We’re proud to announce a new expansion as of today on our Printable Puzzles site (www.printable-puzzles.com) – an entirely new section of “Number Puzzles,” provided courtesy of Engaged Learning, an Australian company specializing in games and puzzles.  The four new puzzles are Rosettas, Star Puzzles, Subaddos and Subaddos 3D.  Each of these number puzzles is similar in some ways to Sudoku, in that you must use only a series of numbers between X and Y, with no number allowed to repeat in certain areas of the puzzle.  Rosettas and Star Puzzles, like Sudoku, require no math at all – Subaddos require only simple addition and subtraction.

When Lawrence from Engaged Learning first sent us these puzzles, we were immediately hooked – and so we’ve worked with them over the past few months to make these wonderful new puzzles available on a weekly basis via Printable-Puzzles.com.  One of each puzzle-type will become available each week, for a total of four new number puzzles every seven days.  (As always, solutions are available online.)

Be sure to try out this newest puzzle craze – especially Rosettas, which are a personal favorite of mine!

Enjoy!

Stephen

Now available at all major bookstores, as of September 6th!  Puzzle Baron’s Sudoku contains 400 unique Sudoku puzzles ranging in difficulty from easy to extremely difficult.  See if you have what it takes to solve them all!

Buy it now from Amazon.com

Just a quick note for all you cryptogram lovers out there… Puzzle Baron’s Cryptograms for Kindle is currently on the Amazon.com Kindle Store’s Top 100 Best Sellers List (#86 at the time of writing)!  If you haven’t downloaded this fun little app yet, now’s the perfect time – as the price has been reduced to $0.99 for a limited time, through September 12th.

Happy solving!

Wordtwist.org has recently been upgraded to work within our new standardized Puzzle Baron design.  This also means we’ve added a number of new features to the site, including:

1. Latest forum posts listed on most pages for easier tracking of the newest conversations and updates.

2. Latest records listed on most pages, for both 4×4 and 5×5 boards – updated every five minutes.

3. Rebuild and redesign of the original Version 1.0 score tracker and timer.

4. New “Winner’s Circle” module available on most pages to highlight the first-place trophy winners from the previous month’s competition.

5.  Improved avatar selection with more than 600 options to choose from.

6.  New schedule for game board creation – 1,500 new puzzles will be added each and every week at regular intervals, to keep the rotation fresh.

Enjoy!

We launched a simple beta of CluelessCrosswords.com just over a year ago, and it’s grown in popularity steadily ever since.  So we figured it was about time to take it out of beta and make it an official Puzzle Baron site.

The new site launched last week, and it contains the usual Puzzle Baron features, such as monthly and all-time competitions, individual game statistics, trophy rooms, chat, forum, etc.  We’ve also improved several aspects of game play based on user response, namely:

1. All puzzles now use every letter in the alphabet, A through Z, at least once.

2. Guest (non-registered, non-competitive) players can get unlimited hints to help them when they get stuck.  Hints are not available for competitive play, to keep things fair.

3. A new “clear the board” link to start over, if you’ve gone down a certain path and discover it isn’t working for you – sometimes it’s easier to just start from scratch.

4. We now keep a running tally of all letters used and unused, to help you keep track.

5. We also won’t allow any letter to be used on the board more than once.  A pop-up will alert you if you try to do this.

6. Arrow keys can now be used to navigate across the game board and the key, so you don’t have to just tab or click your way through anymore.

We hope you find the new site even better than the old one – and thanks as always for playing!

Now available for Kindle!

Puzzle Baron’s Cryptograms: Volume I offers 100 unique cryptograms across ten different thematic categories.  Solve them interactively using your Amazon Kindle, and see if you can beat the average and record times!

The app retails for just $1.99 and can be purchased either from Amazon.com or directly via your Kindle reader.

Click here for more information!

Now patchwords are available on the iPhone and iPad!  Play 200 games of varying difficulty levels using your iPhone/iPad touchscreen.  Move all the two-letter tiles around until they form valid, everyday English language words both across and down.

Just $0.99 via the App Store.  More information…

Sorry it’s been a while since our last update!  May was eaten up mostly by vacation days and a sick cat, and before we knew it, June was here.  On top of that, we’re in the busy phase of putting together our next book – a follow-up to Puzzle Baron’s Logic Puzzles to be released sometime around Q1 2011.  The new book will follow the same structure of the first volume – 200 logic puzzles of varying difficulty, including real-life solving statistics on each.   We’re also including a few more easier puzzles in this volume, thanks to user-feedback on the first book.

So it’s heads down on that until around mid- to late-July in order to meet the manuscript deadline.

After the new book is wrapped up and sent to the publisher, we’ll be refocusing our efforts on a major upgrade to Logic-Puzzles.org – which will include not only a site redesign (to bring it in line with our newer template) but also a radical infusion of new, never-before-seen puzzles.  We’re in the middle of rebuilding our puzzle generator from the ground up to incorporate several user requests and suggestions we’ve received over the past two years.  Namely:

1. Wider variety of puzzle sizes. To-date its been only 4×4 and 4×5 puzzles, but we’ll be expanding into other sizes, such as 5×5, 4×6, 5×6 and possibly even larger ones.
2. New clue types and solving logic. Our new puzzles will be incorporating some new types of clues not used before on the site, and some will require solvers to make logical deductions never before required.  So get ready for some new challenges!
3. Wider variety of people, places and things. We’re working on vastly expanding our descriptive database so that you won’t get quite so many repeated categories and items.
4. Revamp the hints button. We’ll admit it – the hints feature needs some work.  We’ll be rebuilding it from scratch to ensure that you get the hints you need when you get stuck on a puzzle.

Look for all this to start up around August 2011…