Braaak

I Should Maybe Actually Read Some Stephen King Eventually

A week ago, I saw on G+ that a friend of mine was planning a Halloween party. "I should maybe write puzzles for that," I thought. And then an obvious connection between the host's first name and horror clicked in my brain, and I realized I couldn't not write puzzles for it.

I tried to skew the difficulty towards the relatively easy, since I hadn't met most of the people who would be there, and thought they probably wouldn't be experienced solvers; I was pleasantly surprised to learn that most if not all of them have been participating in Seattle-area puzzle events for years.

The puzzles can be found here. Enjoy!
Braaak

Man, It's Been Awhile

For the heck of it, here's (a revised form of) a meta that went with a proposed 2010 MIT Hunt theme that didn't get picked, and which can't really be used in an actual hunt anymore for reasons that will become obvious upon solving.

BLIZZARD
CHARGE
DRILL
FLASH
GUTS
HARD
ICE
METAL
NAPALM
RING
TOMAHAWK
TOP
puzzles

CiSRA Puzzle Competition 2011 Recommendations

The 2011 CiSRA Puzzle Competition happened last week. Teams were limited to four people or fewer, which meant that several of our usual Plugh crew had to splinter off and form Xyzzy, a second team.

It went... well.

If you missed the competition but are interested in trying some of the puzzles, here're my recommendations (most links go to PDFs):

Art Heist: Brilliant idea, well-executed. I had to laugh at the absurdity of including the Mondrian. If you click one link in this post, make it this one. (Be warned, though - the final step may be significantly harder if you aren't Australian or have Australian friends to look at your results.)

Togetherness: One of my favorite moments from this year's competition was making a cheesy joke about this puzzle to my teammates, and then ten seconds later discovering that it was exactly the cheesy joke the constructor was going for. Maybe the best argument I've yet seen in favor of metas that allow for whatever answer the constructor needs.

Puzzle Competition Reminder: A puzzle that's about a second, intentionally awful puzzle. Only you never see the bad puzzle - you only see the series of emails in which the constructor and editor refine it, giving you just enough information to reconstruct it. Fun!

Latin Pipes II: Actually, I ought to recommend its slightly easier cousin Latin Pipes from last year instead - I've been hacking away at this one off and on for about a week now, and still haven't finished it. (Thankfully we had motris on hand for this during the actual competition.) It's an (as far as I know) original type of logic puzzle of the sort that makes puzzle authors (or at least me) go, "Why didn't I think of that?"

The Metapuzzle: I'm impressed at the amount of work that must have gone into writing the meta this year - it's essentially its own smaller-scale Hunt, a set of twenty mini-puzzle unlocked by solving the regular ones.
Braaak

Surprise!

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I set aside the most recent issue of P&A to serve as in-car entertainment during the long road trip down from Seattle to San Francisco for jedusor's 21st birthday party. What I failed to mention was that I'd slipped these into the packet for her to discover:
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(As it turned out, we were running on about three hours' sleep during the actual road trip, and nobody was much in the mood for P&A at the time, so the moment where she flipped through P&A and found the puzzles didn't happen; I just took it out and handed it to her. Still, though - best wrapping paper ever.)
Braaak

(no subject)

This bit of puzzle design philosophy popped into my head during a conversation with thatwesguy  this weekend, and I wanted to get it down so I wouldn't forget it:

All things equal, a puzzle that is reasonably solvable without Internet research is more satisfying than one that isn't.