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Liam & Liana's Puzzle Party

Winter 2006

The Puzzle Party was a terrific success!

• The Questions (PDF, 136KiB)

It worked so well the last time, we had to try it again.

On February 25th, twenty people once again converged on Columbia, Maryland, to take part in our second (hopefully) semiannual Puzzle Party. We had bred a new crop of Puzzles, meaner than the last bunch, with which we tormented these poor players for four hours.

Our participant list exploded in size from last year. This time, it only took three days for all of our friends to pounce the invitation, and ended up having about ten people on our waiting list. A few people had to cancel, but we guess that we must have done something right last time.

The participants were ready and willing. Many had shown up early, so Liana entertained them while I put the last-minute touches on this year's Name Tag, and shortly started handing them out.

At about 12:45, everyone was present, so I told them the rules of Name Tag. People figured it out as quickly as I hoped, and found their teams. We then handed out materials and told the teams to scamper off to their rooms

Our puzzles got a lot harder this time around. We had to wait until nearly half an hour had passed before Absolute Zero turned in the first puzzle of the day, Catalan Numbers

There was slightly less confusion this year, due to both Liana and myself being more familiar with the individual puzzles. We immediately saw people start thinking outside the box of our ways of solving the puzzles, which we do consider to be a good thing.

But, our problems were actually overhard. Tiled of Life was by far the most reviled, but I'm surprised that This Land Is Everyone's Land didn't kick it out of that position. Perhaps it was just too confusing to be disliked that much.

Into the Black Box may have been the most enjoyable puzzle, but we referees goofed up in not being more explicit what and wasn't allowed. We ended up disqualifying two of the teams' scores for that problem, but one team still went on to win. Our truly ambitious puzzle was AAAvian Flew, but no one progressed past its first stage.

Something that we did successfully add, though, was a bonus set of questions. In an attempte to get teammates to cooperate more closely, we only distributed three puzzle booklets. This ended up actually backfiring, as it meant it was harder to divvy up work (participants couldn't easily scan the list to say "I want to do that"). Each booklet had three or four encrypted questions writted on the backs of pages, one per puzzle. Each booklet, however, had a different set of questions. The team had to find the clues scattered across each booklet.

Even when they did find these clues, they still had to solve their cypher, for each one was encoded as a cryptogram (though they all shared the same cypher). These were made slightly more difficult in that they also had to read my handwriting and occasional misspelling. But every team did find them, even if they couldn't answer these bonus questions (which would give the team a 10% bonus on that puzzle's score, after turn-in adjustment).

Scores were a lot lower than last year, by about half. I overestimated how high teams would score on a lot of problems, especially Tiled of Life and This Land Is Everyone's Land.