PM: How did you get into GAMES magazine?

BB: I had heard of GAMES through Ron Hoeflin and 1 or 2 other places, but had never seen a copy of it. I bought a copy at a newsstand, and sent them a copy of my Chimera's Conundrums. They bought it outright, and I got $200 out of the deal, plus a link to my old web site. I was so excited - this was around April of 1998, with the puzzles appearing in the August issue. They didn't respond to a few other things I sent them, and I only once approached a book publisher, who wasn't immediately interested, so I gave up. I had my chess variant game Chivalrous Attrition appear in Variant Chess, the Journal of the British Chess Variants Society, and my Chimera High Ability Riddle Test was published in several places, but none of those things were for money.

PM: Which of your puzzles are you most proud of?

BB: Chimera's Conundrums and the CHART, and you'll find more like that if you dig through Puzz.com. Some of the IQ Brain Teasers I think are pretty good. alliqtests.com is a mix of stuff by Terry Stickels and myself, but most of the analogies problems and a good percentage of the timed test problems are exclusively mine, and I think a lot of those are pretty good.

PM: What puzzles do you personally like to solve?

BB: Good lateral thinking puzzles. Some of Lloyd King's, and there are some great ones on the (long defunct) Mobius Test and some tests by Paul Cooijmans, including the Cooijmans Intelligence Test. I enjoy some mathematical problems, and non-verbal (culture fair) matrix and other types of puzzles. I have also enjoyed crosswords, especially those in The Ultimate Clever Puzzle Book - those crosswords are from the 1950s and 60s, and I seem to enjoy the style a bit more. I like true "brain teasers" of almost all kinds. Sudoku, kakuro, etc. I have not really tried. I guess I'm strictly old school. Although, I do have a section on Puzz.com devoted to sudoku and even wrote the Foreword to a book of sudoku puzzles.

PM: What projects are you working on now?

BB: I think I covered most of them already. For a while marketing-related efforts have taken up large amounts of time, as have family life and my other hobbies (including Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which I spend a few hours each week doing, with plenty of black eyes and other bruises and minor injuries to prove it). My goal for alliqtests.com, for example, is to eventually host 100 or 101 tests, and I would probably consider that a "stopping point" for that site. I also enjoy (especially older) science fiction and pulp/noir movies and novels (I have, for example, read all of the novels in the HardCaseCrime.com series), and may eventually build a site out of that hobby. A friend in Mensa has written reviews of many classic crime novels, and we have talked a little of possibly collaborating on such a project at some point.

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