At the Laundromat

Here is an odd diversion ... due to home repair work, we ended up at a laundromat downtown.  After the previous trip involved heat, restless legs and some digestive trouble, I lost sleep the night before trying to figure out how to make this trip more sufferable.

So made a "surprise" stop at Barnes & Noble on the way, to pick up two books of puzzles.

These books have always been a reliable way to while away an hour or two, full of odd puzzles and activities. 

However, they also tend to boldly include "Games" in their titles or splash pages even though none of the activities really qualify as games.  But it made me wonder about the dividing line.  Considering the variety of solitaire print-and-play games I have tried, is there really a big difference between a one-player game and a good puzzle?

I had seen Games magazine over the years, of course, going back to the 80s.  Hard to imagine not knowing about it, as a lifelong games hobbyist.  But when I think back of actual GAME games that I used to play that came from magazines, there was the Awful Green Things from Outer Space and Snits' Revenge from early issues of Dragon, and I think my favorite Star Trader was from an issue of Ares, along with the old demo of Napoleon at Waterloo which I think was a promo from Ares as well.  I know I still have a Star Trader board and full set of pieces in some baggies somewhere.  Heck, I even wrote my own shareware Space Tycoon game back in the 90s inspired by Star Trader and Monopoly.

But I don't recall very many actual games from Games magazine, just a lot of good puzzles and articles.

These two random puzzle books brought back memories.  Clever twists on crosswords and word searches and deduction puzzles, mixed in with some geometric puzzles, trivia bits, cryptoquotes (I used to love doing those) and variations, more.  So instead of climbing the walls and complaining about how a 36-minute wash feels like four hours, we did four or five puzzles and it was time to go.  

Our simple favorite was "What's Left?" where there is a 4x15 grid of words and a set of increasingly convoluted rules for crossing them off, leaving a coherent message behind in the remaining words.  The first one went fine, but our words of wisdom on the second one was "laid he is well paid that is well cracker satisfied".  Haha, we missed two words.  A perfect diversion from chores that grind away at our time.

Some of the puzzles just begged to have the pieces cut out so they could be rearranged to fill in the solution area.  Like the crosswords that give you 2x3 bits of filled-in answers (called "Brick by Brick") that just have to be moved to the correct spaces.  Those do have a game-like feel.  But if a game is, at a bare minimum, a set of choices that can lead to different results, then these are all still puzzles: a set of actions that completes one fixed goal.

It was fun explaining a selection to Anne, where some she was clearly not interested in, and other peaked her clue-finding instincts.  I had largely forgotten about these books, so much so that the lady at B&N took us to the books section when they were actually in the floor-level of one whole magazine rack. 

Games and puzzles exist not as time-wasters (as I have often been told dismissively) but to help keep our minds active.   So, I think they these worth circling back to every now and then.  Off of a tangent for a game-centered blog, but not so far out in left field after all.