Some diversions for the holiday season with Katamino Quotes, Games politicians play, Crackers and more
Katamino Quotes
Coiledspring’s bestselling games Katamino and Winomino use pentominoes, like the ones in this puzzle, which players race helter-skelter to put together in a series of rectangles. Here you have a bit of extra help – a quotation from Sir Francis Drake. If you can unravel it you may win a copy of Winomino.
Elections
Games politicians play:
Not everyone wanted to play, so we took away one letter from each line in turn, to leave a series of new words. Much more exciting – the game soon disappeared completely!
Can you work out the sequence of words
from ELECTIONS to O?
Beautiful Games
Gordon Brown and Dave Cameron like to keep in touch with sport. Did you notice each has 11 letters in his name? How good a football manager would they make? Take either name, discard a goalkeeper and then make 4,4,2 with the remaining letters. Try again with the other name. Win one of our brilliant strategy games by making the best formations 4,4,2 4,5,1 4,3,3 5,3,2 and 4,4,1,1 with each name.
Crackers
For this puzzle A=1, B=2, C=3 and so on.
We have taken a word, replaced each letter by its number and multiplied them together to get a total. If the word is CAT, then C=3, A=1 and T=20, so 3x1x20 = 60. This total of 60 is offered as the clue for CAT. Try the smaller totals first and work out what they can be divided by. Look for prime numbers such as 13 or 17.
Across
1 13
3 7,866
7 125
9 123,120
10 68,040
11 165
12 15,000
13 20
Down
1 209
2 2,925
3 4,140
4 60
5 756
6 5,700
7 2,500
8 90
If you can get these answers right you may be just the person to win a Triolet!
Texting Traumas
We’ve had a bit of trouble with our text messages. We hit the right keys but not the right number of times, so PUZZLE came out as 789953. We listed a number of eminent people, and here they are in their texted disguises:
a 2253946
b 24262375246
c 248724455
d 288533
e 3336
f 622645526
g 3684527-4663
h 945766
i 43284
j 225524426
k 84282437
l 62567
m 25247
n 27696
If you can decode these clues and say what the people have in common you could win a copy of Coiledspring’s award-winning strategy game Pentago. Absolutely addictive – you are just about to complete a winning row when your opponent changes the shape of the board!
Send your answers for Katamino Quotes, Crackers, Beautiful Games or Texting Traumas to: Coiledspring Games Ltd, P O Box 175, Twickenham, Surrey TW1 4BR or newstatesman@coiledspringonline.co.uk
Closing date: 4 January 2008. You’ll find all the puzzle answers and winners in the 14 January issue of the New Statesman.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
