Non-screen ways to help me get better at solving puzzles?

December 21, 2019 9:25 AM

At work I unsnarl complex processes, then package them into simpler, easy-to-understand patterns. (I’m a software engineer.) What are non-screen activities I could do to boost my logic puzzle solving skills, that involve narrative or human stories?

Many of my coworkers spend their off-hours playing video games where they have to solve puzzles or decode secret messages. I don't want to increase my screen time, and I'm not interested in puzzles for the sake of puzzles (i.e. Sudoku) — I need story, narrative and/or mystery so that I feel there is some sort of narrative or meaning behind me solving the puzzle.

Puzzle-related activities I’ve enjoyed:
- Escape Rooms
- Story-focused puzzles where you have to put events in the correct order to solve the mystery of what happened
- Stories about people
- Sherlock Holmes type mysteries — is there something like this, with more puzzle/logic challenges?
- Logic-type video games like Myst or Return To Zork

Puzzle-related activities I don’t enjoy:
- Aforementioned Sudoku
- Chess, checkers and the like — I don’t like directly 1-on-1 competitive games where your motive is just trying to beat another person, although maybe I would if I learned more (?)
- Those handheld disentanglement puzzles where you’re trying to get the metal ring off the triangle or vice versa

I’m looking for screen-free games or puzzles I can solve on my own, in my own time. Thanks for your ideas!

posted by rogerroger to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (12 answers total)

Have you ever tried your hand at an acrostic puzzle? There's one every other week in the NYT Sunday magazine, and elsewhere. What I like about acrostics is that you're solving in several ways at once: The goal is to figure out the quotation (which might fill your need for some sort of meaning, as the quotes are usually deep or funny or interesting). In order to do that, you must solve clues that are written like crossword clues. As you work each part, you go back and forth as various letters are revealed in the quote or in the clues. And, as a bonus, the first letters of the clues, read downward, spell the author and source of the quote, so that's another way to figure out missing pieces.
posted by wisekaren at 9:42 AM on December 21, 2019

Co-op board games such as Pandemic can be played solo without any adjustments, you just play all the roles in turn yourself. The Legacy versions of Pandemic have a lot more story, but I think those would suffer more without having others in the game with you.

Puzzle hunts are themed collections of logic puzzles that come together into a final meta-puzzle. P&A Magazine comes out every other month. Mostly the puzzles are pencil and paper, but some may have images you might want to look up, or some specific information you need to know.
posted by expialidocious at 9:54 AM on December 21, 2019

I'm dying to get myself a Turing Tumble. Not very practical for me right now. Anyway, it comes with a story that requires solving puzzles and then you use the toy to build a physical computer (i.e. with physical or/not/and/either etc. switches) to solve the puzzles.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 9:56 AM on December 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

The book And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. Don’t read anything about it before jumping in; it’s a pretty quick read.
posted by Night_owl at 10:00 AM on December 21, 2019

I don't know if this would be fun enough or if the narrative would be compelling enough, but the "logic games" (formally known as the "analytic reasoning" section) on the LSAT would definitely exercise the part of your brain you're looking to work out. You can find some sample tests online to see if the questions appeal to you.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 10:31 AM on December 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

You might enjoy the logic puzzles of Raymond Smullyan. There's an example or two in that article, and he wrote at least a dozen books of them. I am especially fond of the first one, What is the Name of this Book?
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 10:34 AM on December 21, 2019

If you've already been spoiled by "And Then There Were None" (It was also a pretty good miniseries in 2015), Dorothy Sayers, The Five Red Herrings is another golden age mystery set in Scotland and involves railway timetables and ticket punches to figure out the murderer. I once read that Sayers set out to write a pure puzzle mystery and this is the result.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 11:09 AM on December 21, 2019

every month there’s a free puzzling event around the world called puzzled pint (wikipedia link, as PP’s site is down this weekend). it’s quite fun. when their web site returns, you can browse their complete archive.
posted by bruceo at 11:09 AM on December 21, 2019

More esoteric: real-world persuasion. Try to understand how people arrived at different views. Practice techniques to convince people of your views. No shortage of practice ground online. Humans are the real puzzle :).
posted by gregglind at 11:21 AM on December 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

Try puzzle books. These days they are mostly done via kickstarter these days as limited print runs. The most rcent that comes to mind is 404. These kinds of books have been made for decades, though. Some famous ones are Maze and The Clock Without a Face.

The Mysterious Package Company also has a line of detective experiences called Post Mortem. The way it works is they send you case notes, evidence, and such for a case. You read through everything and try to solve the murder. There is a sealed envelope with the solution once you think you have it.

Lastly, you should probably know that you can get an escape room in a box. The same kinds of puzzles and challenges, but printed on paper and designed to be solved at a table. You're supposed to do it with friends, but I see no reason why you couldn't do it on your own.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 1:48 PM on December 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

Seconding Escape Rooms in a box. Exit brand has a bunch in the $10-20 range. You can definitely do them by yourself and there's a timed option if you want to test how quickly you can solve the puzzles.
posted by LKWorking at 8:23 AM on December 23, 2019

Bouldering? Indoor problems are often as much about solving a puzzle as being strong.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 12:31 PM on December 23, 2019