The Blog

Welcome to the New Website

If you are a Puzzled Pint regular, you may have noticed that the website has gotten a little facelift. Let’s talk about how that helps you and simplifies things for us.

Portland Survey, 2023

Back in ye olden days of 2015, the Portland Puzzled Pint Game Control put together a small survey. We wanted to collect demographics, suggestions, and threw a couple of fun questions in there. It was really fun and interesting, but it’s been 8 years. It needed an update. I made some tweaks to the questions […]

Puzzled Pint’s Shiny New Code of Conduct

Hi friends. I just wanted to write a quick note sharing that Puzzled Pint now has an official Code of Conduct. We previously had a private one, moderating online communication between Game Control members, but thought that as Puzzled Pint continues to grow (we reached over 3500 players this month!), we should have one that […]

Review: The Ordnance Survey Puzzle Book

It’s not often that Puzzled Pint receives a product to review. In fact, this marks the first time we’ve ever been sent a book to review! Today I’ll be examining The Ordnance Survey Puzzle Book [Amazon UK/ Amazon US ]. Slipping the book from its mailer, I could instantly see its amazing production quality. It […]

DASH 11

You probably know this, but we strive to make Puzzled Pint a beginner-friendly event. Our charter is to to grow awareness of puzzle events, which we partially achieve by running Puzzled Pint every month. We see PP as a stepping-stone to more advanced events such as BANGs, MIT Mystery Hunt, and weekend-games. But informally, since […]

Rating System Feedback

tl;dr People mostly like the star difficulty rating system, so we’re keeping it. You might have noticed that we’ve been experimenting with adding difficulty rating to puzzles.  I brought this notion to Puzzled Pint HQ last year because some teams in Austin kept asking which puzzles were the “easy” ones.  Looking further into this, it became […]

A Call for Puzzle Authors — Write for Puzzled Pint!

The puzzles you see every month at Puzzled Pint don’t just materialize out of the aether. They all start as rough prototypes, often just a simple draft thrown together in a Word document, with little flavor text and no graphic design. The puzzles take several trips through the feedback loop — as first Headquarters, and […]

PP After Dark – Solutions and More!

Earlier this week, Puzzled Pint Portland was invited to participate in OMSI After Dark, an adults-only nighttime event at a local science museum. The theme was “forensics.” We pulled some thematic puzzles from past months to reprint, and also brought along some surplus copies we had on hand to show people what we’re all about. […]

Your theme suggestions

Puzzled Pint is always looking for authors — both seasoned veterans and people who want to get their first taste at puzzle design. Because we do one set of puzzles per month, our waitlist is about a year out, but that’s a good thing for all. It means we have to time to work with […]

Do you check standings?

Since the beginning, Puzzled Pint has logged team standings each month — a table of which teams attended, solve times, and so on. It was a fun idea in the beginning, but as Puzzled Pint matures, there has been friction about the published standings. Internally, we use them as a rough gauge of how hard we thought the month’s […]

Puzzled Pint Attendance by City

We do our best at Puzzled Pint events to take attendance. It started in Portland as a curiosity. Or maybe an obsession on the part of Matt C. We just knew we weren’t going to break 30-40 people in attendance, so tracking seasonal change in participation was a fun curiosity. Fast-forward to moving Puzzled Pint beyond Portland. […]