Lateral thinking riddle examples (with solutions)

Here are a few classic lateral thinking riddles so you can see how they work. Read the situation, imagine the yes/no questions you would ask, then open the solution. These are famous, public-domain puzzles: the CantaStories stories, on the other hand, are always new and written for you.

1. The man in the lift

A man lives on the tenth floor. Every morning he takes the lift down to the ground floor to go to work. In the evening he rides up to the seventh floor and walks the last three floors on foot. Why?

Show the solution

The man is short: he can only reach the button for the seventh floor. On rainy days, though, he has an umbrella and manages to press the tenth. (Variant: when someone else is in the lift, he asks them to press ten.)

2. The two drinks

Two people walk into a bar and order the same drink, on ice. One drinks it slowly and is fine; the other drinks it quickly and dies. Why?

Show the solution

The poison was in the ice, not in the liquid. The slow drinker let the ice melt, releasing the poison bit by bit: they swallowed enough to die. The fast drinker finished before the ice had melted, and with it the poison. The trick is to look for the cause where nobody looks: in a detail that is normally taken for harmless.

3. The closed room

A man is found dead in the middle of a field with a closed backpack on his shoulders. There are no footprints around him. What happened?

Show the solution

The "backpack" was a parachute that never opened. The man fell from the sky: that is why there are no footprints around him.

How to play a lateral thinking riddle

The best part is getting there on your own, by asking questions. On CantaStories you don't have to imagine the answers: there is an AI narrator that knows the truth and answers Yes, No or Not relevant to every question, until you have rebuilt the whole story.

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