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This site is a companion site to Enigmatic Code (which collects Enigma puzzles originally published in New Scientist and their solutions). You might want to read the [ About ] and [ Notes ] pages there.
The site is for discussing and posting notes and solutions to the Teaser puzzles (formerly Brainteaser and Brain-Teaser) published in The Sunday Times.
Primarily it is focussed on archiving old puzzles, but I also put up new puzzles when they become available. (Although I don’t reveal the answers for prize puzzles before the entry deadline has passed).
My current sources are:
- Puzzles from 1961 (the first numbered Brain-Teaser puzzle) onwards.
- Puzzles selected for publication in the following books:
– Sunday Times Brain Teasers (1974)
– The Sunday Times Book of Brain Teasers: Book 1 (1980)
– The Sunday Times Book of Brain Teasers: Book 2 (1981)
– The Sunday Times Book of Brainteasers (1994)
– Brainteasers (2002) - Puzzles from 2013 onwards, that I solved at the time.
- Other puzzles that I find interesting.
Here is a summary of published books of Teaser puzzles that I am aware of.
If there are other Teaser puzzles you would like me to include please get in touch.
To be notified when new puzzles are posted enter your email in the Subscribe box on the right.
Feel free to join in, either by leaving a comment (with a program if you like), linking to your own solution, or by rating puzzles (or just “liking” them). If you want to leave a general comment about the site, please do so below. Any kind of feedback is useful in encouraging me to keep the site going!
If you use this site as a source of puzzles please include a link back to the puzzle on this site.
Here are some other sites that focus on Sunday Times Brainteaser puzzles:
- Sunday Times Teasers — a discussion site for Sunday Times Teasers (the previous site [link] had Teasers going back to 2010)
- PuzzlingInPython — Brian’s site for Python solutions to Sunday Times Teasers
Jim Randell
Pete Good, 
Brian Gladman, and 1 other are discussing. 
S2T2 
Frits 10:39 am on 29 September 2020 Permalink |
Hello Jim,
There are some teasers listed which can’t be accessed yet like “Teaser 2544: Neighbourly nonprimes / 26th June 2011”. Is there a special reason why there are not yet published?
I saw Brian had a nice solution for this one on his site.
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Jim Randell 10:28 pm on 29 September 2020 Permalink |
@Frits: The puzzles that are not linked are ones that I have transcribed, but not posted yet.
I try and post puzzles between Enigmatic Code and S2T2 at a rate of 1 a day, so that there is a small “working set” of currently puzzles which I have recently looked at in play.
I’m happy to look out any particular puzzle as requested. I can post Teaser 2544 on Thursday.
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Frits 12:48 pm on 24 December 2020 Permalink |
@Jim,
A – Any news on better searching in WordPress sites?
B – Is it possible to have a link to more than eight “Recent Comments”?
C – As I normally spend 6 months in SE Asia and don’t always have internet access I am wondering if you could put somewhere a big zip file with all Enigmatic Code and S2T2 puzzles (for manual solving). I don’t want to overload your sites by using a website copier.
I wish you a Merry Christmas
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Jim Randell 7:02 pm on 31 December 2020 Permalink |
A – I’m not sure there is much I can do to change the way the WordPress search works. Although I have noticed that on S2T2 the search seems to also search comments as well as posts (on Enigmatic Code it only seems to search posts).
B – If you use an RSS reader the Comments Feed [ https://s2t2.home.blog/comments/feed/ ] has more comments in it (20 at the moment, but I’ve just upped it to the last 100).
C – I don’t have a version of the puzzles other than on the website. (I have backup XML file, but I think that is to load the site onto another WordPress instance). I think it would be OK to use a crawler to make a local copy of the sites, just don’t do it too aggressively, otherwise WordPress might take countermeasures. I think there are about 2158 puzzles between the sites. When I archived the old Google Groups site for Sunday Times Teasers I used Opera’s “Save Page as PDF …”, but there were only a few hundred pages to archive there.
Happy New Year!
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Pete Good 1:46 pm on 27 August 2022 Permalink |
I have a copy of ISBN 9780312903381 (The Sunday Times Book of Brain Teasers: 50 Hard (Very Hard Master Problems) Paperback – 1 Mar. 1986, (Victor Bryant & Ronald Postill), which is not in your list of published books.
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Jim Randell 2:17 pm on 27 August 2022 Permalink |
@Pete: I’ve seen mention of this book, but I’d thought it might be a reprint of the 1980 book, which starts with:
I found an eBay listing of the book that supports this.
If it is a reprint then all the puzzles should already be available on the S2T2 site. [ tag =
teaser-book-1980 ].
But it would be good if you are able to confirm this from a physical copy of the book.
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Brian Gladman 8:21 pm on 27 August 2022 Permalink |
@jim: I have both books and they are not the same. The one Pete refers to covers 53 teasers published between Nov 1979 and Sep 1983. I found a few on your list but most are missing.
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Jim Randell 9:22 pm on 27 August 2022 Permalink |
@Brian: Thanks. That seems to be the same as the 1994 book I have listed [ tag = teaser-book-1994 ], although currently I only have a few puzzles from that collection on the site.
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Pete Good 6:02 pm on 1 September 2022 Permalink |
Jim,
I have just received a copy of “The Sunday Times Book of Brain Teasers, Victor Bryant & Ronald Postill, Book 1, 1980″ (ISBN 004 793045 4)”, which was published in the UK by UNWIN paperbacks.
I was disappointed to find that it has identical content to the book I told you about on 27th August, which was published in the USA in 1986 by St.Martin’s Press, New York.
It looks like the list of publications on your web site is complete after all!
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Jim Randell 11:23 pm on 2 September 2022 Permalink |
@Pete: Thanks for the confirmation.
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