1970s. A promoter of packaged vacation tours called American Holiday Association (AHA) decided to use a puzzle contest to publicize its holiday packages. The puzzle contest proved so popular, that eventually AHA dropped its vacation business and became exclusively a puzzle contest promoter. [5]
The best-known of the AHA contests was their BINGO format word grid. In the first round the player had to fill in 5 words into the 5x5 grid, meshing with the word BINGO that had already been filled into the left column. Since there were only 2 words in the word list starting with B, only 2 words with I, etc., no real skill was required. The second round was similar, with BINGO filled in the diagonal. Again, there were only 2 words starting with B, only 2 words with I in the second position, and so forth.
At their peak, around 1985-90, the AHA contests drew about 100,000 players in each contest, with a new contest starting every week.
The Diamond Dilemma was a 160-piece 3d triangular tiling puzzle with a £250,000 prize for a full solution. The prize went unclaimed by the 1990 deadline, though prizes for easier subproblems were awarded. [6]
The Eternity puzzle (1999) and Eternity II puzzle (2007) were a 209-piece tiling and a 256-piece edge-matching puzzle developed by Christopher Monckton, for which a £1 million and $2 million prize could be won. The first competition was won by a pair of mathematicians, the second went unsolved.
The -gry puzzle is a popular word puzzle that asks for the third English word that ends with the letters -gry other than angry and hungry. Specific wording varies substantially, but the puzzle has no clear answer, as there are no other common English words that end in -gry. Interpretations of the puzzle suggest it is either an answerless hoax; a trick question; a sincere question asking for an obscure word; or a corruption of a more straightforward puzzle, which may have asked for words containing gry. Of these, countless trick question variants and obscure English words have been proposed. The lack of a conclusive answer has ensured the enduring popularity of the puzzle, and it has become one of the most frequently asked word puzzles.
Word games are spoken, board, card or video games often designed to test ability with language or to explore its properties.
A crossword is a word game consisting of a grid of black and white squares, into which solvers enter words or phrases ("entries") crossing each other horizontally ("across") and vertically ("down") according to a set of clues. Each white square is typically filled with one letter, while the black squares are used to separate entries. The first white square in each entry is typically numbered to correspond to its clue.
A cryptic crossword is a crossword puzzle in which each clue is a word puzzle. Cryptic crosswords are particularly popular in the United Kingdom, where they originated, as well as Ireland, the Netherlands, and in several Commonwealth nations, including Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malta, New Zealand, and South Africa. Compilers of cryptic crosswords are commonly called setters in the UK and constructors in the US. Particularly in the UK, a distinction may be made between cryptics and quick crosswords, and sometimes two sets of clues are given for a single puzzle grid.
A rebus is a puzzle device that combines the use of illustrated pictures with individual letters to depict words or phrases. For example: the word "been" might be depicted by a rebus showing an illustrated bumblebee next to a plus sign (+) and the letter "n".
Alfred Mosher Butts was an American architect, famous for inventing the board game Scrabble in 1938.
Concentration is an American television game show based on the children's memory game of the same name. It was created by Jack Barry and Dan Enright. Contestants matched prizes hidden behind spaces on a game board, which would then reveal portions of a rebus puzzle underneath for the contestants to solve.
A ditloid is a type of word puzzle in which a phrase, quotation, date, or fact must be deduced from the numbers and abbreviated letters in the clue. An example would be "7 D S" representing "seven deadly sins".
Sudoku is a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle. In classic Sudoku, the objective is to fill a 9 × 9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3 × 3 subgrids that compose the grid contains all of the digits from 1 to 9. The puzzle setter provides a partially completed grid, which for a well-posed puzzle has a single solution.
Think Fast is an American children's game show which aired on Nickelodeon from May 1, 1989, to March 30, 1990, with reruns airing weekly until June 29, 1991.
Games World of Puzzles is an American games and puzzle magazine. Originally the merger of two other puzzle magazines spun off from its parent publication Games magazine in the early 1990s, Games World of Puzzles was reunited with Games in October 2014.
La Settimana Enigmistica is a weekly Italian word puzzle and word search magazine, published since 1932 with Europe-wide distribution. It's one of Italy's most popular and top-selling magazines.
Bookworm is a word-forming puzzle video game by PopCap Games. From a grid of available letters, players connect letters to form words. As words are formed, they are removed from the grid and the remaining letters collapse to fill the available space. Players earn more points by creating longer words or words which use less common letters and earn less for smaller words. In November 2006, PopCap Games released a sequel, Bookworm Adventures. Bookworm was released for the Nintendo DS digital distribution service DSiWare on November 30, 2009. It has also been released on the regular Nintendo DS cartridge. Bookworm is the most downloaded word puzzle game, being downloaded over 100 million times. The Deluxe version of the game features updated graphics, Action Game, and the Hall of Fame.
The New York Times crossword is a daily American-style crossword puzzle published in The New York Times, syndicated to more than 300 other newspapers and journals, and released online on the newspaper's website and mobile apps as part of The New York Times Games.
The Eternity puzzle is a tiling puzzle created by Christopher Monckton and launched by the Ertl Company in June 1999. It was marketed as being practically unsolvable, with a £1 million prize on offer for whoever could solve it within four years. The prize was paid out in October 2000 for a winning solution arrived at by two mathematicians from Cambridge. A follow-up prize puzzle called Eternity II was launched in 2007.
The Eternity II puzzle is an edge-matching puzzle launched on 28 July 2007. It was developed by Christopher Monckton and marketed and copyrighted by TOMY UK Ltd as a successor to the original Eternity puzzle. The puzzle was part of a competition in which a $2 million prize was offered for the first complete solution. The competition ended at noon on 31 December 2010, with no solution being found.
The Mint is an Australian phone-in quiz show based on the British program of the same name, and broadcast on the Nine Network in selected areas in the late night time slot (post-midnight).
A Tangled Tale is a collection of 10 brief humorous stories by Lewis Carroll, published serially between April 1880 and March 1885 in The Monthly Packet magazine. Arthur B. Frost added illustrations when the series was printed in book form. The stories, or Knots as Carroll calls them, present mathematical problems. In a later issue, Carroll gives the solution to a Knot and discusses readers' answers. The mathematical interpretations of the Knots are not always straightforward. The ribbing of readers answering wrongly – giving their names – was not always well received.
Lingo is a television game show that aired in the Netherlands between 1989 and 2014, and returned in 2019 on the commercial channel SBS6. Since 2022, it is aired on the commercial channel Net5. The format consists of a word game that combines Mastermind and Bingo.
Concentration originally aired from 16 June 1959 to 7 June 1960 by Granada and was initially hosted by David Gell from its inception in 1959.