Other Organizations and Resources

There are other sites and organizations that may be of interest to puzzlers. These include:

• An article from the National Public Radio (NPR) quiz show ”Wait, wait, don't tell me” about writing limericks with a missing last word. These limericks are a sort of flat.
• the official site of the American Cryptogram Association or ACA; their old site,
• The US National Scrabble(tm) Association
• The Association of British Scrabble(tm) Players
• the rec.puzzles website at www.rec-puzzles.org,

An NPL member, Xyzzy, maintains a site that provides help on how to use the Merriam-Webster online Collegiate Dictionary.

An eclectic collection of games and stuff can be found on Zarf's Home (by Andrew Plotkin) including some obscure and interesting ones. See the sitemap for some help.

The website http://www.primepuzzles.net/ hosts puzzles specifically related to prime numbers. They have a link to The Puzzling World of Barry R. Clarke and to Michael Winckler's pages.

The Fool's Errand et al. offers downloads, free of charge, of the classic puzzle games The Fool's Errand, At the Carnival, and 3 in Three for both Microsoft Windows™ and Apple Macintosh™.

Cruciverb-L is a privately maintained subscription list for discussions about crossword puzzles. Unlike the rec.puzzles.crosswords news group, focus is primarily on non-cryptic puzzles.

There is a site that is devoted to the yearly crossword competition at Stamford, which many NPL members attend. That site also contains a page of links which you may find interesting. Another recently created site is Puzzability, two of whose three creators (G,Ames and Manx) are members of the NPL. Jed Hartman maintains a wordplay page called Words & Stuff.

Ray Hamel's home site contains a page with hundreds of links to crossword puzzle sites, and includes an excellent quote from 1929 about constructing crosswords.

Sue Gleason's website, www.doublecrostic.com is dedicated to online acrostics. A challenging puzzle by NPL member Panache is currently (was?) featured (Oct 2003).

The ”Puzzle review page” is maintained at the “toptenlinks” site. There is also a set of links to puzzle pages at Thinks.com.

A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia is a compilation of odds and ends, such as the longest word in various languages, and words which derive from people's names, such as shrapnel.

Alpha Sleuth™ Word Logic Puzzles combine the best features of Scrabble®, Sudoku, Jumble®, Crossword & Crypto-Quip into a novel solving challenge! They host a FREE weekly Solving Contest.

Puzzle books freely available online:

• Henry Ernest Dudeney, Amusements in Mathematics (plain text, HTML, and Plucker format at Project Gutenberg)
• Henry Ernest Dudeney, Amusements in Mathematics (PDF at djm.cc)
• Henry Ernest Dudeney, The Canterbury Puzzles, and Other Curious Problems (PDF at djm.cc)
• Sam Loyd, Cyclopedia of Puzzles, New York: Lamb Publishing Company, c1914 (page images at mathpuzzle.com)
• Sam Loyd, Cyclopedia of Puzzles (PDF at djm.cc)

• Krewe on the Internet
• 10 words you don't know
• 10 very long words you don't know

News groups are part of a system called Usenet. They carry, amongst many other topics:

• rec.puzzles.crosswords news group,
• rec.puzzles news group.

You may also be interested in information on how to search the rec.puzzles archive. This is a repository of definitive solutions to classic logic and other puzzles, such as the one about the farmer trying to get a goose, some corn, and a fox safely across a river in a small boat. You can download an index file listing all the items, or specific items, from any of the “mirror” sites around the world.