Questions tagged [story]
A puzzle that is dressed up as a story or a longer description of a situation.
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Such a simple task!
"Gosh-darn-dag-nab-it-to-tarnation!" Jimmy hear's Darlene yell from across the farm. Figuring he'd better go face this head on, he heads towards the barn.
"What the hell happened Jimmy? You were just ...
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TechSupport Issue ID#812
User ID: 3Aq47h-20dpc8l
Language: English (UK)
Today I noticed a strange text file on my Windows 10 PC's Desktop called "README.txt". Curious, I opened it and it read
START → 2↑ → P 3→ ↑ P 4→ P →...
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A manager's dilemma
A sports manager was walking nervously on the street. It was a stressful time for him and he didn't know what to do. Two of their biggest stars had drunkenly trashed another hotel room after a ...
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Pirate Blurpwhicks Level
(The story below is not part of the puzzle. If you want to jump straight into the challenge, you can skip ahead to "The Island")
Prelude
It's been a day just like any other day of the week. ...
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The Hyper-Modern Kidnapper: Crime Scene #2
The Story:
Sergeant Vimes had been unable to get very far with the painting found at last night's crime scene and was feeling frustrated and tired after losing so much sleep the night before. They'd ...
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A list-based argument
I have two asian friends who, like me, are into anime, comics and games. One is Chinese and one is Vietnamese.
One day, I found them both in front of a whiteboard, arguing intensively. They weren't ...
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End of piracy and beginning of technology
Blackbeard is no more, and everything seemed peaceful again, but during the last engagement with Blackbeard, my military adviser got introduced to the concept of "computer", and became very interested ...
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The Perplhexing Mystery
There has been a jailbreak in my (imaginary) town. And I, a Junior Detective of the town, have gone to investigate this. As I reach the police station, an inspector comes out to greet me. No doubt he ...
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What's the Combination?
Hacker Harry really wants to get into the server room at a local dot com company, so he dressed up as a phone repairman and planted some bugs in the break room to listen in on the workers. Sure enough,...
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4 (or 5?) Brothers
Each brother tells us a bit about themselves. Can you identify their names?
1:
"I'm the oldest of us, at least to you humans. You all say I'm weaker than my brothers, but my domain is infinite - a ...
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A Bunch of Rocks
An entry in Fortnightly Topic Challenge #35: Restricted Title 1.
"Mind passing me the salt & pepper please Rick?" Jean leaned on the table asking the man in black suit sitting opposite her.
"I ...
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A Railcar for L. & J. Railroad
In the land of the tetrominos, the twins L. and J. have set out to revolutionize travel by rail. Contemporaries' passenger cars are boxy and boring, and humdrum symmetric passenger ...
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Taping a cardboard square is getting me fired!
I was mucking around in the storeroom today when I should have been working. I had a square $20\times20$ cm piece of cardboard, and a roll of masking tape I'd been using (I can't remember the tape's ...
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A Cryptic Morality Tale
An entry in Fortnightly Topic Challenge #46: "Tales From the Cryptic"
So this puzzle uses the term cryptic in multiple senses. On the one hand, it is cryptic in the sense that there are ...
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The Knights and the Hounds
(With thanks and congratulations to Lee Leon)
We rejoin our heroes several days after the events of
The Knights' Gift, at the head of a pack of enormous staghounds, 1000 strong. Such a pack ...
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Ernie and the Christmas Stars
Although Ernie professes to be an atheistic rationalist, he does love the Christmas season. He thinks long and hard to find appropriate gifts, brushes up on his Christmas Carol repertoire, plans a ...
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Trapped and gassed!
“Ouch!” I moaned as I slowly regained consciousness. Someone had knocked me out cold from behind. I now found myself alone, trapped in a small square room. The floor was hard and cold, and the room ...
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A princely romance
The prince was nervous as he chariot approached the woman's house. He knew he was being direct showing up at her door unannounced like this, but he knew the feelings he had for her were not imaginary. ...
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Could there be some logic in this mystical gibberish?
My great uncle Sean passed away in '94 after a long battle with illness. Not many people came to his funeral; he was 105 when he died, and had outlived all of his friends and colleagues.
I'm told he ...
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Remorseless Riddle Rampages Relentlessly
"Fine day" says I
"Need a sardine?"
"Why - no thank you"
- replied Cecil the 3-Eyed Spleen
"How then will you get in
Through that nasty great door?" I ask.
He ...
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Caesar and the Roman Murders
Caesar was quietly sipping a good cup of coffee at a cafe in Rome when a police officer suddenly approached him. We need you, (s)he said! We have a very complicated case and the primary victims here ...
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Puzzling puzzling phrases
Intro:
I found this strange, tattered journal while walking through the woods behind my house, and wondered if you could make sense of it all. From what I could glean, it was written by a nomadic ...
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Reconstructing A Chess Game #4
My five years old pupil Magnus is really on fire !
After three wins in the first, second and third games, he is playing White today in round 4 against one of the tournament's favorites (a child who ...
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The Presidential Safe
Obama has hired you as a PI and you walk into the Oval Office.
He steps up from his desk, shakes your hand and hands you a page torn from a diary. "Don't ask where I found it." As you glance down, ...
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What is this saying?
<=19
B: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, ...
