This Newsletter is Lit!
March 2025
Greetings, puzzlers and gamers! Welcome to another missive full of puzzling fun.
Congratulations
This month we give a special shout-out to Tami for a great score on Endangered Rescue: Galápagos Penguin. Great job! The next Endangered Rescue adventure is on the way…
Happy Enigmarch!
Long-time subscribers may remember that last year I dipped my toes into Enigmarch, a month-long puzzle-setting event. Each day the organizers publish a prompt, and participating creators have a day to come up with an original puzzle based on that prompt.
I’ll be taking up the challenge again this year! Each day’s puzzle will be posted to Discord if you want to follow along in real time, or in the April newsletter I’ll compile the results into a tidy package for you. Hope you can join me!
A Month of Pathologic
The experiment I announced last month has been a success! There are now a month’s worth of daily puzzle videos on my YouTube channel, and I’m still going strong. Check in every day for a newly featured puzzle by some of the world’s best constructors, and I’ll break down the rules for you before I solve the puzzle myself. Links are always provided so you can solve yourself.
My hope is that this introduces you to lots of new and fun puzzle types! If you can take the time to leave a comment or just click “like” or “subscribe,” that is a huge help to me and supports the creation of more of these videos.
What I’ve Been Playing
Lately I’ve had the pleasure of several plays of a newer game called Let’s Go! To Japan.
This is a “pick and pass” drafting game, like Sushi Go or 7 Wonders. Each turn, all players will choose between a small collection of cards, and pass the rest to their neighbor. After many rounds of this process, you will end up with 18 cards, each of which represents one activity you can take part in during your Japanese holiday.
The cards are played in columns representing the timeline of your trip, and the order here is important: cards offer you experiences of five different categories, and also let you score based on your current totals in those categories at that point in your trip. You’ll also have to juggle transportation between Tokyo and Kyoto and a number of other mutually-contradictory goals.
This is probably a small notch in complexity above 7 Wonders, but the delightful theme and gorgeous presentation helps keep it pretty accessible. If you like dreaming of travels, this might be the game for you!
Your Monthly Puzzle Treat
In a couple days on Pathologic we will cover a polyomino-placement puzzle called LITS. This month, let’s solve a few more of them that I made for you!
The rules of LITS are:
Shade one tetromino of cells in each region so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area.
Two tetrominoes of the same shape may not share a bold border, counting rotations and reflections as the same.
No 2x2 region may be entirely shaded.
You can get a sneak preview of this upcoming episode of Pathologic for a full explanation as well as examples:
Got it? Good! Let’s look at a few LITS puzzles I cooked up for you:
(Note: Tetrominoes are not allowed to cross internal borders within a region.)
More Puzzles
If you’re hungry for more, I’ve got you covered! Join the Discord server where I’m posting puzzles of all sorts every few days. It’s also a great place to get hints, and to discuss games, puzzles, and anything else that strikes your fancy.
Happy puzzling!