A nostalgic look back at our first 50 newsletter competitions

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A nostalgic look back at our first 50 newsletter competitions
We were as surpised as anyone to find that our February 2025 newsletter included our 50th prize-winning competition. Puzzles over the last 6 years have included word searches, logic puzzles, quizzes and much more, as this blog shows.

Posted by Andy Brown on 31 January 2025

It's given me great pleasure to come up with puzzles for this newsletter over the last 6 years, and to have reached the milestone of 50 competitions. I've tried to keep them varied - here's a full list excluding this month's competition:

Type of puzzle	Number of competitions	Average number of answers
Codewords	2	15.5
Creating images (last month)	1	18.0
Creative writing	2	7.5
Excel / VBA	6	19.5
Griddler	2	9.0
Logic puzzles	7	21.6
Missing letters	1	6.0
Picture rebuses	4	24.0
Power BI	1	3.0
Quizzes	10	47.5
SQL	1	No data
Maps	1	19.0
Word search	11	15.4

In general quizzes get the best response. Here are some thoughts on setting them:

Type of puzzle	Thoughts
Codewords	The codeword puzzle I set didn't get a very good response. They're quite easy to set because you can get a program to test that all the numbers are correct in the gird.
Creating images (last month)	This was one of the puzzles which took me longest to create, as not only did I have to create custom pages in our website, but I also had to work out how to get C# to interact with the OpenAI API.
Creative writing	These are the quickest puzzles to create, since the effort is put in by the responder, but they're also the most dangerous (what do you do if no one is interested?).
Excel / VBA	VBA puzzles ususally take a fair while to create. They appeal to a specialist but dedicated subset of newsletter readers!
Griddler	The hardest thing about these is getting a picture which can be pixillated easily, and which than has the right degree of difficulty to solve.
Logic puzzles	You have to be very careful with logic puzzles to make sure that there is a solution path which is neither too easy nor too difficult to find.
Missing letters	As is often the case, when I created this I erred on the too-difficult side.
Picture rebuses	These are fun to create and solve - a staple of the Wise Owl newsletter.
Power BI	Following a disappointing response to my Power Query puzzle, I'm unlikley to set any more Power BI competitions!
Quizzes	The hard thing about a quiz is making it interesting. Ideally every question should have an "I never knew that" moment when you see the answer.
SQL	Perhaps I should try another SQL competition some day?
Maps	I enjoyed the research for our What 3 Words puzzle, but it would be hard to repeat.
Word search	I have a whole suite of VBA macros to fit words into a grid, but a great deal of human intervention is sitll required.

Here's to the next 50 competitions!

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