Games

Think you’re pretty smart huh? Got the car out of the driveway, turned off the lightbulbs on the first five levels (I couldn’t get any further either), you even found out how to move around blocks of diminishing size…nice job.

Next up, take some pearls from this guy. Seems simple, it isn’t. When you’ve done that, try this one, with a fourth row of pearls.
Level 1 Solution: 543 – 541 – 531 – 231 – 221 – 22 – 21 – 1
Pearls of Wisdom to prime the intellectual pump:

* “Keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer.” – Vito Carleone
* “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” – Albert Einstein

In the spirit of 30-second time wasters, I submit the original childhood guess-the-word game: Hangman. Nothing gruesome, naughty, or even the slightest bit titilating. If it’s too much for some of you, we’ll move it to the indecorum section. For the rest of you, start tying your noose, you’ve got some spaces to fill.

For more assorted fun, see if you can discover the magic behind the Mind Reading Crystal Ball. It’s pretty standard really, but interesting nonetheless.

And finally, my last contribution of the day is this series of optical illusions that are always fun. The “Liar” took me a while.

If you don’t have flash installed on your computer, you need to dig it up from Macromedia.

Enjoy!

Freeing cars? Any fool with a drivers license or lax parents can get a car out of the garage…but this test is better.

Now you have to turn out lights, all of them. The last game had 40 levels, this one has 52. As usual, the solve button is for cheaters, but it is interesting to try and discover the algorithm which they use to solve the puzzle from any state.

Game on?

Three minute distractions, that’s what I need when I’m waiting for a meeting to start, and someone has to finish up an IM conversation.

I’ve found a good puzzle, called Gridlock, that will fill a few minutes here and there, and shed some light on how the guys in my garage manage to put my car in the way back corner every time. That might not have made sense, but Sara got me a very similar board game where your goal was to free the little car.

Almost like 3D Pong, but you play against the computer on the other end of the courth and there are no blocks to knock out. OK, so not much like Pong at all, maybe more like tennis, but CurveBall is one tough game.

Remember to take a screen shot of your high scores and post away!

At first I wanted to put this in ‘Indecorum’ which is doubling as a ‘Fun and Games’ section, but this is a great followup to the IQ Test.

Towers of Hanoi is a game of recursion or the skill and logic to find patterns if you don’t know what recursion is. Don’t place a big layer on a small layer or you’ll crush the cake.

Number of moves = 2 ^ (number of layers) – 1 :: 3 layers : 2 ^ 3 – 1 = 7 moves