For Clare Crawford and David Palmer, a married couple living in Belmont, life is a series of puzzling events. Escape rooms provide fun for their family and as members of team Belmonsters they regularly participate in puzzlehunt events like the annual MIT Mystery Hunt, drawing hundreds of people from around the world to the MIT campus to crack challenging puzzles.
Enter their home, and you’re bound to notice the board games, jigsaw puzzles, and pages torn from the New York Times crossword puzzle-a-day calendar.
“We’re always doing things as a family that involve puzzles in some way,” Crawford said.
So, when the pandemic shut down many in-person opportunities, they began to look elsewhere to scratch that puzzle itch. Enter Puzzled Pint, a monthly puzzle-solving event that started in Portland, Oregon, in 2010 and now boasts a global attendance of more than 3,000.
The casual event meets in person (online during the pandemic) and provides challenging brain teasers done singly or as part of a team. Each Friday before the second Tuesday of the month, a puzzle is posted to the Puzzled Pints website, which, when solved, will reveal the location of the monthly event the following Tuesday. Once at the “secret” location, the players receive another set of puzzles to solve – possibly while drinking a pint.
“It’s just noncompetitive, social fun,” Crawford said. “It’s kind of an entry-level thing that is doable by most people in a group.”
This month, the couple watched as fellow Puzzled Pint members scrambled to solve a puzzle they had created, their second effort accepted for the competition.
Making the grade
Crawford and Palmer, with help from their son Ben, created a puzzle that appeared in November 2022 based on the Soccer World Cup. The idea came during the pandemic when there just wasn’t much to do, and Crawford, a web developer, started thinking about creating puzzles.
“It was the Women’s World Cup when we first started thinking about it when our son was in youth soccer,” she said. “We said ‘Maybe it would be fun to write a puzzle about the World Cup,’ and we noodled around some ideas.”
The couple presented their puzzle to Puzzled Pint, embarking on a process that took about two years, from submission through puzzle play, Crawford said.
At Puzzled Pint, once a puzzle is submitted, an intake editor provides feedback, and then a team of volunteer editors works on improving the puzzle. This is followed by two rounds of play testing and test solving and another round of feedback and revisions.
“We had to write up solutions and hints. Because there are a lot of international locations that do Puzzled Pint, the puzzles must be solvable by people who don’t have English as their native language,” Crawford said. “You have to make sure it doesn’t have too much Americanism, and that is challenging, to make it accessible by a broad audience.”
The larger Puzzled Pint group tackled that puzzle in November 2022, and, as challenging as the acceptance process was, it didn’t discourage Crawford and Palmer from offering another puzzle; this one on the theme of “classic games” was ultimately chosen and played as the Puzzled Pint November 2024 puzzle. Palmer said the event, which included about 40 teams, was held at Time Out Market in Boston.
“This time, we knew what to expect, but it is still a lot of work, just because you have the idea, you know what you want it to be, but then you have to make a lot of changes based on what will make it fun for other people,” Palmer said.
Crawford said they started their latest entry to Puzzled Pint thinking about classic games like Twister and backgammon. The first puzzle was based on backgammon, with subsequent brainteasers based on the games Apples to Apples, Taboo, and Pictionary.
“A few weeks ago, I probably would have said I’m not doing this again, but it was so much fun seeing people do it, and people said they enjoyed it, so maybe another one wouldn’t be so bad,” she said.
A Good Solver Needs Patience
When asked what makes a good puzzle solver, Crawford and Palmer both agreed one key is the ability to tolerate some frustration.
“You get the puzzle, but you don’t really know how to go about solving it,” Palmer said. “It might involve some aspects of traditional puzzles like crosswords or Sudoku, but the instructions are usually not spelled out, and you have to read between the lines, and it can be a really frustrating process. Having a bent toward problem-solving is key. You have to look at things with a game perspective – how can I put these things together?”
“In card games, there is always some uncertainty of what the other person is going to do. In puzzling, often the other person is the puzzle,” Crawford added.
The next Puzzled Pint event is in December 2024, and the theme is “shapes.” For more information about Puzzled Pint, visit puzzledpint.com. Want to start puzzling with Crawford and Palmer? Reach out at thebelmonsters@gmail.com.