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Iron Puzzler post: the event
Iron Puzzler was a pretty neat event.
The idea was: from 9am Saturday until midnight, groups would work to create puzzles. Each group had to create a paper-based puzzle (one that could be wholly duplicated on a copier), and a non-paper-based puzzle (one that could not). They had to incorporate some "secret ingredients" that we were told at the start of the event (which prevented people from going overboard creating puzzles beforehand, in theory). Afterwards, from midnight until 3pm Sunday (which turned into 1am-4pm with collating time), we'd have to solve as many puzzles as we could.
A group's score was based on:
1. Puzzle-solving score
2. How many people solved your puzzles
3. How people rated your puzzles
Since I know nobody's really going to read most of this except Matt and maybe Jeff, I'll say straight up: our team placed third overall in solving and third overall in puzzle rating, but we had an issue with solvability such that everyone solved our paper puzzle and only four groups out of thirteen solved our non-paper puzzle.
(The way the solvability scoring worked, it was on a curve where ideally you wanted 8-11 teams to solve it, 10 being ideal. Nobody solving it was bad, everybody solving it wasn't particularly good.)
Our paper puzzle was a crossword that Jeff and Jonobie wrote, and our non-paper puzzle was a Lego-word-building-unbuilding puzzle that... I forget who came up with it originally but Mike definitely pushed it through.
I didn't actually get there until like noon or so, because I suck. Jason called and woke me up at 10:30am to tell me that the secret ingredients for the event were Mercury, a spoon, a clock, and the letter L. Fun.
Anyway, we spent Saturday making the puzzles. Jeff and Jonobie worked on their crossword; then they playtested it on us and we found a few errors, so they spent the rest of the day redoing it. Mike and Drew and Andy and Jamie had come up with some arrangements and clues for words for the Lego puzzle; I ended up stepping in for that for a while and helped rearrange things and come up with words/clues.
Mid-afternoon, Jason had been working on an alternate paper puzzle -- to be honest, I don't actually even remember exactly how it worked, it was some form of before-and-after, only the clues were way too hard. So I decided to work on an alternate paper puzzle by myself, and using "spoon" as inspiration came up with the one in the previous post. Everyone else said it was too easy, of course, which it was.
But Mike and Drew and Jason and I went to Manzana's at Bell Square for dinner (after they went to the Lego store to buy some supplies for our puzzle) and the entire time we sat there coming up with new spoonerisms. Soon, we'd expanded it to be multiple layers -- after solving the first spoonerisms you got a second set of letters/phrases which you also had to solve by spoonerism, then combine those, then spoonerize them as well (as per a hint in the flavor text), and blam.
Thing is, in the end we just went with the Fords' crossword, especially after they worked so hard to redo it and make the way the secret ingredients worked into the puzzle a lot clearer. (In retrospect maybe they didn't need to do that, oops. I dunno.)
So we turned in our puzzles and went to the Augusta cafeteria, where we saw all the other puzzle people, and we had to do some silly true/false things about spiders and snakes and alligators and whatnot, and eat a lot of gummy candy. (The sad part is, we didn't even know we were supposed to go there, and had been like "why hasn't Jamie come back yet?" and THEN saw the email telling us to come there. So he ended up eating a whole bunch of gummy candy before we got there, and wasn't too happy about it.)
Eventually all the silly people in chef hats had collated puzzles and gave us a huge box full of them, which we took back upstairs, and got started.
I'd say the going was pretty fast for the few hours. Unfortunately, I started feeling really sick around 6am and took a nap on the floor. I never quite woke up. Every time I woke up I felt sicker... so I wasn't getting good sleep and I wasn't feeling good awake. That sucked. I think I came to fuller strength around 1pm and tried to help people in the last few hours.
