Puzzles

(A subject I suggested.)

When I was little, we had some jigsaw puzzles.  There was one that made a picture of a canoer in the forest waking up in the morning and seeing a huge moose looming above him.  We also had one that formed a map of Canada, including a picture of a Mountie.  And there was a really challenging one, with thousands of pieces, that we got in England.  Its shape was round instead of rectangular, and it formed a group of pictures of old English inns.

I've done crossword puzzles from a pretty early age.  I came to like diagramless crosswords especially, for the extra challenge.  Today I subscribe to the New York Times crosswords, the only part of that paper worth paying for.  They have the easiest daily puzzles on Monday, and it gets progressively harder all the way to the hardest on Saturday.  I just do Fridays and Saturdays because the rest are too easy.  I used to do their famous Sunday crossword, on the chance that it would have an extra challenge like a rebus, but I've lost the habit.

I like a wide range of puzzles.  Sometimes I'll get a puzzle magazine with extra features, like a skillogram where you draw a mystery picture based on little sections.  I used to like logic puzzles ("Who drinks water?  Who owns the zebra?") but I've lost interest in them in recent years.

I've never got into sudoku.  But one Japanese puzzle I especially like is o'ekaki.  There they give you a grid with little squares and you have to figure out which to fill and which to leave empty, based on the length of the filled segments in each row and column, but they don't tell you the lengths of the unfilled segments.  You have to figure it out with logical thinking:  for example, if a filled segment is over half the length of its row, the row has to have some filled squares in the middle.  And when you're finished, you've created a picture!  A left-brain process with a right-brain result.