On the Amazon (US) page for
one of the Chihuahua puzzle books, Fred D. has left the following review:
I thoroughly enjoy the Chihuahua Nine-Letter Word Puzzles series of books. I would kill for word puzzles that allow you to reuse the letters, as in the 7-letter puzzles ("Spelling Bee'") in the NY Times Magazine Section. But short of that, these keep my mind stimulated.
Naturally this intrigued me. Would he really kill for such puzzles? If I created some, would he kill anyone I nominated?
But what mostly intrigued me was, how much fun are the type of puzzles he's talking about, and would it be worth my while to make such puzzles available, on the web site and/or in books? Have any forumites tried these puzzles, in the
NY Times or elsewhere? How do you like them?
As far as I can gather, the Spelling Bee puzzles are similar to Chihuahua puzzles, but with 7 letters, all different. Each letter can be used as many times in a word as needed. As in Chi, there is a middle letter that must be included (at least once) in each word. Words are a minimum of 5 letters. There are bonus points for any word that uses all 7 letters, and I assume there is always at least one such word possible.
There don't seem to be any books of these puzzles, even though Amazon has many puzzle books by Frank Longo, who is credited in the
NY Times as the creator of the Spelling Bee puzzle. The name Spelling Bee comes, no doubt, from the letter cells being hexagonal, so that the puzzle recalls a beehive.