tablesaw | Intercoastal Altercations. (Reply)

What follows are specific notes on the puzzles in Intercoastal Altercations IV. General notes are in another post. This post contains spoilers.

Boston Common. (Word Search) I didn't work on this in real time, but I listened as Elfman and Artistry did. The solving process sounded very natural; finding a few random words, not connecting them to the word list, noticing that sets of words clue other words, noticing that the clued words are in alphabetical order. And from there, everything moved smoothly. I worked on this myself afterward, and it was pretty fun.
Public Garden. (Cryptograms) This was our team's last solution. I was impatient and attacked the first cryptogram with a pattern search. Shortly thereafter, cramerica mentioned that we shouldn't be using electronic references. Oops. So, I solved the second one naturally before getting stuck. I came back to it later and still couldn't crack the last two crypts. (I don't really like crypts anymore, so I get impatient with them. Moreover, I really, really, really prefer to do them on a computer.) Getting less patient, I decided to try to work out the final message. I pulled out the final decryption method, but it couldn't create a message that worked for a long time. By this time, all of the puzzles were done, and everyone else had a copy too. Finally, I made up final message that made preliminary sense when plugged back into the crypts. I tried it on the webpage, and we were in the endgame.
Commonwealth Avenue Mall. (Statues) I didn't solve this one in real time, so I don't know how it went, but it seems easy.
Back Bay Fens. (Garden-Themed Variety Cryptic) Kegler and Artistry worked on this one, with occasional shouted answers from the rest of us. It was the last of the "first-round" puzzles to be completed. I was worried it might be a puzzle that weighed down its solvers for too long, but it wasn't. I did this one on my own after the fact and had a good time with it.
Riverway. (Form) After finishing Jamaica Pond, I joined cramerica on this puzzle. He and DeB had worked out most of the answers, but had no idea what to do with them. And he pointed out a strange set of symbols in the instructions that he couldn't make sense of. Luckily, I recognized them as the nifty notation for forms devised by one of the nifty NPL formists. I couldn't remember what they meant, but I knew that they were on the NPL website. So we go to the Forms page, and follow the link about notation . . . and there's nothing there. "Don't worry," I said, "it should be in the paper Guide as well." And so cramerica runs off to get the guide, opens it up to the page and it says: "For more information, visit the website." D'oh! We went to ask foggyb where the page was, since we thought he'd know, but the information was helpfully posted in the public solvers' chat room.

Although it caused some grief for foggyb, I thought it was a cool idea. A hint hiding in plain sight for NPL members. And it was another way to encourage people to pay more attention to forms.

With the shape of the form understood, the completion of the grid was simple, and the puzzle was solved.
Olmstead Park. (Big Picture) I did not solve this one in real time, and I have no idea how it was solved. I think it was solved by a big group of folks on the other side of the room. When I solved it afterward, I didn't really have any idea what was going on, but things fell into place quickly. The pseudo-acrostic was a bit awkward to work with in terms of getting the final message, but it was a nice way to spread out cluing in the words without a simple cryptolist. The items were pretty easy to identify too.
Jamaica Pond. (Fishing Lines) My first puzzle, I solved it solo. It looked more imposing than it was, and I moved through it at a steady rate. Most of the clues weren't too hard, and it was clear how to bait the hooks after only a little while. Thankfully, I kept track of where each word was located, more or less, which made getting the final message much easier.
Arnold Arboretum. (Big Tree Grid) Didn't solve in real time. Haven't solved since. Helped out a little bit at the end by pointing out where part of the final message was.
Franklin Park. (Picnic Items) Didn't solve in real time, only partially solved afterward. cramerica and DeB worked this one through to the end, and I don't know how they got the "Aha!" I know they worked on it for a while. This looks like the weakest puzzle to me, since many of the clues seem very vague. In the end, after we had gotten used to knowing what the final messages looked like, cramerica filled in the blanks.
Franklin Park Zoo. (Animals and Maps) This was solved by the whole team simultaneously, and was incredibly fun. Brainstorming of trying to figure out why so many of the locations looked like Con cities. Wondering about which nom was where. Crossreferencing with the directory. Using the handing Cribbage board as a straightedge. My choice for the best puzzle.

The metapuzzle logic problem was pretty fantastic. I had to sit out most of the first go-round because I was typing out the statements from the puzzles. (Yeah, we should have been keeping track as we went along.) At a certain piont, though, it became clear that we'd made an incorrect assumption, so we went back to the beginning, and I got to follow along. I was also in charge of the locations map, which turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought. The puzzle had a lot of things going for it. The way it interlaced with the puzzles was really excellent. The thief was a wild card, because it was possible for his statements to be a combination of truth and falsehood. But an important trick was realizing that the thief had not written a puzzle. So discovering the thief was actually a process of figuring out who had written each puzzle.

And the solving process was just marvelous in a way that's hard to explain. It started with abstract statements, led through statements about specific people, brought us to the identity of the thief, and ended with a complicated sequence eliminating hiding places for the necklace. Suddenly, my idle work crossing locations off the map became extremely important. Soon, everyone was crowding around as the spots got picked off one by one by one. And then it was done.

It's always tough to design an endgame that gets everyone involved, and I was surprised that this one did it so well. A really wonderful experience.

Intercoastal Altercations.

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