As of this writing, there are 43 countries in the World Puzzle Federation. Teams of four compete from each country, and there are both individual and team prizes.

The World Puzzle Championship is a yearly event that started in 1992. The first Championship was held in New York, with heavy involvement from Will Shortz (who later became famous as editor of the crossword for The New York Times). The WPC is designed to be culture-neutral, because it involves competitors from many countries. Due to this, while there is a smattering of word problems (fill-in type puzzles or word searches) puzzles are for the most part math and logic.

More information on the 2008 championship in Minsk (which starts October 27^th) is on the official Web site. There are also pictures on worldpuzzle.org from the 2007 championship.

Some of the WPC puzzles are fantastic for math teachers. Sudoku (which they’ve had in the WPC long before it was well-known) is only the tip of a very large iceberg. Here are some places to visit to find out more:

Team USA
The US Puzzle test (which allows qualifying for the US team in the World Puzzle Championship) is held in June. This site has every qualifying test from 1999-2008. Look at, for example, 2002, which has the puzzles Equations, Palindromic Clock, Broken Calculator, Dyslexic Division, and Hot Cross Sums, all of which are directly math related Nearly all of the other puzzles involve logic in some fashion.

Nikoli
Nikoli is perhaps most famous as the inventors of the name “Sudoku” (they hold a trademark to it in Japan). However, they’ve been making hundreds of puzzle types over many years; the website gives a good idea of the varieties of puzzles that can show up in the WPC.

Worldpuzzle blog
This is a group blog including links to the various countries participating (and their own individual championships).

Tim’s World of Puzzles
The “booklets” contain some excellent puzzles similar to what shows up in the WPC.

Here’s a sheet I use with my students to introduce Slither Link (currently the 3^rd most popular puzzle in Japan). These puzzles were generated by the program “Loopy” from Simon Tathan’s Portable Puzzle Collection.

Slither Link Puzzles

Puzzle #1 Puzzle #2 Puzzle #3

Puzzle #4 Puzzle #5 Puzzle #6

Jason Dyer holds degrees in Fine Arts Studies and Math and teaches at Pueblo High School in Arizona. His school mascot is the Warriors and his other blog of residence is The Number Warrior.

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