Queer Pride Puzzles Volume One

Looking for a dollop of LGBTQ+ lore with your brainteasers? This beguiling puzzle book has you covered.

Puzzle-maker Shatzer presents hundreds of word puzzles, logic puzzles, mazes, and trivia quizzes, all of them featuring queer themes. The roster includes word searches on a variety of queer-friendly subjects from The Wizard of Oz (look for “Poppy/Field” and “Judy/Garland”) to Joe Biden’s lesbian press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre; “Queerdoku[s],” which are like Sudokus but with letters; decoding puzzles constructed around witticisms from the likes of RuPaul; and word jumbles that yield lubricious puns, like, “When cruising at the mostly-straight gym, make sure you don’t get this” (“spotted”). For those who prefer visual-spatial tests, there are intricate mazes, including an elegant one with branching walls shaped like the Greek letter lambda, and a spot-the-difference puzzle featuring 16 minutely altered versions of the National Coming Out Day cartoon logo. Brainiacs will find knotty logic puzzles that ask them, for example, to deduce the rankings of contestants in a Miss Red drag queen pageant from a set of gonzo clues (“Candi Apple was not asked about climate change”). Shatzer offers an extraordinary variety of puzzle types at many skill levels, from simplistic crosswords to difficult, abstract take-offs on classics, including “invisible mazes” that don’t even show where the maze walls are. (There’s a complete answer section at the back for those who get stuck.) The author explains the puzzles in brief how-tos that combine lucid instructions with feisty queer attitude. (“Those homophobic bigots on the right may say “Don’t Say Gay”, but here we say Gay all the time as loud as possible and as many times as possible!”) Solving the puzzles also provides a blithe immersion in queer trivia and humor. (One “namedropping” puzzle unveils an Ellen DeGeneres one-liner: “Twice I have shown up at a party wearing the same thing as someone else. Both times it was William Shatner.”) Hardcore puzzle afficionados and casual gamers alike will find plenty of amusement here.

An inventive and entertaining collection of japes.