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Puzzles Galore, Part I.
A browser crash has saved you from reading about the trouble I had getting to the house wherein was held the bimonthly meeting of the Los Angeles members of the National Puzzlers' League. Of the lost text I wrote, here's what it's important to know:
Continuing, in Stage II, a series of trivia questions must be answered, and the correct answers lead to an overall theme. In this particular game, all of the overall themes related to laws in some way. (For example, one set of clues leading to a particular "law" were "The sum," "Current holder of the rights to Scrabble," "Ph.D. requirement," Goes with Tobago," Burr's legal role" and "It begins with 'In the beginning'." Answers below.) The way this game worked threw me for a loop, at first, since the original Stage II game worked a little differently. (The trivia in the original was harder, but the themes were usually a bit easier than the wordplay-based NPL themes).
Eventually, the scores were totaled and someone won. Woohoo! I was on the team with Cramerica, which was the first time I got to talk to him. He's another relatively new member, only a few months older than I, who has moved to LA from Boston. He's a nice guy, and is good with the flats that I write for the Enigma, which was nice for me. The crowd is usually more crossword-oriented.
Panache (who also writes the clues of the Sunday crossword puzzles of the Los Angles Times) followed with a very quick geography quiz, and then we got started on the business meeting. As always, the first order of business was to introduce newcomers. There were two, one was brought from Thousand Oaks by Bluff (our group's most energized organizer) and Sheila (his wife), the other was an old friend of Cramerica. The biggest news was that we won the bid to host the National NPL convention in Los Angeles in 2005, having been cruelly gypped out of hosting it in 2004. There was much speculation on why Boston was selected for the earlier date, ranging from the bitter (apparently some East Coast Krewe felt that holding a convention in Los Angeles after a convention in Indianapolis would be having two consecutive "West" conventions), to the silly (the time change for East Coast members coming to the West Coast would make it difficult for them to stay up late), to the logical (the main organizers of the Boston bid are students who may not be at the same school after three years). Regardless, we set our minds to planning a gathering that would make everyone regret having had to wait an extra year.
We also tentatively arranged the dates and locations for our next few gatherings. I offered my new place as the home of the November 16 gathering, Panache will hold the next in February. There was also more talk of trying to hold a joint meeting between the SoCal and NoCal NPL members somewhere in San Louis Obispo, but it's uncertain if that will happen.
After the meeting, Bluff gave us his new game: The Case of the Heptaphobic Hooligan. I teamed up with Dot and Sheila to solve this set of puzzles, in which a well-known set of seven items (minus one) had to be entered into an unclued grid. This was followed up with an exhausting fill-in-the-country puzzle. Overall, it wasn't that great, but after Sheila left (she had injured her leg and it was giving her too much trouble) and our team absorbed Conundrum and Panache, we actually finished first. As other teams finished, we chatted and waited for Bluff to return from dropping Sheila off at Panache's house (which was nearby and offered quiet rest) before starting the next game.
Make Your Own Treasure Hunt was by far the most interesting game of the day. Artistry ran the game, which was invented by Rastelli from the NoCal group. We divided into two teams and went to different areas of the house. Then each person found a specific object and came up with a clue for it and wrote it on an index card. When everyone was done, the index cards were hidden so as to lead from one clue to the next in a chain. For example, the first clue written by my team was a list (1. Weddings, Funerals, Love Story, Onions, Riot Deterrence), which led to an easy to find object in the house. (Answer below.) Since each person invented his or her own clue, there was a great amount of variety. Not everything worked perfectly (There were only about fifteen minutes to find an object and come up with a good clue) but it was still a lot of fun.
Some of the clues were brief and elegant.
2. I, M, O, T, U, V, W, X, Y. AHA!
3. I hear Herb keeps his hands in front of his face.
Answers below. Others were more complicated. Mine was a two-part flat-based clue.
4. One the front of the card was:
Answer and explanation below. Shorter but still complicated was Cramerica's finale, which my team had to solve:
5. Where you would find the translation of:
This last one gave us a bit of trouble, for reasons I shall explain among the answers.
