Ochin Chap
Sexiest Puzzle Game Alive
It’s Ruddle Week
Thanks to all of you who have been playing Raddle! We're up to over 70 days of Raddles in the archive. Since the end of March, I've been posting blocks of Raddle based on themes like My Favorite Bands, Passover, Flowers, the game Blue Prince (see below), and most recently, Paul Rudd. That last theme has inspired a temporary rebrand: we couldn't pass up the opportunity to rebrand as Ruddle.
The site is seeing upwards of 2,000 players per day, which is amazing. Please continue to spread the word, and if you have any ideas for future themes, just hit reply and let me know. I'm always looking for more.
May Puzzler
Every month I post a new bite-sized puzzle. Here's the latest one:
Start with the name of a famous Hollywood director. Take his first name, remove the first letter, and you'll get the name of an organ. Adjacent to that organ is another organ that may be afflicted with the director's last name. Who is this?
Submit your answer here 🗳Pandora's Legacy
It says right there on the preview image: this is an epic puzzle adventure. Pandora's Legacy is an escape game / jigsaw puzzle built by two friends of mine: Rita Orlov, of PostCurious, and Alex Rosenthal, editorial director and games editor of TED Ed, which supported the game’s development. Rita's games are always a brilliant combination of theme and deduction, and I've been a fan of Alex's work on Mystery Hunts (and his TED talk on the subject) for a long time. I've heard amazing things about this from playtesters. I can't wait to get my hands on a copy.
Blue Prince
My latest puzzle obsession is the video game Blue Prince, available for Steam on Windows, PS5, and Xbox. It's a roguelike exploration game, where you're uncovering the mysteries of a mansion that was left to you by your ancestor by exploring its many rooms — but you only have so many doors you can walk through during each “day”, and when you run out of steps, your day ends. Every day the arrangement of the rooms is different. The game necessitates a lot of note-taking as you wander these rooms. Some puzzles are very surface-level, and some require a lot more observing, note-taking, and deduction. It's a slow-burn of a game, but on every run-through, it feels like I'm uncovering something new. I'm now 40 days in, and the story is way deeper than I realized on first launch. Strongly recommend.
Back on Hey Riddle Riddle
I'm back on your favorite podcast with a new word game. Scrub to 43:45 for my segment, which features an original puzzle about portmanteaus of X & Y phrases:
Solution to the March Puzzler
Think of a five-letter word that can mean “places of refuge”. Change the first letter to get another word that can mean the same thing. What words are these?
I got a lot of great alternate answers, like PORTS & FORTS, CAVES & NAVES, RESTS & NESTS, HOMES & DOMES, SAFES & CAFES, all of which are technically correct, and all of which I accepted. But none of them need to be pluralized for the wordplay to work. The intended answer is: