Just now finished this week’s Listener puzzle, “More Collusion” by The Magpie. I’m grumbling a bit because I think there’s some ambiguity about the extra letters to be deleted from some of the clues, and I had to backtrack from the finished grid to figure out the exact path I was probably supposed to have taken to get here. However uncertain I am about a couple things along the way, though, I don’t see any ambiguity about the finished grid, so I’ve got my entry ready, and a Friday night finish.
Archive for the ‘Puzzles & games’ Category
More Collusion
29 July 2011Weekend Update: Listener Puzzle and Harry Potter 7
25 July 2011I finished this week’s Listener puzzle, “OZ and WR” by Theod, on Friday evening. There’s a Playfair cipher involved in this one: Four answers must be encrypted before being entered, and you don’t know what the keyword for the cipher is, so you have to crack the cipher by comparing the answers for these four clues with what you can get of their encrypted versions from the crossing letters in the grid.
Until you’ve cracked the cipher, then, these four words must be solved without any help from crossing letters. I left these four to work on later after I’d solved the rest.
It didn’t take me all that long to fill the rest of the grid, but I could only figure out two of the four Playfair entries. I figured that that wasn’t going to be nearly enough information to crack the cipher, and that I’d be stuck until I could solve at least one of the other two. But when I finally took a crack at the cipher with the information I had, I was surprised to find that it was enough to give me what were almost certainly the first, fifth, and sixth letters of the keyword and an additional three-letter sequence that was likely to be somewhere in it. That was plenty, and the keyword and the rest of the puzzle fell quickly after that.
Dave and I watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 at home Saturday night and then saw Part 2 in a theater Sunday night. It’s a beautiful pair of movies — one gorgeously shot scene after another, terrific acting all around — but as with all the other movies in the series, I was rarely swept up in it. The story is full of exciting sequences, but it also rambles a lot and contains a lot of derivative and predictable elements. I especially kept being reminded of this or that plot element or scene from The Lord of the Rings, both the book and the movie. Characters are thin and mostly defined by their quirks — one apiece for the minor characters, two or three for the major ones — and though many of these quirks are surprising and whimsical, once you know what they are, there’s no more surprise left and you can see well in advance how they will respond to each new situation that arises.
I’m sure the series is magical if you come to it at the right age and without having read or seen a lot of similar stories already, but I am so not in that group.
A Keep
11 July 2011This weekend’s Listener puzzle, A Keep by Phi, took me till Saturday morning to finish. I found it a challenge the whole way — blank diagram, numerations omitted, misprints in some but not all of the definitions, good grief — but all in all a very satisfying puzzle. The completed grid is a handsome piece of construction.
The clues are mostly nicely done, though one of the definitions seems to me to be oblique to the point of not being a definition at all; the fact that, say, sentimentality can be a definition for cheese doesn’t mean that sentimentality can also be a definition for Camembert. But then, maybe I’m missing something about how the clue works.
The clues are in their normal order, from the first of the acrosses to the last of the downs. The introduction omits to say this, inadvertently I’m sure, but it’s crucial information for solving.
“Jumping to Conclusion”
4 June 2011It’s 8:20 pm on Saturday and I just finished this weekend’s Listener puzzle, “Jumping to Conclusion” by Sabre, over dinner. It’s a stinker, and despite some nice clues and a surprise at the end, this may be my least favorite Listener puzzle in quite a while. A number of the words and parts of words have to be entered not in a straight line but in a series of chess knight’s moves, which opens up the number of possibilities so greatly that it’s kind of tedious to work out the right answer.
Also, there are ten clues that you need to solve with no help available from crossing letters at all, and an eleventh (34 Down) that you have to solve with the only possible help being the first letter (from solving 33 Across). These clues are entered entirely in knight’s moves, but you can’t work out more than a few of the knight’s moves until you have solved every one of those eleven clues. When I went to bed last night I had all but three clues solved, yet I still had 19 empty squares in the grid, 19 squares where there were too many possible paths for the words to take to be able to fix any more letters. I took another stab at the puzzle this afternoon and solved two more clues, but I still had 11 squares I couldn’t nail down. Eleven squares left indeterminate because of one unsolved nine-letter word! And what I had worked out didn’t give me so much as one single certain letter to help with solving the last clue! It looks as though, for the knight’s-move portion of the diagram, the constructor gave the absolute minimum number of clues you need to determine where all the letters go once you’ve solved all the clues. That seems kind of stingy, and it’s not hard to find several more words of five letters or longer that the constructor could also have given.
Even once I did have the last clue solved, working out the one possible way to enter the letters so that all the words could be made took me quite a while because of all the possible paths that had to be considered and narrowed down. There were a couple of nice surprises at the end as a reward for trudging through all of that, so I wouldn’t say it was a bad puzzle, but all in all not an interesting enough puzzle to reward the amount of slogging needed.
