Biopic – Crucifurball!

This is one of my favorite puzzles, presented at the SoCal Puzzle Party in 2016.

Players receive little boxes of paper tiles with grey dots on the back, and five words on the front: four English words on the edges, and a nonsense word in the middle.

The goal of the puzzle is to arrange the tiles so that adjacent tiles share a logical connection: for example, YARN and KNIT (object + connection) might form a connection, or WEEK and WEAK (homophones), or PUSH and PULL (opposites).

Once all of the tiles have been arranged, the players must make sense of the nonsense words in the middle of the tiles to reveal a celebrity quote.

Lastly, the tiles are flipped over to reveal one final surprise, and the payoff to the puzzle.

This puzzle was startling because the celebrity in the quote passed away just one month earlier. This was purely coincidental as I had started construction on it the previous year.

The puzzle requires many paper tiles to be cut out, folded, and taped or glued shut, so preparation is a bit of an undertaking.

More spoilery information about the puzzle if you don’t plan to solve it:

Spoiler

Each pair of tiles in a row or column shares a common theme: anagrams; an object and the thing that eliminates it; and so on. After arranging the tiles in their proper rows and columns, the direction of the nonsense words tells the player how they are read. Those words spell out a quote from David Bowie, whose picture appears in greyscale halftone dots on the back of the tiles. As a bonus Easter egg, the leftover clue words on the edges of the grid point to David Bowie songs: UNDER, PRESSURE, STAR, MAN, YOUNG, AMERICANS, etc.

Downloadable Files

Wordplay Puzzle

Assembly or Preparation Required

Downloads

Biopic Complete (zip file includes patterns for the tiles, optional boxes, and the instructions)