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Redmond Parlor GamesThe story of a few games, puzzles, and friends. November 06 Iron PuzzlerThis last weekend, I participated in a puzzle event at Microsoft called Iron Puzzler, ala the Iron Chef of Food Network renown. Or at least, that was the cover story... basically it was a puzzle potluck weekend where we spent the first half of the weekend creating one paper and one non-paper puzzle and the second half of the weekend solving them. The folks running the event provided 4 secret ingredients at the start of the weekend which you get points for making use of in your puzzle designs (like Iron Chef). These ingredients were:
The ingredients were provided at 9am on Saturday and we had until midnight that night to complete our designs. At midnight, the solving portion began, and went straight through till 4pm on Sunday. Now if any of you are considering participating in an event like this, the best advice I can give you is to get more than 4 hours of sleep on Friday night (unlike me). As a result of both fatigue and generally being unable to come up with puzzles on the spot like this, I was greatly surprised to find that I was the principal constructor of our paper puzzle, a crossword based on spoonerisms (swapping of two initial sounds in a phrase, as in a "tip of the slung" for "slip of the tongue"). I'm happy to say that I am much better at creating crosswords than I used to be, and easily whipped out a 19x19 crossword in about 4 hours after initial brainstorming with the team. While I engaged in my cruciverbalism, the rest of the team brainstormed a crazy spoon windmill structure with sequencing and encoding. Most of the time was spent building this structure, but even this was built by 8pm, which was great because it meant 3 hours of sleep for me. Huzzah! Overall, we had a great time with the event, and best of all, we came in third place in a come-from-behind finish! October 31 Scrabble Records SetIn a club game in Lexington, Massachusetts, three different records were set for sanctioned Scrabble in North America:
Check out the full article on Slate. The best part is that these players weren't particularly good as far as ranked Scrabble players go, but if you ask me, any attempts to best these records will be their own form of quixotry. October 08 CMU Puzzle QuestI participated in the playtest of the CMU Puzzle Quest yesterday, and it was a blast! They did an awesome job of creating a text adventure game and using that as a framework for unlocking puzzles and submitting answers. It was really well put together and had very few issues. I've been inspired to try to accomplish something similar as a standalone work for the Top Secret puzzle event that Stephen Beeman and I put together for a company morale trip to Phoenix. Hopefully, I'll be able to pull something together quickly and get a link posted on here.
Overall, it was an awesome event! September 24 Eight years... amazingI never really considered that I'd ever work somewhere for 8 years (over 9 if you count contract time), and yet I've been at Microsoft that long as of September 14th. Time goes by quickly when you're not paying attention... Formidable FoesRio Grande has announced the release date for Friedemann's new game, Formidable Foes, as October. Of course, they said Gloria Mundi would be available back in June, too...
The reason this is noteworthy is that John, Jesse, and I all playtested a beta version of this at the Gathering earlier this year and gave Friedemann a bunch of feedback. It may even include a game rule that I suggested to him. :) New MusicI recently discovered some new music (for me at least) that I'm particularly enjoying:
Anyway, thought I'd pass them on since I think they're worth checking out. M&M Dark Movie GameSomeone sent me a link to this online puzzle game, which is pretty cool. I don't really think of them all as movies - some remind me more of TV series. Also, there's at least one homophone play on words, so watch out. Only thing I wish is that if you selected something, it would highlight it so you know which one you were selecting; fortunately, once you've filled in the answer, you can't re-select it which helps narrow down a few.
Overall, took me about one and a quarter hours, but was pretty fun.
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