October 12–16
To earn this week's extra credit, fully solve this anacrostic puzzle.
October 5–9
To earn this week’s extra credit, solve this strands puzzle and turn in a screenshot to prove it.
September 28–October 2
When you heat up liquid water, it becomes gaseous water, more commonly known as steam. An amount of water that turns into steam takes up about 1700 times as much volume as the same amount of liquid water. My family visited the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento this weekend. It features lots of locomotives that use that expansion of water into steam to move.
Inspired by this, beginning with the word WATER, change one letter at a time—always forming a valid word each time you change a letter—until you form the word STEAM.
Example: DOG to CAT
DOG > DOT > COT > CAT
To earn the extra credit, turn in a sequence of words that goes in that manner from WATER to STEAM.
Just a reminder: It is very easy to do a Google search for something like “word ladder solver” or write a prompt for an AI asking it to solve this puzzle. Computers searching through large databases of words can solve word ladder puzzles almost instantaneously. I trust that you don’t use AI to solve Weekly Wordplay puzzles, since that goes against the spirit of the challenge: to enjoy playing with words and stretching our minds linguistically—not handing a task off to some software.
September 21–25
To earn this week’s extra credit, correctly solve this word spiral puzzle.
September 14–18
To earn this week’s extra credit, correctly solve this crossword puzzle and figure out the metapuzzle answer.
September 7–11
Imagine this scenario:
You are solving a Wordle, but you already know the answer word is the first name of a PAA student or staff member. After one guess, you see the result below:
You now have all the information you need to solve the puzzle. You can guarantee that your next guess will be the correct name.
To earn the extra credit, give the answer and explain how you can be certain it is correct.
August 31–September 4
To earn the extra credit, solve this word pyramid puzzle.
August 24–28
These odd phrases share a property that most phrases do not:
SPECIAL HONOR
LAB CACHE
NEON LAVAS
SALON WAVINESS
HULAS STERNLY
To earn the extra credit, explain what highly unusual property the phrases share.