Puzzle contest facts for kids
Puzzle contests are exciting competitions where people try to solve a puzzle as fast as they can. The goal is to get the best score among all the players.
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Modern Puzzle Contests
The way puzzle contests are run today, often by mail, started in the early 1970s. A company called American Holiday Association (AHA) used puzzles to advertise their vacation trips. These contests became so popular that AHA stopped selling holidays and focused only on running puzzle contests!
AHA's Popular BINGO Puzzles
One of AHA's most famous contests was a word grid puzzle based on BINGO. In the first round, players had to fill in five words into a 5x5 grid. These words had to connect with the word BINGO, which was already placed in the first column.
The puzzles were designed so that there were only a few choices for each letter. For example, only two words might start with 'B'. This meant that not much special skill was needed to play. The second round was similar, but BINGO was placed diagonally.
At their most popular, around 1985-1990, AHA's contests attracted about 100,000 players each week!
Big Prize Puzzles
Some puzzle contests offer huge prizes for solving very difficult challenges.
The Diamond Dilemma
The Diamond Dilemma was a 3D puzzle with 160 pieces. It was shaped like triangles that fit together. The person who could fully solve it could win £250,000! However, no one claimed the main prize by the 1990 deadline. Smaller prizes were given for solving easier parts of the puzzle.
The Eternity Puzzles
The Eternity puzzle came out in 1999. It was a tiling puzzle with 209 pieces. The Eternity II puzzle followed in 2007, with 256 pieces that had to match edges. Both puzzles were created by Christopher Monckton.
The first Eternity puzzle offered a £1 million prize. It was solved by two mathematicians. The second Eternity II puzzle offered a $2 million prize, but it was never fully solved!
