So, in your book, you tried to visit people who are very, very involved with basically every single type of puzzle you could think of?

Argue out all these questions and more before you even open the ultimate Christmas Day family game book. Because from Love Actually to Home Alone, It's a Wonderful Life and beyond, every family has its favourites. But how much can we really remember about those films we watch every single year?As I said, I’m a huge fan of paradoxes and recursion. As part of my book, I helped create the most time-consuming puzzle ever made. It’s a mechanical puzzle. It’s got 55 wooden pegs which you have to turn in a certain way. To finish it, you have to turn the pegs 1.3 decillion times, which is an unimaginably huge number. If you turn one peg per second, the universe will run out of energy by the time you solve it. I also think that puzzles are a Platonic ideal of a problem. Life’s problems are often very complicated. There is no one simple answer; there are a bunch of answers. Each is suboptimal and you have to figure out which is the best of the imperfect solutions. But with puzzles, there is that one perfect solution. It is very satisfying. We live in a world of greys and probabilities and puzzles present us with that Platonic ideal where you can say, ‘Okay, it all makes sense. It all works perfectly. It all fits together.’ So that is another reason. There are various tactics that can help you to do this - for a start certain letters are much more popular in English than others, so the number that occurs the most time is usually the E, or possibly the T or A which are other common letters. There are also various other patterns common in English that can help you solve: for instance if you have the letter 'I' two from the end of a word, then it is often the case that the word ends in 'ING' or 'ION'.

One of my favorite puzzles is when you have to spot something that links a bunch of disparate objects or ideas. Finding patterns is the basis of science, it’s the basis of life. Here’s one with pictures, I’ll let you try and figure it out. That’ll be fun. What are these pictures of? Yes, exactly. I discovered this because one of my favorite characters that I interviewed for my book is a woman named Elonka Dunin. She is obsessed with secret codes and ciphers and cryptics. So obsessed, in fact, that she moved states to be closer to one of her favorite puzzles. It’s called Kryptos and it’s at the headquarters of the CIA. It’s a sculpture that was created 32 years ago that is a cipher. It’s a big metal wall, carved with hundreds of letters. No one, not even the CIA, has been able to solve the cipher completely. They’ve solved parts of it, but no one has completely figured it all out. It’s one of the most famously unsolved puzzles in the world. With this puzzle not only are you required to solve a crossword, but you are also required to work out the crossword grid itself too! At the start of the puzzle you will be given a few scraps of information: a few numbers in the grid corresponding to certain across and down clues, and a few squares too - but the rest is up to you. Armed with the clues alone you will need to work out the grid pattern and the solution to the puzzle.I’d say there are several things that are alluring about puzzles. One is the search for the aha moment when you actually solve a puzzle. I get an actual dopamine rush from it, the same chemical that—they say—you get from cocaine and sex and all that. So, for me, it is similar to a drug. Book of Skeleton Crosswords Volumes 1-6 "Skeleton crosswords can keep me absorbed for hours, I used to like cryptic crosswords but these are better. ★★★★★