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Spaced Out – A Setter’s Blog by Nebuchadnezzar
Sometimes the core ideas behind a puzzle come all at once, but for this one it was all rather bitty and tortuous. Carl Sagan’s beautiful paragraph about the pale blue dot has been on my ‘potential...
View ArticlePartitioned Digits V by Oyler
I spent most of the summer of 2025 setting puzzles that partitioned the digits into various sets. The inspiration for this started a few months earlier, in that 2025 was a square year and is 452. If...
View ArticleBonus Puzzle!
As a special treat, we’re publishing a bonus puzzle this month. It’s Dream On (2026) by Elint. It hasn’t been through the normal Magpie layout or editorial process but we think you will enjoy it....
View ArticleChill Out – Hawk Keeps His Distance
The interconnectedness of things is one of those ideas that’s difficult to get your head around. Like some areas of mathematical probability, it’s often counterintuitive, even paradoxical. How can it...
View ArticleHappy Puzzling by Oyler
In 2024, The Wizards of OZ were invited to set the puzzles for the Ritangle school’s competition for 2025. Zag had set a crossnumber puzzle for the previous year’s competition and it had been well...
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Monky Business – Gareth reflects
I can date the genesis of Monky Puzzle precisely. It was the day this Futility Closet post was published. It was clear to me that Cistercian Numerals were both obscure and interesting, which is an...
View ArticleHexiamond Divisions by The CQ Elves
Who are The CQ Elves? If you are a UK subscriber you may have watched QI and you’ll know about the QI Elves who come up with all the quite interesting stuff. Some of you may have had an inkling that...
View ArticleAnagrammatic Liberal Blog
By Oyler Cast your mind back to the summer of 2024 when we had a General Election. The PM announced it whilst getting rather wet. Of course, we were bombarded with election stuff and it was during...
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Step by Step post-amble
Almon Brown STROWGER was an undertaker who lived in Kansas City, Missouri and the inventor of the automated step-by-step telephone exchange. Before his invention, local telephone calls were made by...
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Ys-y as ’Pie!
Nebuchadnezzar gives an insight into the creation of Dire Straits Spoiler alert – this blog discusses the themes of a few of my previous puzzles. Please spare a thought for me as I sit staring at a...
View ArticleMusician Abhors Getting Parking in Eden
I was first inspired to write Paradise Lost while listening to an episode of Desert Island Discs, for which Both Sides Now was one of the selected eight records. Looking back at the archive helpfully...
View ArticlePerfect Brain Teaser? Not quite!
By Oyler I’m sure that I’m not the only setter who, whenever a numerical appears in The Listener or Magpie and has an interesting idea or something novel, has a go at setting their own version of it...
View ArticleAreas of Triangles – a View for Miles
I read that several solvers approached the Areas of Triangles puzzle by seeking out Heronian triples on the Internet and bypassing the intended logical deductions. I feel that this was a shame, but...
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Vagans on Playful Search
or May A Guest Prelate Indicate an Explanation (of how the puzzle came to be) Vagans regrets to say that the original title of this puzzle was “Baywatch” – not you understand that he has ever watched...
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Twin on Shaken: E.g. Blog?
I have always enjoyed a game of Boggle. In my family I am banned from using a pencil while playing, because the manic scratching is off-putting to the other players. At a friend’s birthday party a...
View ArticleGareth’s Meta-reflections
I like a meta-puzzle. I think any set of individual puzzles can be immediately improved by the addition of an over-arching meta-puzzle that links them together. This requires co-ordination, but a...
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Pandiculator Remembers His Password
I suspect I’m far from unique in having thought about QR codes as a possibly useful tool for a thematic crossword. That said, trying to make a crossword that doubled as a QR code initially seemed like...
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Knighty Knight (Quadratum VI by Oyler)
Since The Magpie didn’t do blogs in their pre-electronic era you were spared blogs for QI – QIV. Those of you who are old enough would perhaps have thought that it had something to do with Spike...
View ArticleWan on Formulaic
I only came across the Mandelbrot Set a few years ago on the Youtube channel Numberphile, which I find very interesting. It struck me immediately as suitable for a crossword theme given it had both an...
View ArticleTwin on Splitting the Atom
I have been delighted to see the recent increase in the number of blogs on the Magpie site, following my rallying cry earlier in the year. It would be churlish of me not to contribute to their number...
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