Author Archives: gmdirect

The Nerd Potluck Looms Large!

Posted on by
Reply

Aloha, fellow puzzlers and solvers galore!

Last week, I mentioned that I’d be attending a Nerd Potluck this coming weekend. It’s a celebration of all things puzzle, game, and nerd-centric, and I’ve been working on a new word puzzle to challenge my fellow attendees.

And as promised, you’re getting the first peek at it. I call the puzzle “Word Personals.”

Word Personals is based on the singular parlance of personal ads and dating slang.

Your standard personal ad looks something like this:

SWM, 31, brown hair, brown eyes, calf muscles of a Roman gladiator, enjoys full contact rock-paper-scissors and the films of Ben Stiller…

The breakdown is pretty simple.

–SWM is short for single white male in standard personal ad jargon. SWF would be single white female. (SBF would be single black female, MWM would be married white male, etc.)
–That’s followed by the person’s age and a brief description.

So my idea was to employ this format, but make the ads themselves word puzzles to be decoded by a solver.

Here’s an example:

SWF, 6, one letter once, one letter twice, and one letter three times, enjoys hanging out and giving people the slip.

Again, the breakdown is pretty simple.

–SW stands for “single word.” (If it was “MW,” it would be “multiple words,” indicating a phrase.)
–The next letter, F, stands for “features,” indicating that characteristics of the word will follow. (If it was “M,” it would be “means,” indicating a definition, synonym, or hint toward the definition would follow.)
–The number that follows is the number of letters in the word or phrase.
–Finally, there’s the description, which is in two parts. The first part, as indicated by “F,” gives some characteristics of the word. The second part is a jokey clue to provide further information.

And there you have it, Word Personals. I’m sure you’ve solved the example one already, so how about we check out a few more?

1) SWM, 8, power or vigor, enjoys vowel conservation and Herculean qualities.

2) MWF, 11, can read backwards and forwards, enjoys formal greetings and the days before holidays.

3) SWF, 4, goes from one syllable to three by adding a letter, enjoys taking car trips in the past tense.

4) MWM, 9, stutter-stop way of talking, enjoys frequent breaks and a certain British inspector.

I admit, It’s a bit esoteric, but I like the concept quite a bit, and I think it’ll be a hit.

Naturally, your thoughts are welcome. What’s confusing? What works? Is it too prone to alternates? Too easy? Too difficult? Your input would be very much appreciated.

In the meantime, I hope Word Personals provided you with a bit of brain-teasing today. So keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you next time. Wish me luck!

Warming up for a Nerd Potluck

Posted on by
2

Greetings, fellow puzzlers and enigma enthusiasts!

I’m attending a Nerd Potluck next weekend, and I could use your input.

Now, for the uninitiated, a Nerd Potluck is a party where everyone brings something suitably nerdy. It could be a game, a puzzle, a brain teaser, or something else that fits the nerd party aesthetic.

This is a natural extension of other parties my friends and I used to throw. We’re all gamers, RPG fans, and puzzle nerds.

No matter what the occasion — birthday, homecoming, reunion, Thursday — I can’t remember a party that didn’t include a few rounds of Mafia or a spirited game of the trivia/Truth-or-Dare hybrid my friend Dan invented, Who Wants to Eat a Millionnaire?

Last time we threw a Nerd Potluck, my contribution was a handful of Politos, jokey off-kilter summaries of movie plots.

(I based the idea on the writings of Rick Polito, a writer for the Marin Independent Journal in California, who is known for his sharp single-sentence summaries of films.)

Example: Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.

Answer: The Wizard of Oz

How great is that?! The answer is very. Very great.

So, I opted to come up with some of my own to challenge my fellow puzzle-loving movie buff pals. Here’s a sampling of them:

–A suicidal man has an intense hallucinatory psychotic episode, then is saved by a timely family-organized intervention.

–The minds and opinions of a group of prisoners are gradually changed by a charismatic knife-wielding stranger.

–An improperly supervised gang of miscreants, when left to their own devices, commit acts of trespassing, property damage, assault, consort with known criminals and pillage historical artifacts for their own gain.

–A group of friends scatters and licks their wounds after bullies wreck their secret snow fort.

(Feel free to leave guesses in the comments section. I’ll follow Eric’s example, and ask you for one answer per person. I’ll post the answers in the comment section later!)

It was a fairly popular exercise in outside-the-box thinking, but it feels a bit “been-there, done-that.”

This time around, I’m working on something new, more brain teaserish than anything else.

It’s not quite ready; I’m still ironing out a few kinks stylewise. (If I have the chance, I’ll post it here next week, a few days before the Nerd Potluck. I’m sure your input would be helpful.)

But a ladyfriend of mine will be attending, and she has a different challenge in mind.

She wants to make a puzzle-themed dessert.

Naturally, I suggested strawberry shortzcake, but she was considering tiramisudoku. (I know, a puzzle fan with a sweet tooth. She’s awesome.)

So, any suggestions for puzzly dishes? Cryptograham crackers could be fun, but who wants to do all that writing in icing?

Oh well, if not, no worries. I’m sure she’ll come up with something. (Hopefully I will too!)

But in the meantime, thanks for reading. Keep calm and puzzle on, gentle readers!

What is a puzzle?

