There’s never been a better time to be a fan of puzzles. Escape rooms are the most obvious recent development, but the worldwide enthusiasm for puzzles didn’t stop there. One of my favorite new developments is the online puzzle challenge.
I personally threw my hat into the ring and started putting together a weekly puzzle challenge (currently on hold due to needing that time for wedding prep). It’s very rewarding to produce new puzzles and marvel at which of my friends will solve each of them first.
It’s always a treasure when a new source of good puzzles appears, and I was thrilled to see Rabbit Hole Recreation Services (a must-do escape room in the Denver area) started posting a weekly puzzle series on their Facebook page. This series is unique in that the first three puzzles in a month can be solved at any time but their answers are all required to solve a fourth final puzzle with a valuable prize.
My favorite puzzle of the month was the first one posted, which was the curve-setter of the bunch. Rabbit Hole designed the puzzle series very cleverly in that in both months of the contests thus far, it would be possible to catch up at the last minute by using context clues in the final puzzle, but it’s still an advantage to go into the finale with all three previous answers. The below puzzle was a real challenge and took me about a week of taking a look here and there before the answer came to me.
I wont post the answer here (they eventually post the answers on their Facebook page), but I highly advise taking your time with this and not jumping straight to the answer sheet. The one hint I can give is that you can have faith that the puzzle is well-designed, and that you’ll know when you have it right; it’s not going to be something ridiculous like CIRCULAR just because there’s a reference to the Arctic Circle.
The Escape Game, one of the bigger escape room chains, also ran an online contest of its own called the Monthly Mystery, but awarding their nice prizes randomly rather than to the first solver. Those puzzles also had a nice framework in which most of the riddles were very easy but each month had one more difficult final puzzle to earn a chance at one of the top prizes. These challenges have since been discontinued (they seemed structured to collect personal information and social media connections, which may have run dry), but it was neat while it lasted.
Both Rabbit Hole and The Escape Game must have spent a lot of time and effort putting together these challenges, but it’s a neat way to expand to the reach of an escape room beyond the walls of the business. Sometimes it felt like I spent half an evening putting together a new mediocre puzzle with an interesting background image, so I can imagine the amount of work that goes into some of these puzzle challenges utilizing visual elements.
If anyone knows of any other online puzzle challenges, I’d be thrilled to hear about it, so shoot me a note. It’s a great way to keep the mind fresh in between exploring all the puzzles out there in the world.
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