American Crossword Puzzle Tournament

The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament will take place Feb.29-March 2 at the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott Hotel in New York.

Contestants from all over the world will converge on the hotel to compete for prizes in more than 20 categories. The grand prize is $5,000. Points are awarded for both speed and accuracy.

The event, which is directed by Will Shortz, was started in 1978 at the Stamford Marriott in Stamford, Conn., as a way to fill up the hotel during the winter. That year 149 contestants participated, and the top prize was $250.

The contest has grown every year, but took a huge leap after the 2006 film "Wordplay" focused attention on it. It finally outgrew Stamford, "and we had to move to Brooklyn," Shortz says.

People not attending the tournament can still participate online.

New book provides Oscar-winning puzzles

What do "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Terms of Endearment" and "As Good as It Gets" all have in common? If you know jack about the Oscars, then you can figure out they're the three films for which Jack Nicholson won his Academy Awards.

Even if you missed that question, there are plenty of others to test your Oscar IQ in "So You Think You Know Oscar" (Dorrance, $9), a new book by East Hampton writer Gerald Granozio that combines his love of the movies with his passion for puzzles.

"This book was really a combination of two interests I've always had: the Oscars and puzzles. There are a lot of books out on there on the Oscars, but this one was different because it put those two interests together," Granozio said.

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Sudoku And Other Big Issues

Sounds like the opening of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting but even number puzzles can create addiction and in my case nearly did! So after about a year I quit and subsequently allow myself a once a month "drink at the trough" by doing the (usually) nice simple one in the "BIG Issue" giving myself some altruistic justification - at best, a rather weak excuse but ...

anyway there are often some good articles as well ...

For those unfamiliar with Sudoku, it has a 9 x 9 grid printed grid (like a chess board), containing 9 3 x 3 mini-grids; as presented, 17 or more numbers are given (out of 81), depending upon difficulty (roughly) and the challenge is to complete the grid within the rules; the rules are that each column and row and mini-grid shall contain all the numbers from 1 to 9.

A Real Man of Letters

An NYT Sunday puzzle pays a cool $700, but the weekday and Saturday submissions are only worth $135 each. It can also take as much as four months to hear back on the status of a pending crossword, according to the Crossword Constructors Community Center.

Although Mahowald has ambitions beyond puzzles, he will still enjoy the festivities that come with his hobby. In March, hundreds of crossword junkies will gather in Stamford, Connecticut for the biggest and oldest crossword tournament in the nation: The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which was started by Will Shortz thirty years ago. And Mahowald will be one of them.

Mahowald, who competed for the first time last year, is still deciding in what capacity he will be attending the competition. "I can go as a judge or a contestant, but I don't know which I will do yet," he says.

EA, Steven Spielberg Unveil Boom Blox for Wii

Electronic Arts and Steven Spielberg today unveiled their first videogame collaborate: Boom Blox, a puzzle game for the Nintendo Wii. Amazingly enough, although the game was officially unveiled today, Boom Blox for Wii will be available in stores this May.

Boom Blox offers a host of levels that engage Wii owners in single-player, co-op and versus modes. The premise of the game, which uses real-time physics, is essentially making players destroy blocks and solve puzzles to make their way through a host of challenges.

Boom Blox has more than 300 levels and a cast of 30-plus characters, but the biggest addition, particularly as it goes up against games like Little Big Planet for the PS3, is its an in-game editor that lets players create their own levels and challenges -- and then share them with others.

Honda pieces together fresh puzzle ad

Honda's latest TV campaign features a car made of jigsaw pieces and a giant sculpture of an engine constructed from thousands of Rubik's cubes.

The TV campaign, which breaks on Monday, features Honda's engineers tackling a series of bizarre puzzles to showcase the innovative nature of the company's FCX Clarity hydrogen-fuelled car.

A colourful and quirky opening scene features a bearded and bespectacled engineer playing with a Rubik's cube, set to Mark Mothersbaugh's Ping Island from the soundtrack to the Wes Anderson movie The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

The campaign, developed by ad agency Wieden & Kennedy London, aims to launch the Honda FCX Clarity, a zero-emission hydrogen fuel cell car.

Honda's 90-second ad, called "Problem Playground", shows a team of 140 people tackling a series of giant-size puzzles representing problems the engineers have to overcome to create products that are as radical as this new type of car.

Mercury Meltdown Revolution

Sometimes it's the simple ideas that are the most effective. Sometimes you don't need cutting edge AI, jaw dropping visuals and a mega-money licence boasting voiceovers from the Hollywood elite. Sometimes all you need is a little tilting mercury and 200 levels of post-pub puzzle fun. Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Mercury Meltdown Revolution, we guarantee that you'll be staying for a while.

The Wii-exclusive game from little known publisher Ignition challenges players to immerse themselves in a colourful world of sci-fi machines, crazy characters, and bubbling test tubes. Using the Wii Remote, players guide a liquid mercury 'blob', around traps, door switches, spikes, moving floors and other hazardous elements in order to complete the level.

If you're looking for a perfect example of a game that pits players against their environment then this is it.

MEGA Brands Takes Construction Play and Activities to the Next Level ...

MONTREAL, Feb. 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- MEGA Brands (News) is set to launch its 2008 toy line-up at New York Toy Fair, featuring next generation building systems, technologically enhanced classical toys and imaginative activities that inspire creativity in every child.

'MEGA Brands' new toy portfolio is designed to deliver new play patterns and creative experiences for kids through innovation and technology,' states Vic Bertrand, Executive Vice-President of MEGA Brands. 'Combining technology and classical play continues to be a huge trend and we're always looking for innovative ways to introduce products that draw young minds into a world of imagination and creativity.'

'MEGA Brands is capitalizing on one of the major trends emerging from this Toy Fair,' says Toy Wishes contributing editor Chris Byrne aka The Toy Guy(R).

Cultural differences alter the brain

It's no secret culture influences your food preferences and taste in music. But now scientists say it impacts the hard-wiring of your brain.

New research shows that people from different cultures use their brains differently to solve basic perceptual tasks.

Neuroscientists Trey Hedden and John Gabrieli of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research asked Americans and East Asians to solve basic shape puzzles while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. They found that both groups could successfully complete the tasks, but American brains had to work harder at relative judgments, while East Asian brains found absolute judgments more challenging.

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Video games: New puzzle games reach out to wordplay fans

The worldwide sudoku craze appears to be fading -- if electronic versions of the number-logic game are any indication. Since 2005 I've seen dozens of sudoku games for consoles, handhelds, computers and cell phones. On the schedule for 2008 are none. I gave into the fad for a while, in much the same way I got hooked on "Tetris," "Minesweeper" or "Bejeweled." But now that I've achieved a reasonable skill level, it feels like there's not much more to see. I've put aside sudoku and returned to my old two-crossword-a-day puzzle regimen. I'd love to see more video games based on word puzzles, and I think there's an audience out there. Casual gamers have made modest hits of PC games such as "Bookworm" and "Text Twist," while the Facebook crowd has turned "Scrabulous," a Scrabble knockoff, into a phenomenon.

Welcome

This is a blog about all sort of puzzles - be they words , numbers or objects. We hope to look at all sorts of puzzles and brain teasers that we find interesting. Everyone is welcome to add to this blog