Puzzlicious

Doing puzzles is something I’ve grown up with, both of the jigsaw- and the mind- kind. While I haven’t done a jigsaw puzzle on my own for many years, I fondly remember doing them with my Mum.  More importantly for me, though, she always had a mind-puzzle on the go.  Her favourite was wordsearches, but she also enjoyed crosswords – she’d even let me join in, me sitting on her lap, pointing at where her pen should mark.  Mum entered hundreds of competitions too, many of which would see her unscramble an anagram or solve a clue.  I also remember us playing this travel game which was a bit like draughts, only with coloured pegs that pinned into a diamond-shape 3D board as you advanced across it (if anyone knows what this was called, please let me know!). 

Puzzle-playing was a pastime of my childhood...and I continue to indulge it now I’m (well into!) adulthood.  Crosswords are my third favourite, wordsearches second, with first place going to...Arrow-words.  With no filled-in boxes acting as barriers like in a crossword, or extraneous letters muddling the mind as in a wordsearch, I find Arrow-words less linear and so more...free and easy, quick and creative spark-y, I guess.

Designed so that the clue-box points the answer-arrow in various directions, each word you fill in forms part of another; so as my pen races horizontally across the page, my gaze darts diagonally to another clue-box and I’m answering that question before I even register reading it.

Filling in an Arrow-word doesn’t happen every day, but when I do one, I find the puzzle terribly more-ish and have to solve another one and another...  Perhaps it’s the mind-equivalent of polishing off a box of chocolates!  It certainly fuels my word-collecting appetite anyway, and so I thought I’d share some of the words that I’ve collected from my recent Arrow-words puzzle:     

Slovenly          Proximity        Furtive             Shock              Lively              Invigorat        Vile                Gristle             Deed               Onus                Stodgy         Inane     Collide         
     Rife       Purge     Doom      Heed      Haste     Lame       Grill      
          Resilient       Hubbub        Intrepid          Array          Melee         Stretch     
     Cramp     Cower       Strand      Caper         Repertoire       Exodus            Breadth      Foe          Seldom       Eddy       Rancid          Ajar        Recur              Squander       
       Swat        Pallid      Dwell        
                          Blasé        Rebuttal      Lag        Shale             Drab         Imitate