P: <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 X X X X X X X X X X X X X X ...
AB: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -...
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Spider Solitaire Puzzle - Can You Help Joe Bloggs Achieve His Goal?
It was yet another dreary Friday afternoon. Hardly anybody to talk to and the internet connection was flaky as usual. And the less said about his latest performance review the better. Hardly anything ...
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Who owns The Golden Pie Café?
It's the early second millennium, and we're in Italy's two-dimensional cartesian world, and look, Mr.X has just opened a new café—The Golden Pie Café! He's put a lot of thought into constructing the ...
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Cookie Unionization
My Christmas cookies are gone! When I came into the kitchen this morning, the box was empty. All that remained were a few crumbs and this note:
We absconded.
You never saw that coming, did you? Well, ...
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Locked in an alien crypt: Jewels on the floor
Dazed, you slowly regain consciousness. You don’t know how you got here, but one thing is certain – your exploration of this otherworldly planet has reached an ugly end. Trapped in an alien crypt, ...
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An Evil Cartesian Psycho
I came up with this puzzle when I was in high school.
There is an island owned by an evil man who keeps some tourists who were visiting the island a few years ago captive.
The authorities demanded ...
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Ode to a Nightingale: a puzzling study in literary criticism
The field of literary criticism is an interesting and fruitful one, in which puzzlers might carve out a niche. This was recently brought home by a conversation I had with a sagacious old gentleman in ...
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We found text from the year 2040!
Recently, the first surviving examples of text from the ███████████████e discovered! The unearthed artifacts included a collection of rectangular tablets inscribed in the hitherto unknow███████████████...
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Disaster in Madrid!
A couple were in a car racing madly through Madrid in the middle of the night. Suddenly the engine juddered, whirred, and died. The broken-down car rolled to a halt, leaving them stranded with nobody ...
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The princess' journey came to a crossroad
This is a sequel to A princess fell in love
During her journey, the princess encountered a very strange crossroad.
Can you help you her choose a safe way to go to the prince? What would she ...
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Surviving Captain Nefarious
Captain Nefarious has captured you and two of your friends, Alice and Bob. Being a villain, he has a natural desire to monologue, so he sits you down (guarded, of course by his Largely Incompetent ...
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James Bond must Go!
Once I was flirting with the receptionist at the gym. She marveled at my international business travel and I joked I was Bond, James Bond. She laughed... and instead of a locker key she handed me a ...
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A Problem Of Royal Proportions
One day, while enjoying a trip in one of his kingdom's cities, the amnesiac king of Country X forgets the identity of his sole son and heir. Three men from the empire rush to send letters to the king--...
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Heartless bunch of faces
I was having snacks with a friend the other day, i had pretzels and
my friend was licking candy canes when he told me a weird story. He
said that, the night before he was at a party at some rich ...
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Bob wants revenge on his evil boss
Bob wants revenge on his evil boss, so he devises a cunning plan.
He writes a request to visit three American cities, and then gets his boss to approve it.
Bob then instead travels to six locations, ...
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Before it's too late, where am I?
They're onto me! I've lost my secure means of communication, so this will have to do. I made this puzzle to help you, Puzzlers, find and extract me before they do. I sincerely hope you're the first ...
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Something's missing
I recently received an e-mail from my cousin who knows I am into puzzles. The body of the puzzles was weird and only thing I know is that he talked about being excited about something the last time I ...
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A Chase Through Cipherspace
Some Background
I have this ... work associate ... with whom I've done several jobs that are, as some would say, of questionable legality (no judging please). We're pretty successful together, but he ...
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An unknown message from an unknown world
Overview:
On 10-29-2097 at 14:37, a prototype hyper-luminal communications device was turned on for the first time at Research Site 1039. To the marked suprise of the research team, one of the ...
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True for one, Not for the other [closed]
I came up with puzzle, I think it's clever.
Two women, Eve and Amy, sit at a table. After a bit of casual chit chat. Amy, writes on a piece of paper and says “I wrote five words. It is a true ...
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Getting to the Root of the Problem
TD:LR - Only the equations and bold question at the bottom are part of the puzzle; the rest is just flufftext.
After a long time of searching for the origin of the device I previously posted about, I ...
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I'm a respectable predator (?, 7, 9, 7)
My head hurts... I feel like I'm missing something. "Avoid notes" starts with the left heading, reportedly. Ends firsts, like extremely terrifyingly impressively clearly plainly solved:
...
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The mysterious equations - Clue Twenty Seven
<<---First clue
<---Previous clue
A note from @Mithrandir: I have given explicit permission for @Volatility to post this, and gave him the answer to encode. If you want to post one, ping @...
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Breaking the Heart geometrically
The King of Geometro nation has 2 very smart wives. On the Geometro Wives day he gets a nice heart shaped cake made. It has a number of icing flowers on it.
The King wants to split the cake in half so ...
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Close encounter of the orthographical kind
Over here! Hey! People! Thank goodness. I managed to escape. I was held captive in a Keerg spaceship hovering high above the continental United States. They pointed on different places on a map and ...
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A Story of Secrets
I was the child of a ruler, but I wasn't human
All of my kind shared the same, strange weakness.
We loved to be kidnapped by others.
We would speak all of our secrets to them.
Some see it as a ...
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