Do you love a puzzle?

I like good crossword puzzles, and Black Stories.

I do, but I prefer jigsaw puzzles. I haven’t been able to do any lately because my kitty attacks the pieces I have put together. I usually wake up to find a few pieces on the ground and one or two always go missing. :/

I do the British cryptic puzzles in the Wall St. Journal, Sunday NYT, and Harper’s magazine and in some other exotic places (viz: collections from the olden days in The Atlantic and New York Magazine).

My favorite is crosswords because I get to manipulate letters and words to solve it. I like the jumble everyday but do it in my head.

Word puzzles of all kinds.

I like the NYT Sunday crossword, because of the humourous themes. Without that hook, I don’t really enjoy crosswords. About once every two years, I’ll pick up one of those Penny Press mags, and work my way through from start to finish (which is probably more to do with a mild case of OCD than actual enjoyment). I do love riddles, and most any puzzle that is challenging and combines wordplay and humour.

@gailcalled One day I am going to sit down and try to understand the language of the cryptic crossword. It’s like they have a specific vocabulary that is not used in any other word puzzles.

@They do and it is. I just talked my brilliant young nephew ( a professional mathematician) through the simple ones. He caught on in an hour and is now hooked.

If you are serious and want to put out $10, order this

It starts with very clear explanations of the sorts of clues and then, gently and gradually, offers you puzzles to try out. (The answers are in the back). Essentially, Cryptics 101, 201, 301, MA and Phd. It will keep you busy for a decade

@gailcalled Thanks. I will squirrel that away for future reference.

Yes I do. My little cousins got this one for Christmas. I think I spent more time playing with that than I did anything I got for Christmas :P

I like jigsaw puzzles with an enjoyable picture (think NOT The Beatles White album), also crosswords, and MENSA-like puzzles. I am not great at them but I find them very entertaining and interesting. Also I’ve been doing crossword puzzles for ten years about and have never finished one. :|

I like Sudoku, and those “logic” puzzles that involve putting ticks and crosses in a grid like this

I was an early reader and good speller, so I’ve always loved word puzzles. I work the NY Times crosswords – Thurs, Fri, Sat are the most challenging – with the price of daily paper at $2.50 I don’t bother to buy Mon-Wed. I subscribe to Games magazine, which has enjoyable puzzles of all kinds, including all the formats found in the NYT Times Sunday alternate puzzle. Cryptics (“British-style” crosswords) are also enjoyable – I used to solve the one in The Nation but they stopped running it. I have a decent ranking in competitive Scrabble tournaments, which I got into a few years ago – once I committed to memorizing word lists.

I also love mathematical puzzles of all kinds. I used to be good at the kinds of abstract reasoning found on IQ tests. I joined Mensa as a high school student in the 1960s, though it was dull and never renewed membership. Nowadays I don’t think my aging brain would find those IQ tests so easy anymore, lol.

Popular formats that I don’t enjoy working include word searches and sudoku.

Solving puzzles serves as a general metaphor for how I approach life.

Sudoku and double-crostics. I like the latter because you get something back when you get the solution. Sometimes it’s funny; sometimes a fact of some kind. The sudoku are more of a mind exercise.

It depends on the puzzle. I hate math puzzles and have a mild dislike for sudoku. I’m not a fan of crosswords either. However, I do enjoy riddles and word searches. My favorite though are the types of puzzles you find in video games like Uncharted (specifically 3). They’re a bit different and kind of hard to describe if you haven’t played the games, but those were always my favorite parts.

I have yet to find one worthy of my monumental intellect, although that teletubby jigsaw came close…real close.

I like puzzles or missions relating to geocaching. There are some really clever ones out there.

I’m a Sudoku person myself, though I often enjoy the works of Raymond Smullyan, who has put out nearly a dozen books of logic puzzles.

There’s nothing more interesting than puzzles with no answers. Really. Puzzles that have a set answer do not interest me very often. I like the puzzles of human relationships and figuring out what to do next—puzzles with no answers—the best.

I do Sudoku daily through some of the apps i have and i also enjoy anagram/boggle type of word searches. But i find it difficult to find an app with a sensibly inclusive word list. There’s nothing worse than submitting a perfectly good (albeit less common) word and have it rejected as invalid.

I’ve lost track of how many of those stupid apps reject “tines” as invalid. Hello? Have you used a fork lately? Ugh.

@Jonsblond

i have the perfect solution for you that kitty can’t reach There are online jigsaw puzzle sites as well as apps for both IOS and Android depending upon which type of phone/tablet you have.

It may take a while to find one that suits you and the best ones let you set the difficulty level to suit you as well as use your own pics or ones you’ve found online .