My latest obsession is The Island, aka The Puzzle Boat, an online solve-at-your-own-pace puzzle extravaganza. It's free, was created by a National Puzzlers' League member, and supports team play by allowing multiple players to use the same login and leave notes for each other about the puzzles. Solving a puzzle unlocks more, so while there are hundreds of puzzles on The Island you're only ever faced with a handful of them at one time. They're formatted as PDFs, so often you need to print them to solve them. While on the one hand it's a drag to not be able to solve them interactively online, you can take them with you and solve them at lunch or on the road. Many of the puzzles are GAMES Magazine-style word puzzles, which puts them right up my alley. I'm working on this with some people from my MS Puzzle Hunt team (Cracking Good Toast), and any nose-dive in work productivity is purely coincidental.
Posted by Peter at October 24, 2005 04:32 PM | TrackBackWe[scrubbbers]'re doing the island too... haven't been using the notes feature though.
Posted by: Steve Dupree on October 25, 2005 08:12 AMTeam Last Minute has show absolutely no interest in solving any puzzles despite my creating a login for us. So, mostly I'm helping Troy from Scrubbers since he's in the office next to mine and can't stop working on these puzzles. :)
Posted by: Caleb Holt on October 28, 2005 11:56 AMIn defense of Team Last Minute, most of us have known about The Island for less than three days. Give us at least a week...and even then I don't think we'll be challenging Cracking Good Toast or Scrubbers any time soon. =)
Posted by: Ann Katzenberger on October 28, 2005 12:32 PMEverday Heroes will definitely start participating... about 188 hours from now. :/
Posted by: Stephen Beeman on October 29, 2005 10:29 PMAre Cracking Good Toast doing the hunt tonight? Another of my friends is - well, an unknown number of my friends apart from you are, but I have it on good authority that this number is strictly positive - and I'd love to hear about it from any or all of you after the event.
Posted by: Chris M. Dickson on November 5, 2005 01:55 AMToast came in 1st place (congratz!). Five or six teams finished the entire event, a new record I believe.
Posted by: Steve Dupree on November 7, 2005 10:55 AMNow that I've caught up on sleep, I'm working on a report. More to come.
Posted by: Peter on November 7, 2005 01:06 PM