The X-factor
20 May 2011A Friday finish this week: I finished this week’s Listener puzzle, “The X-factor”, a little after 11 pm. It’s a numerical and an ingenious one with a lot of subtle deductions to be made along the way. Very tough at first — I think after my lunch hour I’d identified the value of one letter and filled one cell in the grid. But the pace picked up steadily as I chipped more and more of it away and I must have filled in the last quarter or so of the grid in under fifteen minutes.
“Cruciverbalism”
22 April 201110:53 pm and I just finished today’s Listener puzzle, “Cruciverbalism” by Poat. It looks incredibly tough at first, and I was wondering whether I’d be finishing this one by Monday at all. The puzzle is another diagramless sort, and I had to solve about half the clues cold, without any help from crossings, before I was able to start to fit even a few of the answers together; but the puzzle became quite a bit easier once I’d gotten the first few words into the grid, and then when I saw what the omitted letters were going to spell, the rest fell together pretty easily.
“All New”
16 April 2011It’s about 3 pm on Saturday and I just finished this week’s Listener crossword, “All New”. A workout, but a really enjoyable one, and with some nice surprises cropping up at the end.
“Ups and Downs”
8 April 2011I just finished today’s Listener puzzle, “Ups and Downs”, at about 6:00 pm after less than two hours’ solving time — just part of my lunch break and the first half hour of my commute home. Very satisfying puzzle, too, even if it turned out to be a relatively easy one. The references in most of the clues to either music, especially Handel works, or the Bible are a sweet touch (and of course a teaser to the nature of the theme), and I found gradually piecing together the theme of the puzzle to be a lot of fun.
The Rite of Spring and “Carte Blanche en Tore”
4 April 2011Friday was an excellent day both for chamber concerts and for cryptic crosswords. In the evening Dave and I went to hear the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra at Herbst Hall. The first half of the program was pleasant and charming but not terribly exciting — a Vivaldi concerto for guitar and viola d’amore, a set of variations on “Là ci darem” by Beethoven, and a new piece by Gabriela Lena Frank called Inca Dances — all of it played with spirit and delight but none of it very powerful stuff.
But then the second half was Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, reorchestrated for a chamber orchestra of 14 players. That turned out to be an astonishing and thrilling experience. The Rite of Spring is a piece I’ve known since studying it in college a quarter of a century ago, but this performance made it all very fresh again, as well as harsh and shocking and brutal and potentially riot-inciting. It was like hearing the piece again for the first time, and I heard a lot in the transparent textures and harmonies that I don’t remember noticing before.
Plus, for those who like their ballet scores accompanied by some choreography, you could watch the two percussionists doing their obviously well-rehearsed dance as they scurried around the back of the stage managing the drums and marimba and all the rest.
All in all, this may have been the most exciting concert I’ve been to in quite a few months.
Friday’s Listener puzzle, called “Carte Blanche en Tore”, is also my favorite in a while. It’s essentially what in America is called a diagramless puzzle. I love this kind of puzzle, love the process of finding how the words fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces, though it’s also true that this sort of puzzle also tends to be pretty hard, as you have to solve a fair number of the clues before you can start figuring out how the answers fit together in the grid.
This one is made even trickier because words can go beyond the right and bottom edges of the grid and continue at the left and top (always in the same row or column), which makes the grid topologically equivalent to a torus (doughnut shape).
Around 1:00 in the morning I was thinking that I really should get to bed and continue it in the morning, when I found a way to interlock four entries in such a way that, if they were right, a particular as-yet-unsolved entry would have to include a particular two-letter combination. I looked at the clue and was able to solve it now with the help of the two letters. Now I had five entries interlocking, and with a little more experimenting I got it up to eight. Knowing I had broken into the grid at last, I stayed up to keep chipping away at it and finally finished the grid about 2:00 am. A very satisfying challenge.
Rattle
25 March 2011It’s 6:45 pm, I’m still on my commute home, and I just finished today’s Listener puzzle, “Rattle” by Augeas. Not nearly as hard as it looks at first — I had solved maybe nine clues when I figured out what the quotation and the theme were. (Still haven’t figured out what the title means, but I’m sure it’ll come.)
It’s an amusing theme, but it ends unsatisfyingly, to my taste anyway, because of the amount of extra information that has to be given so that there’s a unique answer. Seems like an aesthetic flaw in the construction to me. Given the freedom the constructor had, I’m not sure why there couldn’t have been enough more crossings with the unclued, thematic entries to eliminate alternatives.
Oh well. Cute theme, anyway.
