First of all, since there's been so much hype lately about Star Wars, did you know that there is now a Death Star Perplexus? What? You don't know what a Perplexus is? It's a 3-dimensional marble labyrinth game. If you've never played with a perplexus before, you should give it a try!

You may have noticed that last week a new menu option showed up at the top of the page. It's called "Resources" This option was added because we have some new resources that are tough to categorize under any of the other headings, so it made sense to have a place to compile all of these in one place.

Here you'll find our product review blog, our Vortex pages, and the following new features:

Alphabet Lists: This feature was designed to help teachers and parents who are teaching the alphabet to their students/children. You can choose a letter of the alphabet, or a category, depending on whether the alphabet letters are the primary or secondary focus of your teaching.

Population Explosion Simulation is a simulation based on a question Professor Puzzler was asked recently about how quickly the human population could expand.

Gravity Train Simulation is based on an interesting notion of drilling holes through the earth so that trains would be able to pass in a straight line from one city to another. Although the notion seems crazy, and is certainly way beyond our current technological capabilities, it's a fun concept to consider.

Recently we've had a report of a couple of our games no longer functioning properly in some mobile devices. We're working on tracking down the source of those glitches. Some have been repaired, others we're still working on. If you have a mobile device, and one of your favorite games is no longer working the way it used to, please let us know about the trouble you're experiencing. You can contact us most easily by clicking the "Ask Professor Puzzler" link at the bottom of any page. Be sure to mention which game you're having difficulty with, and explain in as much detail as you can, the problem you're having.

Speaking of Professor Puzzler, the "Ask Professor Puzzler" blog is really the new and updated version of an old blog called "Ask Doug" that the site administrator started back in 2005. Over the course of the next few weeks, we'll be taking the contents of that old blog and re-publishing the posts on Professor Puzzler's blog. In most cases, the publication dates will remain in the distant past, so you won't actually see most of the posts crop up on the main page of the Ask Professor Puzzler blog. However, once in awhile, we'll find one we think is particularly interesting, and we'll update it and republish it with the current date. For example, this morning we just republished the blog post about The Diameter of the Internet.

The "Ask Professor Puzzler" blog has become a very popular point on the site in the last few weeks. Yesterday, for example, more than one third of the people visiting The Problem Site were people who were looking for information on the Professor Puzzler blog!

This is great, but at the same time, all those people who came to read one page and then left again - we wish they knew about all the other resources on the site. Accordingly, we added a new game to the Professor Puzzler blog. At the bottom of the first post on each page of the blog there is an inline game called "The Daily Scrambler." It's a very simple game in which you have to unscramble one word. When you finish, the site will show a "Game Over" window that invites the player to try other games on the site. We're hoping this will become an incentive for people to stay longer on the site.

This new game only appears on the Professor Puzzler blog, so if you want to play the new Scrambler each day, add the Professor Puzzler blog to your list of daily visits!

Many of our members come back day after day to play specific games. Your favorite games might be Secret Word and Scrambled Word. Or maybe you prefer logic and strategy games like Trio Match, Entrapment, and Diamond Slide.

And you might be one of our many Daily Puzzle addicts.

Up until just a week ago, if you had multiple games you liked to play, every time you come to the site, you would have to look up each game individually on the game page, and then go back to look up the next one when you were finished the first.

We have added a great new feature called "My Game Sequence." This feature lets you select the games you want to play, in the order you want to play them. Once you've set up your game sequence, all you have to do is click "My Next Game" each time you finish one game, and you'll automatically leap to the next game on your list.

This feature comes with Pro Membership, which gives you access to a lot of other features as well. For a $5.00 one-time fee, that's a great deal!

If you follow us on Facebook, you might have seen our New Year's Day post:

This was a silly way of writing the number 2016 using nothing other than the number two. I made no attempt to make it simple; as a matter of fact, I went out of my way to be absurd about it. But that got me wondering, "What is the shortest way to write 2016 using just twos?" 

Here's one possibility:

2^(22/2) - 2^(2*2 + 2/2)

Here's another:

2222 - 222 + 2^2^2

And maybe you can think of some better ones.

But this caused me to think, "Wouldn't it be interesting if we took the concept of the Operations Game and extended it to creating four-digit numbers, and allowing people to reuse digits."

So the game Express This! was created one week ago today, on New Year's Day. You can find it here: Express This! and here: Express This! Daily.

You will notice that this game has something a little different in the "Game Over" screen; you will see a "play this puzzle again" link, and a "play a different puzzle" link. The goal with this game is to get the lowest score possible, so even if you've solve a puzzle, you may not have found the best solution, so you might want to try the puzzle over again.

(Eventually, if there aren't any issues with this feature, we'll also add it to the Diamond Slide game; we've had requests from some players to add the "play this puzzle again" feature, and it makes a lot of sense to do that!)

The daily puzzle's best score is displayed on the game page, so you can check back throughout the day to see if anyone has beaten your score. You can try the daily repeatedly to get better and better scores. And if someone beats your high score, you have the option of trying again, in order to take the top spot back again. However, to take the top spot back, you must beat the best score, and not just tie it.

Each day you can check back to find out what the best solution for the previous day's puzzle was.

If you find any bugs in the game, please don't hesitate to drop us a message, either on the community forum, or on the "Ask Professor Puzzler" page.

Also, this morning we made a slight change which should affect the end-of-game experience for many of the games. Games which have a small playing board often have scrollbars in the end-of-game message window, because there isn't room for all the messages, achievement ribbons, scores, and play-buttons. With the new tweak, the game board will resize to make room for all of these things. Please let us know if you experience any issues with this feature.