Artist presents puzzles for Korea-based audience

The Korea Times

The Korea Times

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Thu, September 28, 2023 | 06:36

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Artist presents puzzles for Korea-based audience

Posted : 2022-03-01 17:40

Updated : 2022-03-01 17:40

Kevin Nickolai / Courtesy of Kevin Nickolai

By Jon Dunbar

For Kevin Nickolai, puzzles are one of the basic needs of life.

"Solving puzzles is my oxygen," he told The Korea Times. "I have happy little fireworks shoot off in my brain when I complete them. I'm a gamer through and through. And I'm always on the hunt for new fun games to play. I think we all are."

But he doesn't stop there: he also likes making puzzles of various kinds. "I have a lot more fun making puzzles because I'm just solving it in reverse with my own creative twists," he said. "After a particularly satisfying puzzle design I don't hear the fireworks shoot off, but I do hear a voice say, 'You rascally devil!' I love that voice."

He started out at age 9 back in Saint Louis, Missouri, by making mazes, eventually contributing his mazes to his high school newspaper. "But puzzling really kicked up one day when I was staring at the Periodic Table and I was trying to make an anagram out of different elements," he said. "I started barraging my coworkers with these word puzzles and offered prizes to anyone who could solve them."

Eventually, he published a book containing 74 of his puzzles through his university press, titled "Chaos and Love: 74 of Kevin's Puzzlers."

Then he came up with a new style of puzzle, as seen attached to this article.

"While making crossword puzzles for my coworkers I tried to challenge myself and make perfect word squares," he said. "These are crossword puzzles with no black squares in them. A famous example is the Sator Square which is also palindromic. The problem is that construction of a perfect square gets unwieldy the bigger you get. My solution was to literally cut the corners out of the equation. So instead of a Sator Square, I have more of a Sator Cross. Instead of clues, I wanted to guide the solver with symbols and have some sort of payoff at the end with a coded message."

One of Kevin Nickolai's word puzzles / Courtesy of Kevin Nickolai

Each of his puzzles may look either easy or confusing at first approach, but appearances may be deceiving. Doing a crossword without clues sounds tough, but on the bright side it challenges the individual's creativity and vocabulary, rather than trivial knowledge.

There are a few tricks to bring the solution closer within reach. It's easiest to start by looking for words ending with "NG," since "I" must be the preceding letter. Another helpful trick is to seek out repetition of letters, and also patterns of vowels. In the election-themed puzzle included today, the easiest starting point is the middle horizontal word, beginning with "WE" and ending with "NG."

A pitfall of solving these is when you finish everything, but the decoded phrase makes no sense. In that case, it's the fault of the person who put the words together, and in this case, that's you. When filling out the blocks, it's a good idea to leave extra room or do it in pencil, because you might need to erase or cross off wrong letters and keep going.

As his wordplay comes into focus, you may experience fireworks, or maybe just an exasperated groan as you get a glimpse inside the mind of the "rascally devil" who put this puzzle before you.

Nickolai said he tried to make his puzzles "quirky and compelling."

"I think some people will encounter these puzzles and just see random gobbledygook and throw their hands up," he said. "But for others if it has an engaging enough design or weird enough question it might pull someone in far enough to cut through the noise and pull out the music within."

Nickolai moved to Korea originally in 2005, working in Incheon and then Seoul before returning to the U.S. to live in Chicago, where he taught English to adults and performed improv with The Second City.

After his wife had a baby, they found themselves juggling childcare with four different jobs. Seeking something more stable, he returned to Korea with his family in 2013, this time living in Daejeon. He's a member of the Daejeon Arts Collective, which will have its spring exhibition next month.

"I typically do poster art or booklets, but this time I'm doing an installation piece," he said. "I intend to debut a new board game I've been working on called Blitzograms. It's a cross between Boggle, Yahtzee and Risk. I'm hoping I can get a few people to play against me on opening night. Please come on down! We'd love to have you!"

jdunbar@koreatimes.co.kr