me and my puzzles

contrary to popular belief i am not a senior citizen. but i sure do love my evening puzzles.

i mostly do two types of puzzles -- crosswords and sudokus -- but then there are also the inkwellgames.com games that i really like. inkwell is a site i found through the We're Here newsletter, every issue of which comes with a handful of games and puzzles to play. one fateful day in december, the newsletter recommended the Inkwell game Stars, in which you have to place two stars in every row, column and section of an x-by-x grid without letting them touch. i was immediately intruiged because before this i'd for some time already been a big fan of doing sudokus and the concept of stars felt familiar in this way, but it both feels simpler and ends up demanding a bit more logical thinking and planning than sudokus do.

today's Stars puzzle

very quickly, i also picked up Inkwell's other game, Fields, in which you colour the fields of an x-by-x-grid either blue or green to create connected fields of a given size. this one is a bit further away from any puzzles i usually do, so i always think i have a harder time with it. but in reality, i'd say both games are somewhat equally challenging for me, maybe just in different ways.

today's Fields puzzle

on Inkwell, you get one of each puzzle every day, of increasing difficulty throughout the week, and -- what i really appreciate -- you can catch up on the week's puzzles if you missed a day. i tend to do these around lunchtime in the afternoon and depending on difficulty, both take me maybe 10-30 minutes to finish. i like this little puzzle break in the middle of my day. plus, the site's aesthetic is just very cute and fun, and you can tell -- especially from Fields that these puzzles are designed by real people with a particular kind of humour, so i like being on there.

in the evening, i go back to the basics and make google think i'm old by perusing the puzzles-section of 50plus.de to do my crosswords and sudokus. this started one day when Gronkh (a beloved staple of the german youtube/twitch gaming scene) found the site and did crosswords on stream for no other reason than chat suggested it or something. i don't even know the circumstances under which i then started visiting 50plus.de by myself. i must have just yearned for the crosswords. so i started doing crosswords.

i'm not very good at crosswords. i don't have much of the kind of general knowledge that crossword puzzles often demand and i also kind of have bad object permanence with words, where i do know what many words mean when i see them and i do fine putting things into words, but i struggle a lot with finding synonyms or words based on a description, which you may know as two of the key concepts of crossword puzzles. so i have never finished a crossword on paper and on 50plus.de i always end up brute-forcing some or many of the answers by just trying out letters -- which you can fortunately do because 50plus.de gives you feedback which letters are or aren't correct.

yesterday's 1st crossword puzzle. the keyword was Zahnfee (Tooth Fairy)

here, also you get a daily rotation. with occasional exceptions where the previous day's 1st puzzle is used as the current day's 2nd, you get two puzzles a day, which is a nice amount.

on 50plus.de you also get three sudoku puzzles of different difficulties. i don't think i quite agree with measuring sudokus by how "difficult" they are? from where i stand, the cognitive challenge of any sudoku (at least within a casual puzzler realm) mostly kind of stays the same -- the larger process just takes longer when there are less numbers given. at least that's my experience after maybe a year of daily sudoku, the "hard" puzzle just takes longer. everything else is just following the same strategies as always. but maybe that's the reason i like doing sudokus so much. they're simple in this way, you just do the same thing over and over and once you've found a strategy that works for you you can just sweep through them. and it's not necessarily that you "get better" at them, but with time you just automatically learn logical shortcuts to figuring out what number can go where.

yesterday's medium-difficult sudoku. i like when there is a symmetry like this in the way the numbers are arranged

as i said, i do my crosswords and sudokus in the evening, usually somewhere between 10 and 12, and it takes me up to an hour to get through them all. i love this downtime a lot, it's just me and my letters and numbers.

i also generally like, both on 50plus.de and Inkwell, that there is just this small number of puzzles each day. it makes it easier to turn puzzling into a routine, for me, and i don't run the risk of "doom-puzzling" to procrastinate (which is surely better than doom-scrolling, but ultimately still an avoidant behaviour).

i'm sure there are other platforms for daily crosswords and sudokus that have a better GUI and design and also don't try to sell you various weight-loss-treatments and things you don't need (yet). but ah. i've gotten so used to my site. i'm ok here. it doesn't need to be fancy, it just needs to provide me my puzzles.

that's all. go solve a puzzle.