California man ‘beats’ Bejeweled 2

We thought we were pretty hot at Bejeweled 2. But we’ve got nothing on steel contractor Mike Leyde, of Riverside, CA., who managed to score so many points, he broke the game. Leyde became the first person in the world to reach the game’s maximum score of 2,147,482,575, after which the game simply can’t process […]


Story behind gold Monopoly set

Even the most mundane of Monopoly sets contains over $20,000 in fake money — but this custom-made, jewel-encrusted one-off is estimated to be worth over $2 million, and it’s headed, appropriately enough, for Wall Street. San Francisco jeweler Sidney Mobell created the set in the 1980s after he heard about a Monopoly tournament taking place […]


Rubik’s Cube secret revealed

Study uncovers every possible Rubik’s Cube solution An international team of researchers using computer time lent to them by Google has found every way the popular Rubik’s Cube puzzle can be solved, and showed it can always be solved in 20 moves or less. The study is just the latest attempt by Rubik’s enthusiasts to […]


Search for the Guggenheim Treasure

Loot valued at $20 million lies off the coast of Staten Island, and Ken Hayes is on the hunt for the sunken silver bullion Among the old-timers casting for stripers along the Arthur Kill between Staten Island and New Jersey talk tends to return to a few well-thumbed topics. The most intriguing of these is […]


Online gaming law set to take effect

China’s first law to be initiated against the vastly growing online gaming industry is set to take effect Sunday, state-run media reported. The law has been introduced to protect children from internet addiction and inappropriate content. The action comes following the deaths of numerous children at rehabilitation centers for internet-addicted youths last year. The regulation, […]


The Coolest Toys

Judging by the toys featured at the American International Toy Fair, the industry isn’t ready just yet to place huge bets on an economic recovery. Toymakers are sticking with many of the trends that worked last year and are keeping prices low. One big theme is toys that take advantage of the falling prices of […]


Hardest word in hangman game

What’s the hardest word to solve in Hangman? If you guessed some freak of linguistics like “onomatopoeia,” “dybbuk,” or “benzodiazepine,” you’re barking up entirely the wrong arboriform growth. Take it from Jon McLoone, director of business development for Wolfram Research, the company behind popular mathematical modeling tool Mathematica. McLoone was inspired to investigate the English […]


playing card mysteries explained

Unchanged for years, the iconography of modern playing cards make them one of gaming’s most familiar sights. But how much do you really know about the history of the modern 52 (or 54) card deck? 1. We think of playing cards as being as ancient as chess or draughts, but while the general idea of […]