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Funundrum is your latest conundrum

By Meg Olson

Point Roberts game creator Ben Van Buskirk has come up with a new puzzle he hopes will find its way into national syndication, starting here.
The Funundrums puzzles are the latest creation of the team that brought us the award winning board game DAO and the scrappy card game WOOF: Van Buskirk, who is also the manager of Lighthouse Marine Park, and his college roommate Jeff Pickering, a cartoonist and graphics artist.

Swept up in the Sudoku craze, the pair decided it might be more fun to make puzzles themselves rather than solve them. “We decided we wanted to create something different and fun. We want people who do our puzzles to be amused and entertained,” Van Buskirk said.
Funundrums combine images and word scrambles as the clues pointing to a solution sentence. Van Buskirk says the appeal is “the ‘aha!’ factor.”

“People smile when they get the answer,” he said. “They really have fun with it.” So far he said his testers have found the puzzles fun and addictive. “Everyone immediately requested more puzzles after the first set had been sent out.”

Pickering and Van Buskirk have set up a web site, www.funundrums.com, where puzzle solvers can print out Funundrums puzzles to solve for themselves, or solve the online version. They have also included a survey so people can provide them with feedback.

“We hope people enjoy solving these puzzles as much as we enjoy creating them,” Van Buskirk said. He also hopes national magazine and newspaper syndicates like the games well enough for Funundrums to spread across the continent.