Tortoiseshell Puzzles
Puzzles by Nathan Curtis
Snake Charmer #16
Another Snake Charmer. This one has a couple of less-than-familiar answers, so I rated it as a bit more challenging.
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A Child's Garden
This puzzle was written on the heels of an announcement from my friends Martha and Kyle Ingols (42itous and not here in the National Puzzlers' League) way back in February. I first gave the puzzle to them, to be shared with their friends and family, and Martha's father Dick Plotz (aka Geneal) suggested I write a version with cryptic clues that could go in the Enigma. It took me a little while to "cryptify" the puzzle, but eventually it came together, and the puzzle appeared in this month's edition of the Enigma. I am including both the original version (with straight clues) and the revised version (with cryptic clues) so you can decide which one to solve. I would like to acknowledge Patrick Berry for the Rows Garden puzzle type, and Martha and Kyle for providing the inspiration for this puzzle.
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Snake Charmer #15
Picking up from last week's announcement, I now have pages with all the puzzles sorted by difficulty and by rating. I had hoped to have a single list that you could click to sort by different metrics, but that does not seem to be in the cards. Anyway, this week's puzzle is a Snake Charmer. Enjoy.
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Some Assembly Required #10
This week, I've decided to try out a new addition to the site. You can now rate the difficulty (1 to 3 stars, like the system in Games Magazine) and overall quality of each puzzle. I haven't yet figured out how to make lists of puzzles sortable by these stats, but I'm hoping that will come soon. I have seeded the puzzles with my own subjective ratings of their difficulty, but leave the quality ratings up to you. Oh, yeah -- there's also a new puzzle. It's a Some Assembly Required. Enjoy.
Edited to add (5/30/13): There was an error in the puzzle. On the first page of the puzzle, the number for piece 5 was on the wrong end of the piece. I have fixed the error and uploaded a new file. Thanks to Tyler for catching the error.
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Snake Charmer #14
Once again, I am posting a day early, this time due to DASH. I love outdoor puzzle hunt season!
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Marching Bands #15
Not my best effort, I'm afraid. I liked the crossing of the seed entries in Row 1/Band A, but the fill elsewhere suffered. I try to stick to words of 4 or more letters when writing a Marching Bands puzzle, but this time -- well, you'll see.
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Snake Charmer #13
Not much to say here. BAPHL 7 was excellent, and I really should post a writeup soon. Um...enjoy the puzzle?
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Some Assembly Required #9
Posting on Friday this week, because I will be at BAPHL 7 tomorrow. Been a while since I tried a Some Assembly Required. Hope you enjoy it!
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Around-the-Bend #1
This is a new (to me) puzzle type, shamelessly ripped from the pages of Mike Selinker and Thomas Snyder's excellent book Puzzlecraft. It's like a spiral puzzle, in that the same letters are used going forwards and backwards in different words, but it has a different topology, as you will see. Thanks for the inspiration, Mike!
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Pathfinder #7
As hinted at previously, here is the second of my paired Pathfinders. As a form, the Pathfinder is rather interesting to me. When I set out to write a Pathfinder, it usually comes together fairly quickly, at least as far as variety crosswords of this complexity go. And yet, I still feel like I'm stuck in the learning curve. I have a hard time filling the outer edges of the grid in interesting (to me) ways, and I seem to fall into similar patterns of overlapping 5- and 6-letter words. It would be nice if I can show some improvement in the future. At any rate, I hope you enjoy the puzzle.
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