Puzzle 1
Starting with BALL, change one letter at a time until you have the word HEAD.
Each change leaves the other letters in their original places and must result in a proper word.
What is the minimum number of steps required to achieve this change?
Puzzle 2
A woman had three old coins: a silver dollar, a quarter, and a dime. Each coin was a little battered and had a piece missing. She found that exactly the same fraction had broken away from each coin.
What fraction of each was missing if the value of the remaining bits of coins was now exactly one dollar in total?
For this puzzle it can be assumed that 1/2 a coin is worth 1/2 of its value.
Based on a puzzle by Henry Ernest Dudeney.
Puzzle 3
This BrainBashers safe has a rather unusual control panel.
In order to open the safe, you have to press every single square once only, in the correct sequence, ending on the square marked E.
Each square indicates which square to press next, for example, 2U means move up 2 squares and 3R means move right 3 squares.
Can you determine which square you must start with?
| 4R | 4D | 1R | 1D | 2D | 4L | 1D |
| 1R | 4D | 5D | 2R | 2D | 1L | 4L |
| 2R | 1D | 1L | 2R | 2R | 2D | 2U |
| 2R | 2R | 3U | 3D | 1R | 3U | 6L |
| 3U | 3R | 1D | 2U | 4L | 2D | 3L |
| 3U | 1L | 1R | 1R | 1R | 1R | 2U |
| 6U | E | 2U | 2L | 4L | 1L | 2U |
Note: this puzzle is not interactive, and the safe buttons cannot be clicked.
Puzzle 4
In each of these sentences, can you replace the missing number.
The number is written as a word (e.g. five, twenty-four, thirty-three), and each sentence is correct after the replacement.
This sentence contains ? letters, one hyphen, two commas and a full stop.
Interestingly, this sentence contains ? letters, one hyphen, three commas and the final full stop.
Finally, this sentence contains ? letters, one hyphen, three commas and one full stop.