With just a little bit of time left to go before dinner, we launched into the puzzle sent to us be our friends up north, Iolanthe, Wrybosh, and someone else whose nom I forgot. I also forgot the name of the puzzle. (This should teach me not to leave sheets of puzzles when I leave.) Anyway, this puzzle was a bit more interesting than Bluff's and was framed as a search for truth a la Voltaire's Candide. I teamed up with Music Man, Dot, Elfman, and Debbie, one of the newcomers, to tackle the six-part puzzle. When we divvied up the puzzles, Dot took on the cryptic crossword about the truths of Science Music Man took the word search concealing games from Childhood, Elfman took the puzzle asking for nine-letter words related to Love, and Debbie and I worked on the two-part American History Quiz/Dot-to-Dot puzzle. Debbie and I made short work of our quiz, with occasional input from the others when we were stumped on a question. (Dot remembered that Henry Clay was the Great Compromiser, for example) And as we finished up our dot-to-dot, we struck upon the theme of the answers. Although looking for truth, our puzzling protagonist was finding only lies, our American History dot-to-dot revealed a silhouette of Tricky Dick.
Since we finished first, Debbie and I took over the Love puzzle from Elfman, who had been stumped, while he finished the cryptic with Dot. We didn't make much progress on the clues, but we did manage to find the overall answer for which we were looking. I sussed out where the answer would be, and Debbie, marvelously ignoring the words we had erroneously input, found the great Lie from the world of Love.
Music Man finished shortly afterward with a lie from childhood, and we all focused on the cryptic Dot and Elfman had completed to find the lie of Science hidden within it. When we finally did, we turned our attention to the fifth puzzle. We got nowhere with the fifth puzzle, so we turned to the sixth puzzle. We ultimately found the answer to the meta-puzzle, but it would take us quite a bit longer to discover what the answers to Puzzle five were and where they came from. Regardless, my team came in first, barely, and there was much rejoicing before dinner.
I'm going to continue this later, since I've been writing for about two and a half hours, now. Here are the above promised answers, which should be hidden in invisible text. Highlight the area to read the answer.
Answer to the Stage II set:
If you look at the end of each answer, you'll see the words "ma", "bro", "sis", "dad", "son", and "sis" again. So the "Law" we're looking for is "The Law of Relativity."
Answer to the Treasure Hunt clues:
MonNYTX: 3:40. During the on-line NPL chat, there was much time comparison. I did adequately, considering that some solvers finished it in 2:15.
- I don't remember things like teams and order exactly, so bear with me.
- There was lots and lots of traffic getting to Conundrum's house near LAX.
- NPL members use pseudonyms called Noms that we use in conversation and that I shall use in this report.
- The first game was written by Music Man and was a "Stage II" game, named after the eighties board game of the same name.
Continuing, in Stage II, a series of trivia questions must be answered, and the correct answers lead to an overall theme. In this particular game, all of the overall themes related to laws in some way. (For example, one set of clues leading to a particular "law" were "The sum," "Current holder of the rights to Scrabble," "Ph.D. requirement," Goes with Tobago," Burr's legal role" and "It begins with 'In the beginning'." Answers below.) The way this game worked threw me for a loop, at first, since the original Stage II game worked a little differently. (The trivia in the original was harder, but the themes were usually a bit easier than the wordplay-based NPL themes).
Eventually, the scores were totaled and someone won. Woohoo! I was on the team with Cramerica, which was the first time I got to talk to him. He's another relatively new member, only a few months older than I, who has moved to LA from Boston. He's a nice guy, and is good with the flats that I write for the Enigma, which was nice for me. The crowd is usually more crossword-oriented.
