Pick up a puzzle: 7 scintillating brainteasers to have as a hobby

Puzzles: from the Ancient Egyptian maze to the Sunday newspaper’s Samurai Sudoku, they are popular around the world, across every culture – and have been for millennia. Radio 4’s Two Thousand Years of Puzzling explores the long and endlessly satisfying human appetite for the setting and solving of puzzles.

What’s your favourite puzzle? If you’re looking for a new hobby as we start the year then try wrapping your head around one of these compelling, mind-bending, brainteasers.

Could the maze – a confusing network of winding pathways, with one or more blind alley, through which one has to find a way – be the oldest type of puzzle? Although little remains of the structure today, an Ancient Egyptian maze near Crocodilopolis dates back to around 700 BC.

Always start with the corner pieces. Oh hang on...

The oldest hedge maze in the UK was designed in 1690 for William of Orange, although there is evidence that it replaced an earlier version, perhaps designed for Henry VIII. These days, finger mazes appear in puzzle books and newspapers, and even on the walls of the London Underground, but if you really want to test yourself head to Ningbo in China. The Butterfly Maze – the largest permanent hedge maze in the world – covers 33,564.67 m² and has a total path length of 8.38 km. A-mazing!

2. The Sudoku

A Sudoku is a logic puzzle in which the objective is to fill a 9 by 9 grid with digits so that each column, row, and 3 by 3 sub-grid contains all of the numbers from 1 to 9.

Each puzzle has a single solution and, let’s face it, they're addictive. We think of the Sudoku as a modern phenomenon, exploding in popularity in recent years (travel by train and you’re bound to see someone frowning at their paper, pencil in hand) but, in fact, French newspapers featured variations of the puzzle in the 19th century – until they disappeared around the time of World War I.

The modern version of the puzzle became popular when a Japanese company introduced it, branding it the Sudoku, meaning ‘single number’. It appeared in The Times newspaper in 2004 and looks set to stick around…

The origins of the jigsaw – a tiling puzzle that involves assembling interlocking and tessellating pieces to create a picture – date back to the 1760s. John Spilsbury, a British cartographer and engraver, is credited as the inventor: he pasted maps onto wood, cut them into small pieces and called them ‘Dissected Maps’. These days, jigsaws are produced for educational purposes, as well as for fun, as they’re seen to help with hand-eye coordination, fine motor skills, shape recognition and memory. All important skills when undertaking modern variations like spherical, 3D and double-sided jigsaws! The world's largest commercially available puzzle shows 10 scenes from Disney works, has 40,320 pieces, and measures 680 by 192 cm when assembled. Giant table not included.

Are you a cruciverbalist? If you’re a bit of a whizz at creating or solving crosswords then the answer is yes! The crossword is a black and white word puzzle, in the form of a square grid, which one fills with interlinking words by answering clues.

12 down, nine letters, type of puzzle...

The first crossword puzzle as we know it was published in 1913, but word square puzzles were found in the ruins of Pompeii! In the 1930s, crosswords inspired the creation of the board game Scrabble, and during the Second World War crosswords were banned in Paris in case they were used to pass coded messages to the enemy.

5. The Cryptic Crossword

Think crosswords are hard? Let’s ramp it up a level. With cryptic crosswords the clues are more obscure, indirectly indicating what the solutions could be.

For example: an anagram clue tells you some words in the clue have to be rearranged; a charade clue is when one part is added to another to get the answer; the container clue is a set of letters or a short word put inside another word; reversals are a cryptic device where a word or a part of a word is reversed to get to the answer; and in a hidden word clue the answer is hidden in plain sight.

Confused? We are. But however nonsensical cryptic crossword clues seem, they all conform to a set of rules. Learn these rules and you will conquer!

What can travel around the world while staying in a corner? Have you worked it out? The answer is… a stamp! A riddle is a question or statement intentionally phrased so as to require intelligence and reasoning to reach an answer; an ingenious and creative word puzzle. They were a prominent literary form in the ancient and medieval world, and appear extensively in written records – in Babylonian school texts, Sanskrit poetry, medieval monastic manuscripts, and as preserved graffiti in the Basilica at Pompeii. Perhaps the most famous riddle of all belongs to the Sphinx of Greek mythology who sat outside Thebes asking passers-by, ‘What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?’ The answer? Man: he crawls as a baby, walks upright throughout his life, and uses a cane in old age. Luckily for Oedipus he solved the riddle, and avoided a sticky end.

He didn’t just invent the Jabberwock and the Jubjub bird – author Lewis Carroll is also the brains behind the word ladder. The puzzle – also referred to as doublets, word-links, paragrams, laddergrams, or word golf – begins with two words, and to solve the puzzle one must find a chain of other words to link the two, in which two adjacent words differ by only one letter. For example, if your first word is wine, and your last word beer, the words in between could be wins, wits, wets, bets, and bees. Lewis Carroll claims that he invented the game on Christmas day in 1877, first mentioning it in his diary the following year. In 1879 he published a series of the puzzles and solutions in Vanity Fair and later it was made into a book. Now his creation is a stalwart of puzzle books and newspapers the world over.

To discover the history of your favourite puzzles, listen to Two Thousand Years of Puzzling.