I've created this chess problem for today. Can you find the key move? Have fun, and no computers are allowed! Checkmate In 5 Moves

Grid in plaintext This is a cylindrical cryptic crossword. Some "across" clues go beyond the right-hand edge of the grid and continue from the left-hand side. The black part between the two vertical bars is the actual grid; a few columns on both sides have been duplicated in gray as visualizatio...

One day (in a universe very unlike our own) a wealthy adventurer set off in an obscure direction from his home solar system into the depths of space. But he made a dire mistake: Before getting into his cryptosleep casket, he forgot to change the time setting off of "indefinite." And so any astron...

Here's another challenge I use to give to my students: Let's begin with a bunch of little white cubes assembled on a big white cube. All the little white cubes are equal. Then I decide to paint blue some of the faces of the big cube. Afterwards I break the big cube apart into the smaller ones. ...

You and your friend's new favorite game is "topological nim": You take your favorite compact metric space $X$, and Player 1 chooses a number $r$ less than the diameter of $X$. Starting with Player 1, each removes a closed disk of radius $r$ from the space $X$ on their turn, until one player—the w...

Were there giants in Game of Thrones? I didn't watch it - no really, I didn't. No really... Well, to be honest, I did watch the first episode and there were no giants in that. Anyway, that's enough about me. If there were giants, you might expect to see them here. In fact lots of GoT fans do visi...

Despite my despair at creating a Connect Fano Plane in the spirit of a normal Connect Wall, I think I succeeded, thanks to the database of world cities I downloaded from Geo Data Source. In this iteration, you are given seven municipalities from around the world. Your job is to determine seven ca...

I came up with this one myself: When you see me you smile, I only stay a while, think outside the box my friend, until you bring me to my end. Where did my buddy go? Their name had the sound of low. Who am I, and who is my buddy?

Good morning. Today I am going to test your mental arithmetic. To do so I shall ask you to give me the sum of a series of ones. I shall say One and one and one and one and one and one, etc. Of course you won't know ahead of time when I will stop. I shall speak rhythmically in time with a metronom...

There I was, in the PSE lounge, polishing up my math-crossword. The only test-solver available was the Cryptic Cat. I think you see where this is going. When I got my crossword back, the little bugger had thrown out all of my Across clues and replaced them with cryptics*. Worse, she** had gotten ...