In 2024, The Wizards of OZ were invited to set the puzzles for the Ritangle school’s competition for 2025. Zag had set a crossnumber puzzle for the previous year’s competition and it had been well received. I scoured my back catalogue looking for something that would be suitable and found a series of puzzles that I’d set which were based on The Happy Puzzle Company’s Genius Square.

I can date the genesis of Monky Puzzle precisely. It was the day this Futility Closet post was published.

Who are The CQ Elves? If you are a UK subscriber you may have watched QI and you’ll know about the QI Elves who come up with all the quite interesting stuff. Some of you may have had an inkling that it was something to do with Crossnumbers Quarterly and Oyler and Zag. If it had been just Oyler and Zag then the pseudonym, thanks to Arden, would have been The Wizards of OZ. The CQ counterpart to QI is a conglomerate of setters who usually set numerical puzzles and whose identities change from puzzle to puzzle.

By Oyler

Almon Brown STROWGER was an undertaker who lived in Kansas City, Missouri and the inventor of the automated step-by-step telephone exchange.

Nebuchadnezzar gives an insight into the creation of Dire Straits

I was first inspired to write Paradise Lost while listening to an episode of Desert Island Discs, for which Both Sides Now was one of the selected eight records. Looking back at the archive helpfully posted online by Praful Kapadia, I’ve decided it was the episode featuring The Wire actor Wendell Pierce, although I now learn Joni Mitchell is the 76th most commonly picked artist on the show; her records would accompany 47 guests to their desert island, nine of whom selected Both Sides Now. (That compares to 121 for Bob Dylan, and 1028 for Mozart).

By Oyler

I read that several solvers approached the Areas of Triangles puzzle by seeking out Heronian triples on the Internet and bypassing the intended logical deductions. I feel that this was a shame, but otherwise I have no problem with it. Perhaps this could have been forestalled by withholding Heron’s name in the preamble, but I felt that it would have been wrong to deny him the credit for the formula.

or May A Guest Prelate Indicate an Explanation (of how the puzzle came to be)