Panache (who also writes the clues of the Sunday crossword puzzles of the Los Angles Times) followed with a very quick geography quiz, and then we got started on the business meeting. As always, the first order of business was to introduce newcomers. There were two, one was brought from Thousand Oaks by Bluff (our group's most energized organizer) and Sheila (his wife), the other was an old friend of Cramerica. The biggest news was that we won the bid to host the National NPL convention in Los Angeles in 2005, having been cruelly gypped out of hosting it in 2004. There was much speculation on why Boston was selected for the earlier date, ranging from the bitter (apparently some East Coast Krewe felt that holding a convention in Los Angeles after a convention in Indianapolis would be having two consecutive "West" conventions), to the silly (the time change for East Coast members coming to the West Coast would make it difficult for them to stay up late), to the logical (the main organizers of the Boston bid are students who may not be at the same school after three years). Regardless, we set our minds to planning a gathering that would make everyone regret having had to wait an extra year.
We also tentatively arranged the dates and locations for our next few gatherings. I offered my new place as the home of the November 16 gathering, Panache will hold the next in February. There was also more talk of trying to hold a joint meeting between the SoCal and NoCal NPL members somewhere in San Louis Obispo, but it's uncertain if that will happen.
After the meeting, Bluff gave us his new game: The Case of the Heptaphobic Hooligan. I teamed up with Dot and Sheila to solve this set of puzzles, in which a well-known set of seven items (minus one) had to be entered into an unclued grid. This was followed up with an exhausting fill-in-the-country puzzle. Overall, it wasn't that great, but after Sheila left (she had injured her leg and it was giving her too much trouble) and our team absorbed Conundrum and Panache, we actually finished first. As other teams finished, we chatted and waited for Bluff to return from dropping Sheila off at Panache's house (which was nearby and offered quiet rest) before starting the next game.
Make Your Own Treasure Hunt was by far the most interesting game of the day. Artistry ran the game, which was invented by Rastelli from the NoCal group. We divided into two teams and went to different areas of the house. Then each person found a specific object and came up with a clue for it and wrote it on an index card. When everyone was done, the index cards were hidden so as to lead from one clue to the next in a chain. For example, the first clue written by my team was a list (1. Weddings, Funerals, Love Story, Onions, Riot Deterrence), which led to an easy to find object in the house. (Answer below.) Since each person invented his or her own clue, there was a great amount of variety. Not everything worked perfectly (There were only about fifteen minutes to find an object and come up with a good clue) but it was still a lot of fun.
Some of the clues were brief and elegant.
2. I, M, O, T, U, V, W, X, Y. AHA!
3. I hear Herb keeps his hands in front of his face.
Answers below. Others were more complicated. Mine was a two-part flat-based clue.
4. One the front of the card was:
I'm Enry the Eighth, I am.On the back was:
Enry the Eighth, I am, I am.
I married a woman named Anne;
She left shorter than the the girl began.
My other wives I did push away,
Yes they all were LONGER out by me.
I'm a round, and not flat man, you see.
Enry the Eighth I am.
small/Washington
Starting on the back side?
That isn't right, nor left.
Wondering where I hide?
Look among the HEFT.
Lots and lots of data
In one tiny space,
Come around, you gotta
Find my hiding place.
Answer and explanation below. Shorter but still complicated was Cramerica's finale, which my team had to solve:
5. Where you would find the translation of:
0x5C7ABB13.
This last one gave us a bit of trouble, for reasons I shall explain among the answers.
With just a little bit of time left to go before dinner, we launched into the puzzle sent to us be our friends up north, Iolanthe, Wrybosh, and someone else whose nom I forgot. I also forgot the name of the puzzle. (This should teach me not to leave sheets of puzzles when I leave.) Anyway, this puzzle was a bit more interesting than Bluff's and was framed as a search for truth a la Voltaire's Candide. I teamed up with Music Man, Dot, Elfman, and Debbie, one of the newcomers, to tackle the six-part puzzle. When we divvied up the puzzles, Dot took on the cryptic crossword about the truths of Science Music Man took the word search concealing games from Childhood, Elfman took the puzzle asking for nine-letter words related to Love, and Debbie and I worked on the two-part American History Quiz/Dot-to-Dot puzzle. Debbie and I made short work of our quiz, with occasional input from the others when we were stumped on a question. (Dot remembered that Henry Clay was the Great Compromiser, for example) And as we finished up our dot-to-dot, we struck upon the theme of the answers. Although looking for truth, our puzzling protagonist was finding only lies, our American History dot-to-dot revealed a silhouette of Tricky Dick.
