National Puzzle Day is celebrated each year on January 29th in the United States. It's not an official national holiday, but The Griddle tries to celebrate it each year by giving away some nice stuff, telling people on social media, and by posting a ton of nice free puzzles to solve!
There's talk of starting a National Puzzle Day in India soon, most likely some time in December. When a date is picked, this page will be updated with more information.
Crossword Puzzle Day is celebrated each year on July 21st. It's not an official holiday either, but The Griddle has plenty of crossword puzzles and crossword variants to spice up your Crossword Puzzle Day!
One event that happens around National Puzzle Day every year is the Silicon Valley Puzzle Fest, where people in Silicon Valley get together to celebrate puzzles and participate in workshops and tournaments.
You can hold your own events as well! Try a small puzzle party with friends or invite coworkers and/or classmates to compete in puzzle contests, share puzzles, and even try making their own!
Each year I try to host a puzzle competition for people who play the game Kingdom of Loathing. Here are the past few years' results.
| 2008 Contest | Flamizia won a Mr. A |
|---|---|
| 2009 Contest | Oryhara won a Mr. A |
| 2010 Contest | Dr Ools Lotto alt won a Mr. A |
| 2011 Contest | micromann won a massive prize package |
| 2011 2nd Prize | deificus, bazo0ka, and bsmith won 100,000 meat |
Note: The Griddle is not affiliated with Kingdom of Loathing.
Not sure what to do for the day? You could celebrate by challenging your friends to sudoku solving time trials, print out some of my free puzzles to use in classes as handouts, get puzzle game iPhone apps, enter puzzle solving contests, and more!
Puzzles are a great way to get students engaged in the classroom! Puzzles lend themselves well to a variety of scenarios: crossword puzzles can be made for a variety of topics, logic puzzles like sudoku and story logic are great for building critical thinking skills, and sudoku can even be used as an example in conflict graphing/graph coloring! If you use my puzzles in your class, I would love to hear about it — just send me an e-mail.
Conflict Graphs and Sudoku