Insight Required

Hi there! Welcome to Insight Required, a site filled with directionless puzzles.

The puzzles on this site require you to figure out not only the answer, but also the way to get there. We've written an example puzzle, so that you can see one way to arrive at the solution. The kinds of manipulations allowed by the rules are nearly limitless--it's your job to figure out what to do.

Each puzzle has a toolbox below it. In the toolbox are some useful things for that puzzle: you can download the PDF, see any notes about the puzzle, check an answer, or request the solution. You'll have to have patience for the solution--you'll receive it in an email 24 hours later.

We were inspired to make this site from our experiences in the College Puzzle Challenge. We really enjoyed those puzzles, and searched for more puzzles of the same sort. There were none to be found, so we made some for one another.

Feel free to discuss the puzzles, resources for their solution or anything else on the forum.

We hope you enjoy solving these puzzles as much as we enjoy making them.

I just saw this on gizmodo. Some architect secretly built a huge scavenger hunt into an apartment.

FTA:

It took the family months to discover the scavenger hunt and weeks after that to figure it all out.

Wow it would be cool to discover that in your house. More from the New York Times

This Sunday, if you are in the DC area, there is a puzzle contest sponsored by the Washington Post.  Last year’s contest seems very fun and quite challenging, going by this article. I’ll be playing on a team with a friend from highschool—if anyone else is interested, let me know!

So I was at the climbing gym with a friend of mine, and I had the following conversation:

him: “Have you heard of this website, Insight Required?”

me: “…”

him: “It’s like this puzzle website.”

As it turned out, he found the site and was working on Twisted Word Search. Totally made my day.

These puzzles are quite interesting.  They present a variety of words/short phrases in uncommon or dying languages which model patterns typical of that language, and prompt you to deduce other related phrases in that language.  There are easy, medium, hard, and ultra-hard puzzles, categorized by ski trail difficulties.

Some of them are straight-forward, but some are quite tough!  I had a blast doing the first few.