There were a LOT of spoonerism puzzles, so it worked out well that we hadn't used ours. There were one or two other crosswords, a map puzzle, a few clock puzzles, etc, I'm forgetting a lot of the paper ones at the moment. The non-paper ones were more interesting. There was one that was a spiral entirely made out of spoons, which was kind of neat. One puzzle gave us a cereal box with puzzles on the outside (and it turned out, a bowl and a spoon in a bag with it, but we didn't see that part until later, we just took the box out of the bag, oops). One non-paper puzzle was a tray of cookies with clock faces on them with the note "Feel free to eat me / Once you complete me". One puzzle was a CD of a text adventure game (to which I immediately said, "Ah, that's gotta be Jason Liszka's", and I was right). One was a CD that you had to figure out the password for, which absolutely nobody solved. One appeared to be a paper puzzle at first -- you had to solve a sports score logic puzzle and it said "go to the foosball tables in building 42", and the tables were set up in a way to represent letters (but it didn't really work). One puzzle had a clock face with spoons for hands that you had to align. One puzzle was of these white-and-black squares which came together in one way, gave you a location, you got a second paper and put them together in another way. That was pretty cool. Then a bunch of the puzzles were actually made out of spoons. And one was made out of forks with the tines broken off. One was a deck of cards where you had to play through a game of Spoons, and one involved going to a room and figuring out things from a series of posters.
I think that's it for them. 13 puzzles plus our lego one.
Our lego one was neat, you got clued in for words, like, say, "sundial", and that indicated to make a word out of legos with three normal letters, two ascenders, one normal, and another ascender. Or "bigben", which involved a descender as well. The words were clued with colors, and the way you knew which pieces to use for them was by the four-color theorem combined with the wordforms. We had three layers -- one layer with spoon clues, one with mercury clues, and one with clock clues. Each layer had one outlier to it, a color-letter clue, like if you had a blue J, that'd be "blue jay", or if you had a gray L, that'd be "grail". Overall once the lego block was built and taken apart according to directions, there was a particular letter you'd see built out of a particular color, and that was the overall solution. Only four teams solved it though. But I think we rated pretty highly on the scale of coolness, so that made up for it.
(It was funny rating puzzles afterwards because when the cookie faces one came up, I was like "we have to give this one a 20 for 'tastiness', those cookies were really good")
Anyway, the cool part about this was getting to make puzzles and also to see what other people came up with. An annoying part in solving, though, was thinking too much about the secret ingredients... sometimes it'd be like "goddamnit, where are they?" and you'd be thinking the puzzle out that way, second-guessing it.
I had fun, but I wish I hadn't felt so useless for about six hours there.
Oh well, I'm still looking forward to the real PH in february.
After IP was over I came home and went to sleep, slept twelve hours or so, still felt like crap when I woke up. Dammit!
The idea was: from 9am Saturday until midnight, groups would work to create puzzles. Each group had to create a paper-based puzzle (one that could be wholly duplicated on a copier), and a non-paper-based puzzle (one that could not). They had to incorporate some "secret ingredients" that we were told at the start of the event (which prevented people from going overboard creating puzzles beforehand, in theory). Afterwards, from midnight until 3pm Sunday (which turned into 1am-4pm with collating time), we'd have to solve as many puzzles as we could.
A group's score was based on:
1. Puzzle-solving score
2. How many people solved your puzzles
3. How people rated your puzzles
Since I know nobody's really going to read most of this except Matt and maybe Jeff, I'll say straight up: our team placed third overall in solving and third overall in puzzle rating, but we had an issue with solvability such that everyone solved our paper puzzle and only four groups out of thirteen solved our non-paper puzzle.
(The way the solvability scoring worked, it was on a curve where ideally you wanted 8-11 teams to solve it, 10 being ideal. Nobody solving it was bad, everybody solving it wasn't particularly good.)
Our paper puzzle was a crossword that Jeff and Jonobie wrote, and our non-paper puzzle was a Lego-word-building-unbuilding puzzle that... I forget who came up with it originally but Mike definitely pushed it through.
I didn't actually get there until like noon or so, because I suck. Jason called and woke me up at 10:30am to tell me that the secret ingredients for the event were Mercury, a spoon, a clock, and the letter L. Fun.
Anyway, we spent Saturday making the puzzles. Jeff and Jonobie worked on their crossword; then they playtested it on us and we found a few errors, so they spent the rest of the day redoing it. Mike and Drew and Andy and Jamie had come up with some arrangements and clues for words for the Lego puzzle; I ended up stepping in for that for a while and helped rearrange things and come up with words/clues.
Mid-afternoon, Jason had been working on an alternate paper puzzle -- to be honest, I don't actually even remember exactly how it worked, it was some form of before-and-after, only the clues were way too hard. So I decided to work on an alternate paper puzzle by myself, and using "spoon" as inspiration came up with the one in the previous post. Everyone else said it was too easy, of course, which it was.
