Knossos Games - Boggling Stories

I've never been a big "word" puzzle person. If you buy a general puzzle magazine, usually it is chock full of word puzzles, various versions of crosswords, and very few other types of puzzles. I've just been more of a maze/logic/math puzzle type of person. So when my editor asked for a word puzzle for the March/April 2006 edition of Imagine, I knew I had my work cut out for me. I went through a lot of different possibilities, but I wanted something that was a) original and b) solvable by me. A good friend of mine loves Boggle, and that ultimately served as the inspiration for this puzzle (thanks Niki!). Of course, Boggle is trademarked by Hasbro Inc. (formerly Parker Brothers), so I have to keep references to Boggle to a minimum.

One thing that didn't occur to me until after I had come up with the puzzle was a little game I used to play in fifth grade. We had these tedious assignments for spelling/grammer class. Every week we'd get a new list of spelling words, and we would have to write sentences containing each word. So I would connect the sentences together and make a bizarre little story each week. My teacher, Mr. Smith, didn't exactly know what to do with me, but it certainly passed the time. Creating these puzzles is sort of similar: once I choose the grid and have the word list, then I have to connect up as many of them as I can (while still giving some clues as to what the words might be).

Finally, I should mention that I've always liked the crypto-funnies puzzles in Games magazine (that's one of the only word-type puzzles that I can usually figure out). I like how the pictures and dialogue always have a clever twist or joke at the end, and so I also wanted the boggling stories to have the same quirky quality.