Puzzles & brain teasers
Wolf, goat, cabbage — and one small boat
A farmer must take a goat, a wolf and a cabbage across a river. The boat holds the farmer and only one other thing. Left alone, the wolf will eat the goat, and the goat will eat the cabbage. How does everything get across safely?
Measure exactly — with no markings
You have a 5-litre jug and a 3-litre jug and a tap. Neither jug has markings. How do you measure out exactly 4 litres?
…and a whole box of riddles to unlock
I am alive without breath and as cold as death. I am never thirsty, though I always drink. What am I?
Change one letter at a time
Change COLD into WARM one letter at a time. Every step in between must be a real English word. Four steps will do it.
Move and conquer — in 3D
Move the whole tower of discs to the right-hand peg. Only one disc at a time, and never a bigger disc on a smaller one!
Crack the code of the missing number
Every sequence follows a secret rule. Find the rule, and you'll find the missing number.
What comes next?
Shapes, colours, turns and numbers — each row follows a pattern. Find the missing tile.
Flip, remember, match — and learn a fact
Find all the matching pairs in as few tries as you can. Every pair you match reveals a fun fact.
Roll through a 3D maze to the exit
Guide the explorer ball out of the maze. Every maze has exactly one route to the exit — and three hidden gems for brave explorers.
Fix the 3 × 3 picture grid
Each row and column follows a rule. Which piece belongs in the gap?
Three belong together. One doesn't.
Words, numbers and shapes — spot the one that doesn't fit, and find out why.
A bit of everything, against the clock (or not!)
Maths, patterns, words, logic, memory and reasoning in one quick round. Practise without a timer, or race the clock.
Your trophies
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From the printed edition
Have a proper go before you peek. The hint is there if you get stuck, and the answer explains itself.
A man lives on the tenth floor. Every morning he takes the lift down to the ground floor. Coming home, he takes the lift to the seventh floor and walks the rest — except on rainy days, when he rides all the way to the tenth. Why?
Think about what he can physically reach.
He is short. He can reach the ground-floor button, and the highest button he can reach going up is the seventh. On rainy days he has an umbrella, and uses it to press the tenth-floor button.
What this teaches: This puzzle is famous because almost everyone assumes the man's choice is about preference. It is about his body and the height of a button — a good reminder that the world is designed around some people more than others.
1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, ___ . What is the next number, and what is the rule?
Look at the gaps between the numbers rather than the numbers themselves.
28. The gaps go up by one each time: +2, +3, +4, +5, +6, so the next gap is +7. These are the triangular numbers — the number of dots you can arrange in a neat triangle.
What this teaches: When a sequence looks random, subtract each term from the next. If those differences form a pattern, you have found the rule.
I have cities but no houses, forests but no trees, and water but no fish. What am I?
You unfold me before a journey.
A map.
What this teaches: A map is a model: it keeps the relationships between places and throws away almost everything else. Deciding what to leave out is what makes a model useful.
Three boxes hold apples, oranges, and a mix of both. Every label is wrong. You may take out just one fruit, without looking inside. How do you correctly label all three?
Start with the box you know the most about — the one labelled 'mixed'.
Take a fruit from the box labelled 'Mixed'. Since every label is wrong, that box is not mixed, so whatever you draw is what it really holds — say an apple, so it is the apples box. The box labelled 'Apples' cannot hold apples and cannot be the one you just identified, so it must be the mixed box. The last box is oranges.
What this teaches: The clue was in the rule, not the fruit. 'Every label is wrong' is itself information — constraints often carry as much as data does.
Printed in the newspaper: guide the bee through the flower meadow to its hive, visiting each flower exactly once. Grid mazes like this one appear in the puzzle pages of every edition.
Work backwards from the hive — there are usually fewer wrong turns that way.
Solutions to printed mazes appear in the following edition, along with the names of readers who sent in a correct route.
What this teaches: Solving a maze backwards from the goal is often faster, because the exit usually has fewer paths leading into it than the entrance has leading out.