UK Puzzle Association

The World Sudoku Championships start on Monday, the World Puzzle Championships on Thursday. Fingers firmly crossed for you all that you can make yourselves proud of your performances!

It's that time of the year again... This year, Thursday is the new Sunday, and the MSO have scheduled contests for Thursday 23rd August - a week today from the time of posting. Excitingly, there are two contests this year: the afternoon contest features "various puzzles" as described on the schedule...

There's an event being held at Imperial College London this Saturday called mathscon . Mathscon is a series of science events, consisting of a conference and a networking social. It is directed at undergraduates, young researchers and science lovers in general. Each event aims to expose the public t...

Taking a look at the rules, there's an additional tweak in that people are invited to nominate exceptional puzzle designs within the contest for recognition. Some of the wording in the rules seems a shade confusing, but I really like the general principle behind it, and fingers firmly crossed that t...

I too add my thanks - and congratulations, especially to the A-team; finishing in the top quarter of the team rankings is a superb result!

As far as I am aware, 2011 was the first event of "the modern era". Detailed results are available under the Results dropdown list at http://www.msoworld.com/ . There was a Puzzle Solving event in 1998 : I don't know the format but it sounds too early and I don't recognise any of the names involved...

It's (just about) that time of year again. The Sunday in question is not tomorrow, but the MSO's traditional sudoku and KenKen tournament takes place on the morning of Sunday 27th August. Details, as in previous years, are available on the MSO web site.

The round 8 instruction booklets are up now. The C paper seems to have lots and lots of unusually light puzzles, which I don't mind a bit, and the A paper has some wonderful-looking combinations of familiar formats. We used to joke about the likes of Magnetic Battletent Snakescrapers; never a truer ...

I have an app called 'logic games' on my phone (logo is 2 grey cogs). "Free on iOS, Android and WP" by Andrea Sabbatini. There are dozens of familiar puzzle types you can practice, including Clouds... Ooh, what a good recommendation! Dozens and dozens of puzzle formats to practice there. Thank you ...

A good point well made. I observe, only mostly tongue in cheek, that the hunt would be 1:30am to 9:30am Indian Standard Time on the early hours of Sunday 22nd October when the championships are over and people have no further plans on the Sunday apart from departures. Assuming there's good Internet ...

The Hunt for Justice is an online puzzle hunt which will take place on the evening (UK time) of Saturday October 21st. Teams play from wherever they like around the world, but must register in advance by August 1st - i.e., this Tuesday. There is an entry fee of US$90 per team (2-4 recommended, but ...

I'm delighted to see quite so many different UK solvers taking part; off the top of my head I think 29 is a considerable leap forward from a previous best of 25. Curious to know why the time limit was only two hours rather than two and a half; I suspect solvers could well have been kept busy for ano...

kiwijam wrote:If people are wanting some practise puzzles, I've collected 32 puzzles from last year's WPC that match types in this weekend's UKPC.

Thank you for your hard work!

Shouldn't make much difference in reality. I will reopen self-registration nearer the time of the the UK championship season, when hopefully this madness dies down a bit. I'm about to plug the UKPC somewhere fairly soon. Is self-registration available again now, please, for those who might want to ...

A .pdf document saved by archive.org has a full chart of results from 1992 to 2010, including the full details of the UK '96 performances. It shouldn't be impossible to bring this chart up to date and I rather hope that someone, somewhere (ideally at the WPF itself) is doing so.

Someone wrote in 2004 on the matter: "Strangely enough, your referencing Tim's site has led to the first time I've ever seen the full horror of the UK's first participation in WPC... all four team members finished in the bottom six, which may well be the Most Hopeless WPC Team Evah! Having said that...

I may be able to dig a little data out when I'm back off shift and on my main PC at these other end of the country. Nick Deller may remember more, but I believe the team was made up of four staff members from a puzzle magazine who may have been the UK WPC member at the time.

Good list; very good list! Pleased to see the acknowledgement of David McNeill's world class WSC performance in 2007. By a similar token, I would argue that it's worth celebrating strong qualification performances in the pre-UKPA days. I put together the data about three years ago - while it's a lit...

He has a lifetime record of 16-1 at Countdown, so that might be where you heard of him. Never played Neil, though! (Jack played later by about a year.)

Jack Hurst, who I don't know personally but believe to be a co-worker of a friend, has started a puzzle blog . The word puzzles there are cute enough. As he says in his first post, " I’ve been spending a lot of my spare time in recent months working on a software project to help me compile different...

I tend to believe that plugging my puzzly, escape-room-y blog would not generally be wildly welcome here; that said, my most recent post, on the titular question, may be of interest . Executive summary: aside from the question of whether or not you'd want to, while the answer to the first half of th...

If you know of any more events, do post again. Just found out about Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2017 in a similar style from March 14th to 23rd. The hint system is different - notably, you'll get to ask yes/no questions for the hints you want, rather than for canned hints - and the tone of the rubric (and...

Yes! I have met three of them and consider them to be thoroughly lovely people, to the point where the fourth must surely be thoroughly lovely by association at the very least. Mark runs Puzzled Pint in Manchester, and I talked both Mark and Ken (among others) into taking part in the online UK puzzl...

The best way to keep up with such things is the Puzzle Hunt Calendar . Second best way would be my blog, but if you're only going to follow one, go for the calendar. :) Now we have an emergent puzzle community in Cambridge, of course, we need to find ways to introduce them to other puzzle activities...

The participant classes were posted yesterday afternoon. There are 14 people who have faithfully solved in the Grands Prix time and time again and have been "promoted" to Class B on the basis of effort rather than achievement. I am one of them. D'oh! (I am, at least, in good company in this...) I've...