Puzzle Type Explanations

Question

This question may have already been answered, but is there a running list of the different types of puzzles (outside of tags).

Example: Riley, Grandfather, Teapot.

But these types don't have the Riley, Teapot, Etc tag. Are these just fan titles?

Over time I can get an idea of what these types of puzzles are, however, it would be nice for newer users to be able to see what each of those mean.

Thoughts?

Answer 1

I don't know of any list of them. From time to time it's suggested that we make a new tag for one of these temporarily-popular types of riddle, but so far there's never been a consensus that that would be a good idea.

Usually these things are popular only for a fairly short period. As GentlePurpleRain says in comments above, you can search for "Riley" or whatever and get a pretty good idea of what's what.

In case this question gets found by future puzzled searchers, here are brief descriptions of the specific question-types mentioned here:

• A "Riley riddle" (named for the user who first posted one here) gives cryptic descriptions of the start, middle, and end of a word (they may overlap), and of the word as a whole; the puzzle is to figure out the word.
• A "teapot riddle" (named for an old parlour-game puzzle that worked in a similar way) gives cryptic descriptions of two or more homonyms (i.e., different meanings of the same string of letters); the puzzle is to figure out the word whose meanings they are.
• A "Grandfather riddle" usually consists of a number of assertions of the form "my grandfather likes X but doesn't like Y", and the puzzle is to figure out what more or less implausible criterion is being used to divide the Xs from the Ys.