Posted on by
1

In the very first post on this blog, Corey raised the question of how you define a puzzle. Allow me to attempt to tackle that thorny topic.

Puzzles have always been popular, but with the advent of smartphone and tablet apps and games, they’ve been freed from newspapers, magazines, computer screens, and video game consoles, making them more accessible than ever before.

Sudoku puzzles, crosswords, Words with Friends, and Cut the Rope are just a few examples both new and old that are available with a few simple dabs at a touchscreen. It’s effortlessly easy to indulge in a bit of puzzle fun these days.

But that does raise the question of what separates a puzzle or puzzle game from a game with puzzly aspects.

G4 recently did a countdown of the Top 100 Video Games of All-Time, and Angry Birds (#49), Myst (#47), Words with Friends (#99), and Tetris (#5) all made the list. Those are all wildly different games that could fall under the umbrella of “puzzle game”.

Now, I might be splitting hairs here, but I think there’s a big difference between puzzle games and games with puzzle elements.

Puzzle games have a definite solution that can be reached by a combination of the information you’re given and your own cleverness.

The PC game Myst is a terrific example of this. Myst is a sprawling series of mechanical and visual puzzles scattered across a deserted (and gorgeously rendered) island, and the puzzle-solving is the be-all, end-all purpose of the game.

A rich storyline emerges as you solve the various puzzles, and information pertaining to that storyline ties into some of the puzzles you solve. This aspect of the game is quite similar to crosswords and other clued puzzles, which often require a knowledge of cultural references and other contextual information in order to complete the puzzle.

Of course, you could approach virtually any game from a puzzle standpoint — how do I get Mario up there? How do I get Solid Snake past this guard without being spotted? How do I escape these zombies with only a wooden kitchen spoon at my disposal?! — but that doesn’t make that game a puzzle game.

Puzzle games aren’t simply a matter of fast reaction time or skillful button-mashing, they’re a matter of mental agility and dexterity as well.

For example, both Halo and Tetris require a speedy response time and a sense of strategic planning. (At least, they do if you want to last more than 30 seconds in either game.)

But since Tetris is basically an extremely aggressive jigsaw puzzle, the puzzle solving itself IS the game experience, while puzzle solving — obtaining weapons, neutralizing enemy forces, capturing the flag, etc. — is only one aspect of the gameplay in Halo. You could play for hours just fragging your buddies or tooling around in the Warthog and thoroughly enjoy the game without a single puzzly moment occurring.

Essentially, puzzle games are dependent on the puzzle aspect to be enjoyable, while games with puzzle elements are not.

Consider Angry Birds. It’s basically a simple physics puzzle with some delightful slapstick thrown in.

You could take your time and figure out your best shot at knocking down each structure in one blow, but there’s an element of uncertainty there, because you have to guess not only the best launch angle and velocity for a particular bird, but how the structure will react to that bird.

You can’t complete a level in Angry Birds with your mental agility alone, and that separates it from other puzzle games.

You can also just revel in the fun of hurling birds into pigs and knocking stuff down, which requires no puzzle skills whatsoever. The puzzle element isn’t crucial to the gameplay.

In the spirit of Shakespeare, the puzzle’s the thing!

This distinction between puzzle games and games with puzzle elements fits all sorts of two-player games as well.

Although achieving the high score and/or defeating your opponent are the real goals of puzzle games like Words with Friends, the puzzle aspect remains crucial to your success. Sure, it’s immensely satisfying to foil that jerk who tried to steal the triple-word score after you laid the groundwork for it, but you can’t accomplish that without your anagramming and word placement skills.

(Sorry, Mom, I didn’t mean that! You’re not a jerk!)

Like Words with Friends, PuzzleNation’s two-player games (Starspell, Guessworks, Tanglewords, and Crossword Raiders) have you competing with your opponent for points, but again, solving the puzzle is what completes the game.

In fact, in all but Crossword Raiders, each move by your opponent offers you another clue toward solving the puzzle, whether it’s a letter pattern you hadn’t noticed in Starspell, additional letters in a clue or a quote in Guessworks, or letters that help you place your own words in Tanglewords.

On the other hand, Battleship — the classic competition to find and destroy your opponent’s naval fleet, not the alien-laden cinematic dud — has a puzzly appearance, but it’s mostly a guessing game. Once you have a few data points (either white-peg misses or red-peg hits), you can try to deduce where your opponent’s ships are, but there’s no concrete puzzle-solving there.

Especially when your brother keeps moving the pieces. He said it was more realistic that way. “Real ships move!”

Grrr.

Sorry, I digress.

It may seem like a minor thing, quibbling over whether something is a puzzle game or not. But it’s not a minor thing.

This is a puzzle blog. If we’re going to write about puzzles here, if we’re going to share our opinions on them and discuss them with you and delve into all things puzzle-wonderful, it’s important to have a set definition, so you know exactly what we mean when we talk about a great puzzle game (like Valve’s Portal) or a game with fun puzzly features (like the Ratchet & Crank series).

So there we go. Thanks for indulging me, and I look forward to the inevitable semantic debates that are sure to follow. =)

Keep calm, puzzle on (or puzzle-game on, or even game-with-puzzle-elements on, if you like), and I’ll catch you next time.