Linda Hired Eye
Academy Award for Best Adapted Recipe
Oscar noms
Every year we like to have a few folks over to watch the Oscars. But as a word nerd, for me the real joy is the opportunity to make your best food-movie pun. Below are the highlights from this year.
My favorites:
- If I Had Chicken Legs, I'd Barbeque
- Cake Pop Demon Hunters
- F1yuns
- Ryan Kugeler
- Bloody Crackers
- Delroy Lindor Treats
But they're all winners in our book.
Latest Puzzler
Every month I post a new bite-sized puzzle. Here's the latest one:
Start with the name of a ’90s rock band, in three words. Change the first letters of two of those words and anagram the whole thing to get the name of another ’90s rock band in three words. Which bands are these?
Submit your answer here 🗳Parseword, a daily cryptic puzzle
The idea behind Parseword, a new word game by game makers Josh, Matt & Chris, is to gently ease you into solving cryptic clues by helping you parse the elements of the clue bit by bit. "We wanted to make a game that captures the joy of solving cryptics while making them more accessible to everyone," they say in the about page. If you're someone who's always been scared of cryptics, this is a great way to give them a try.
Shuffalo
The New Yorker
How long can you keep anagramming a growing string of letters? Shuffalo, from the New Yorker has you scrambling letters to make a word, and each time you make one, it gives you one more letter. Shuffalo is such a good name that I wonder which came first: the game idea or its title?
Learn with the Game Detectives Academy
The Game Detectives Academy is a free resource for anyone looking to learn concepts that frequently crop up in ARGs. They have courses on ciphers, steganography, computing and more.
Justified
A friend tipped me off to this old school guide for Super Metroid, the Nintendo game from the ’90s. It's a complete walkthrough of the game. As you scroll, you might not immediately clock what's so impressive about it, but look closely: every line is written to be the exact same number of characters. Every. Line. Is. Manually. Justified. An insane accomplishment.
Netflix Puzzled
Cool, another service jumping on the daily game grind. Netflix Puzzled has a collection of 8 word, logic, and visual puzzle games. It includes a new home for Bonza, which has been around for a while, and which I was a contributor to about 10 (?!) years ago.
Strange Jigsaw
Matt Patches
Fleb the Puzzlemaker has a new set of wacky jigsaw puzzles. He says in this interview that this game is an attempt to translate puzzle hunts into a video game. This interview goes into his creative process, his views on puzzles, and his sense of humor. You can play the puzzles on Steam.
Solution to the February Puzzler
Think of two actors who co-starred in a trilogy of movies together. A homophone of one of their last names and an anagram of the other are the first names of two famous brothers. Who are they?