But Mike and Drew and Jason and I went to Manzana's at Bell Square for dinner (after they went to the Lego store to buy some supplies for our puzzle) and the entire time we sat there coming up with new spoonerisms. Soon, we'd expanded it to be multiple layers -- after solving the first spoonerisms you got a second set of letters/phrases which you also had to solve by spoonerism, then combine those, then spoonerize them as well (as per a hint in the flavor text), and blam.
Thing is, in the end we just went with the Fords' crossword, especially after they worked so hard to redo it and make the way the secret ingredients worked into the puzzle a lot clearer. (In retrospect maybe they didn't need to do that, oops. I dunno.)
So we turned in our puzzles and went to the Augusta cafeteria, where we saw all the other puzzle people, and we had to do some silly true/false things about spiders and snakes and alligators and whatnot, and eat a lot of gummy candy. (The sad part is, we didn't even know we were supposed to go there, and had been like "why hasn't Jamie come back yet?" and THEN saw the email telling us to come there. So he ended up eating a whole bunch of gummy candy before we got there, and wasn't too happy about it.)
Eventually all the silly people in chef hats had collated puzzles and gave us a huge box full of them, which we took back upstairs, and got started.
I'd say the going was pretty fast for the few hours. Unfortunately, I started feeling really sick around 6am and took a nap on the floor. I never quite woke up. Every time I woke up I felt sicker... so I wasn't getting good sleep and I wasn't feeling good awake. That sucked. I think I came to fuller strength around 1pm and tried to help people in the last few hours.
There were a LOT of spoonerism puzzles, so it worked out well that we hadn't used ours. There were one or two other crosswords, a map puzzle, a few clock puzzles, etc, I'm forgetting a lot of the paper ones at the moment. The non-paper ones were more interesting. There was one that was a spiral entirely made out of spoons, which was kind of neat. One puzzle gave us a cereal box with puzzles on the outside (and it turned out, a bowl and a spoon in a bag with it, but we didn't see that part until later, we just took the box out of the bag, oops). One non-paper puzzle was a tray of cookies with clock faces on them with the note "Feel free to eat me / Once you complete me". One puzzle was a CD of a text adventure game (to which I immediately said, "Ah, that's gotta be Jason Liszka's", and I was right). One was a CD that you had to figure out the password for, which absolutely nobody solved. One appeared to be a paper puzzle at first -- you had to solve a sports score logic puzzle and it said "go to the foosball tables in building 42", and the tables were set up in a way to represent letters (but it didn't really work). One puzzle had a clock face with spoons for hands that you had to align. One puzzle was of these white-and-black squares which came together in one way, gave you a location, you got a second paper and put them together in another way. That was pretty cool. Then a bunch of the puzzles were actually made out of spoons. And one was made out of forks with the tines broken off. One was a deck of cards where you had to play through a game of Spoons, and one involved going to a room and figuring out things from a series of posters.
I think that's it for them. 13 puzzles plus our lego one.
Our lego one was neat, you got clued in for words, like, say, "sundial", and that indicated to make a word out of legos with three normal letters, two ascenders, one normal, and another ascender. Or "bigben", which involved a descender as well. The words were clued with colors, and the way you knew which pieces to use for them was by the four-color theorem combined with the wordforms. We had three layers -- one layer with spoon clues, one with mercury clues, and one with clock clues. Each layer had one outlier to it, a color-letter clue, like if you had a blue J, that'd be "blue jay", or if you had a gray L, that'd be "grail". Overall once the lego block was built and taken apart according to directions, there was a particular letter you'd see built out of a particular color, and that was the overall solution. Only four teams solved it though. But I think we rated pretty highly on the scale of coolness, so that made up for it.
(It was funny rating puzzles afterwards because when the cookie faces one came up, I was like "we have to give this one a 20 for 'tastiness', those cookies were really good")
Anyway, the cool part about this was getting to make puzzles and also to see what other people came up with. An annoying part in solving, though, was thinking too much about the secret ingredients... sometimes it'd be like "goddamnit, where are they?" and you'd be thinking the puzzle out that way, second-guessing it.
I had fun, but I wish I hadn't felt so useless for about six hours there.
Oh well, I'm still looking forward to the real PH in february.
After IP was over I came home and went to sleep, slept twelve hours or so, still felt like crap when I woke up. Dammit!