Puzzling

My father doesn’t enjoy flying. He used to go on business trips occasionally before he retired, and so to distract him from the whole air travel process, he would buy a puzzle book. When your mind is trying to work out where to put the elusive 7 in a sudoku puzzle or trying to find a three letter word that may be spelled frontward or backward and be across, down, or diagonal, the stresses of waiting to board, taking off, landing, and waiting to deplane are much less felt.


There’s not enough time or stress in a trip for anyone to finish an entire puzzle book, so eventually, you end up with a pile of half finished puzzles underneath your bed.


My least favorite puzzle in the world is a crossword. I know some people love them, but I just can’t stand them, especially the ones in the newspaper. I can never put the clues together; all I get for a clue is something vague like the word “mold” and the fact that the answer is five letters long. At least in a puzzle book I can look up an answer to get me started. And then I always say something to myself like, “‘shape’?! How is that a five letter word for ‘mold’?”


I’d much rather do a Fill-It-In. A Fill-It-In looks exactly like a crossword, except it doesn’t have any numbers, because it doesn’t have any clues. All the words that go in the puzzle are provided, and you have to put them into it, based on one word that’s already there. It’s the fun of putting together words in a crossword without the added dread of trying to guess what the puzzle maker could possibly mean by “Danson and Knight.” I’ve even done a few Fill-It-Ins that had groups of numbers instead of words!


The best thing about puzzles is that they exercise your brain. You can sit around all day and work on anagrams, and be exhausted at the end of the day. It may not be push ups and crunches, but it’s still a work out!


There’s a reason why early video games were mostly puzzles. Go through a maze. Find the key that goes in this door. Answer the riddle or face certain doom. It may have been on a computer or console, but it still exercised your wits. It’s too bad that nowadays the makers of video games are more focused on making a game pretty than challenging the player’s mind.


I’m not going to say that puzzles are absolutely better than all video games, because I enjoy both activities quite a bit, and both have their separate merits. But there is one situation that a puzzle book will always beat out a video game, and that is when the electricity goes out.