Since we finished first, Debbie and I took over the Love puzzle from Elfman, who had been stumped, while he finished the cryptic with Dot. We didn't make much progress on the clues, but we did manage to find the overall answer for which we were looking. I sussed out where the answer would be, and Debbie, marvelously ignoring the words we had erroneously input, found the great Lie from the world of Love.
Music Man finished shortly afterward with a lie from childhood, and we all focused on the cryptic Dot and Elfman had completed to find the lie of Science hidden within it. When we finally did, we turned our attention to the fifth puzzle. We got nowhere with the fifth puzzle, so we turned to the sixth puzzle. We ultimately found the answer to the meta-puzzle, but it would take us quite a bit longer to discover what the answers to Puzzle five were and where they came from. Regardless, my team came in first, barely, and there was much rejoicing before dinner.
I'm going to continue this later, since I've been writing for about two and a half hours, now. Here are the above promised answers, which should be hidden in invisible text. Highlight the area to read the answer.
Answer to the Stage II set:
- sigma
- Hasbro
- Thesis
- Trinidad
- Perry Mason
- Genesis
If you look at the end of each answer, you'll see the words "ma", "bro", "sis", "dad", "son", and "sis" again. So the "Law" we're looking for is "The Law of Relativity."
Answer to the Treasure Hunt clues:
- These are all things that make one cry. The index card was hidden in a box of Kleenex
- The letters present are the ones that have left-right symmetry. The index card was hidden behind a mirror.
- This was an unusual cryptic-style clue. "I hear Herb" clues time (a homonym for thyme) and "keeps his hands in front of his face" describes a clock, where the next card was hidden.
- My puzzles needed a bit more explanation. Both were types of flats, but it wasn't stated which was which kind. The first one was a flat type called a Beheadment, in which the first letter is chopped off of a word to reveal another word. This was clued both by example (Enry for Henry) and by subject matter (Anne Boleyn was beheaded). The answer is the beheaded version of whatever word LONGER represents.
On the other side of the card was what appears to be a rebus. The cryptic "small/Washington" is a rubric which, if read in the proper way, should form a word that can replace HEFT. The rubric here reads "sm or DC", which doesn't make sense. But if you turn the letters around ("starting from the back side"), you get "CD-Roms", which is where the next clue is hidden.
Going back to the first side, it became apparent, working from the verse and the collection of CD-Roms that LONGER stood for the word "driven" and the answer was the CD-Rom of "Riven."- This was another Rebus and rubric type of puzzle, but without the verse to accompany it. It was a bit harder to solve than it should have been because the team that made it wouldn't let us fumble around when we had only half of the right answer. It became obvious to me that the rubric was in hex[adecimal], though it took a bit of explaining to some of my teammates. It was also obvious that it related to Scrabble, a copy of which was displayed prominently on a shelf above us. Unfortunately, the exact reading eluded us for quite a while. The answer to the question of where to find the translation of the hex term was "Hex table lookup under Scrabble." Which ultimately led us to stand on a hexagonal table underneath the Scrabble box and find the index card on the shelf below it. The problem was that after we found the hex table and the Scrabble board, we weren't allowed to stand on the table until we gave the full answer, which we didn't know. (I can recognize hexadecimal, but I don't know much about a hex table lookup.) Regardless, it was a very well-conceived clue.
- This was an unusual cryptic-style clue. "I hear Herb" clues time (a homonym for thyme) and "keeps his hands in front of his face" describes a clock, where the next card was hidden.
MonNYTX: 3:40. During the on-line NPL chat, there was much time comparison. I did adequately, considering that some solvers finished it in 2:15.