:: Eric Shamblen’s Puzzle Blog ::

Mike Reilly is an award-winning game, toy and puzzle designer. I talked with him recently on PuzzleMonster.com about how some of his better-known puzzles got developed and brought to market, how an agent earns his cut (50%!) and whether, in the end, it’s all worth it.

Puzzle Monster: You’ve worked in the toy and game business for over 25 years. How did that begin?

Mike Reilly: I started making games, puzzles and toys when my daughter Dawn was born. I sheltered a friend’s woodworking shop in my home in Albuquerque, New Mexico and had access to tools and materials there. Soon, all my friends, and their friends, started asking me to make toys for their kids.

Piet Hein’s Soma Cube inspired me to create my own puzzles. It was made out of a bunch of cubes glued together and I thought, “I can do that!” Of course, I wanted to do it my way, so I purchased several thousand one inch wood balls and made at least a hundred ‘items’ from them. My daughter and I even barbequed on our Hibachi over some of them. Another friend, John Bird and I started my first toy company, Rhino Games & Toys together in 1972. We presented several of my designs to Skor-Mor, then the largest wood puzzle company in America. They licensed two of my designs on sight. One was a game called ‘Archiball’ (their name for it, not mine!) and the other was a 35 ball, three-sided pyramid puzzle ‘Cannonball’ (again, their name).

They were already manufacturing ‘Cannonball’ when they sent an urgent message asking for a photo montage of how to solve it. Instead, they put all seven shapes of five balls each unassembled into a box, along with the base, and shipped it that way! They put my photo on the box with John Bird’s name beneath as the inventor. The company’s puzzle & game business, no surprise here, went tits up soon after.

While attending the Toy Show in NYC in February 1974, I presented my portfolio to Julie Cooper, Senior VP of Ideal Toy which at that time was second only to Mattel. He took the cigar out of his mouth and said, “We can’t use your stuff kid… but, we can sure use you.” He offered me a job in their R&D department. I needed time to think about it. He said, “Sure. Take all the time you want… five minutes.” I hesitated less than five seconds and took the job. Learned heaps in the next year, much about the toy business and tons more about playing the corporate game.

Read the rest of the interview!

In the pre-missionary days, when their language was purely an oral tradition, the Hawaiians loved puns, jokes and riddles.   They took their riddles very seriously; they had competitions known as ho’opa’apa’a, in which riddling was a sport on par with wrestling or spear-throwing in determining the prowess of a chief.  Such contests had high stakes.   One famous riddling champion on Kauai was known as Halepa’iwi, or “House surrounded by bones” - the bones being ones of those who had lost to him in the ho’opa’apa’a.

Want to test yourself and see if your fibia would have become a fencepost for the riddling champion?  Try these resources:

He Mau Nane Hawaii: Hawaiian Riddles A slim paperback in both Hawaiian and English by Kimo Armitage, who has written several other children’s books as well as a Hawaiian language primer.

Treasury of Hawaiian Words in One Hundred and One Categories: Conundrums of Ancient Hawaii A searchable version presented by Google Books of the original text by Harold Winfield Kent, this section contains a list of riddles compiled by Dr. Charles M. Hyde in 1886. What is “my bird with two beaks”? How about “my bundles of red sugar cane in the ocean”?

Hawaiian Riddles: Na Nane “My fresh water spring hung up in the air.” This and several other riddles appear on this site.

Hawaiian Mythology: Section XXXII. Riddling Contests In 1940, Martha Beckwith wrote a comprehensive study of Hawaiian folklore, comparing its legends with those of other Pacific islands. In this chapter, reproduced online, she presents the legend of Kalapana, a boy who entered a ho’opa’apa’a to avenge the death of his father in a previous contest.

A study to be published in the February 2008 issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin reaches some unexpected findings about the importance of mental exercise in boosting intellectual performance.

The experiment compared three groups of college students, aged 18 to 21.  The first group completed a reading comprehension exercise and a crossword puzzle. The second group discussed a social issue for 10 minutes. The third group watched a clip of Seinfeld. Then all three groups were given tests that measured short-term memory and mental processing speed.

Which group got a boost that helped them excel on the test? No, not the Seinfeld group. No soup for them!

Surprisingly, both the group who warmed up with a couple of puzzles and the group that warmed up through social interaction received the same boost.   Said psychologist Oscar Ybarra, lead author of the study, “We found that short-term social interaction lasting for just 10 minutes boosted participants’ intellectual performance as much as engaging in so-called ‘intellectual’ activities for the same amount of time.” 

“To our knowledge, this experiment represents the only causal evidence showing that social interaction directly affects memory and mental performance in a positive way.”

So if Sudoku’s not your bag, just chat with your neighbor Sue Ellen - according to Yberra, both will help keep your mind sharp!