Solving riddles is fun, no question about that. The puzzles, clues, and clever wordplay engage the mind and tickle the funny bone, creating great games and opportunities to spend good moments with friends and family. Yet, how to answer riddles is something that many still have questions about.
Most players, whether kids or adults, just wing it and let common sense guide them. This can be enough when it comes to easy riddles or simple kids’ riddles, but it might fall short when facing more complex challenges or those that require a specific approach.
How to answer riddles: finding the solving path
In our article on how to solve riddles, we explained the strategies and different analytical approaches one can take. However, to reach the first stepping stone for those approaches and strategies, one must first learn how to answer riddles. As with any game, knowing the rules and understanding the gameplay is essential before you can start planning for victory.
Riddles are a type of game — a brain-teasing one at that. This means they are designed to deliberately trick the players’ minds into making simple mistakes and following misleading paths to the solution. Understanding their structure, common ruses, and principles is essential to not let yourself be misguided.
Identify the type of riddle
Riddles can be broken down into two types: enigmas and conundrums. Although these terms are often used interchangeably, their distinction is important to recognize the type of clues and deceptions they might hide.
Conundrums are often short riddles that rely on wordplay and puns within the question, the answer, or both. Therefore, they require a more lighthearted and good-humorous approach as players must try to decode and/or recreate the puns and jokes to solve them. For example, “What is orange and sounds like a parrot?” The answer is “a carrot”. The trick here lies in the use of the article before the noun, leading the players to think the verb refers to the sound a parrot makes, rather than to the pronunciation of the word ‘parrot’. It’s a play on words.
Enigmas are often more complex. They tend to be longer, making them wordier and harder to retain, and employ metaphors, ambiguous statements, and hidden meanings, as well as wordplay and puns like conundrums. For this reason, they are considered especially challenging and are highly appreciated both as brain teasers and as plot devices to elevate a story or tale. It is no coincidence that the famous riddle of the Sphinx is an enigma.
Consider the structure
The structure of the riddle can give you a clue about the type of riddle you are facing and the type of artifices it employs. Pay attention to elements like punctuation, rhymes, uncommon words, misspellings, archaic spellings, sentence length, and anything that might look or sound unusual. All of these can be important clues for solving the riddle. For example, long sentences with many details can be used to bury important information or shift your attention away from the critical parts of the riddle. Rhymes, for instance, can contain a clue in their sounds, or they might be a deception, using misleading words on purpose under the guise of making the riddle rhyme.
Details can certainly make a difference in thinking games.
Check for a context
Context is very important when it comes to how to answer riddles successfully. It can be your most precious hint to uncover the clues in the riddles’ text or guide you to their solutions. For instance, if you are solving chemistry riddles, then you know the answer is likely related to that topic. It is conceivable that the conundrums will employ puns involving scientific names or even the periodic table, while enigmas might require prior knowledge of the subject at hand.
Other categories of riddles can be harder to interpret, but it’s a process the players should nonetheless try. For example, with birthday riddles, given the context, they might consider: is the riddle about the party, the date, or the person?
Context can help you narrow down the world of possibilities a riddle might be referring to and even help you recognize and exclude some red herrings from your analysis,
You are ready to let your top reasoning skills loose
Once you have completed these three steps on how to answer riddles, you are ready to roll up your sleeves and tackle the real task at hand: solving them! Identifying the type of riddle, being aware and on your guard about its structure, and having a clear understanding of its context or possible contexts are the stepping stones to the puzzle-solving challenge ahead. You have finished setting up the game board and reading the instructions, now it’s time to think, reason, infer, decode, and give free rein to your brain!
