A while back I commended The Puzzle Boat to your attention. About 100 puzzles in length, it's a great way for teams of puzzlers to get some practice between live events but is a bit much for just one or two people to bite off (not that that's stopped some individuals from doing it all themselves).
Thanks to the strong response to The Puzzle Boat, its creator has started a bimonthly "extravangazine" (in the National Puzzlers' League what I call a puzzle hunt is called an Extravaganza) offering more of the same on a lesser scale. Each issue promises in the neighborhood of a dozen puzzles, each resolving to a word or phrase which link together via a metapuzzle to reach an overall answer for the entire set. It plays very much like a single ring of The Puzzle Boat, and the puzzles are of the same high quality (although the first issue's puzzles were unfortunately riddled with minor errors, most of which have since been corrected). It's a great way for one or two people to enjoy a puzzle hunt experience at their own pace.
The first issue includes a diagramless fill-in, a color paint by numbers with a nice final flourish, a clever two-layered soduku, a variety cryptic, a puzzle involving cryptograms, some fun miscellaneous word puzzles, and more.
Each issue is distributed as a PDF file download for $4.95-- a trivial sum for the hours of enjoyment it will provide. I'm already eager for issue #2.
Posted by Peter at January 11, 2006 07:16 PMThanks for the review. I was wondering how good it was. It looks like he's trying to produce one every 3 months, which is infrequent enough that quality should remain high.
Posted by: Steve Dupree on January 12, 2006 10:50 AM