NPL Convention 2006 recap

On Wednesday, I started out for the con, meeting several other members at the airports I traveled through. I had printed out a couple nights before the new issue of P&A Magazine, and had specifically set it aside for solving on the plane on the way to con. By the time I got there, I had pretty much solved all the parts I could solve without references, so these puzzles stayed behind in my hotel room after that.

Since my mother and brother live in Corpus Christi, I had made arrangements for them to join me at the con Wednesday, starting by meeting me at the airport. That evening, we also visited some more of our family that lives in San Antonio. My family are not really puzzle people, though, so they retired to the hotel room to relax after some dinner and introductions to whichever of the NPL members happened to be around. They drove home Thursday, leaving me to enjoy myself at the event as it really got going.

Rather than try to cover everything in chronological order, which would take me forever to get straight, I'm just going to write up my experiences in different types of events.

Handout puzzles
A long-standing tradition has many members bring original puzzles to hand out to people attending the con. These puzzles are not official con events, though there is an official con event which consists of co-solving two (formerly three) cryptic crosswords over the course of the weekend. Many of the handout puzzles are cryptic crosswords, and it may be that the tradition got started by people passing out on their own puzzles which were submitted but not accepted for the cryptic crossword solving event. There are other types of handout puzzles, as well, some of which I am more interested in than others. Here is what I got this year:

• Wandering Around San Antonio (cryptic by Ucaoimhu). I had a lot of trouble getting started on this one, and ended up co-solving this one with D. Ness on Saturday.
• Criminal Record (cryptic, by Jangler). Solved. Moderately difficult.
• Covert Missions (standard crossword handed out at the registration table). Mostly solved, I had some trouble at the lower right. Noticed the theme.
  
• Stone Cut (cryptic, by Elfman). Mostly solved, a few words on the left side holding out. Fairly difficult, in the way that Elfman cryptics generally are.
• Double Jumbles (anagram puzzle by Atlantic). This is a set of mini-puzzles which all involve sorting out a set of letters to spell two words. I solved a few of these, and two more after I received an updated version of the puzzle from Atlantic about a day later which includes fixes for some of the errors, but I didn't really spend a lot of time on it.
  
• Texas-size Knight's-tour Crypts (by 769). three largish (over 100 letters each) knight's tour crypt puzzles. I am not a big fan of these, and didn't try the puzzles during con.
• Wordplay advertising card (crossword by Merl Reagle). This card, about the size of a largish crossword, is clearly meant to be used in some manner to advertise the movie. (It isn't a postcard, though: no place for postage or address, and it has a punch-out clearly meant to hold a pencil. Some Wordplay-labeled pencils were seen at the con, not inserted into these cards, but they were probably supposed to be.). The card was not specifically targeted at NPL members, who have already learned plenty about the film, but maybe for them to get their friends interested. I did not try it yet.
  
• Extra Ordinary (crossword by Jangler). Mostly co-solved this one with Groucho, though I could have done it myself in little more time. Groucho felt he needed the help. The theme clues on this one are hilarious.
• Example of theme and meta-variations (cryptic by Gabby). Solved. I figured out what the theme was, though I needed to look it up later to understand it fully.
  
• Finishing Touch (cryptic by Kegler). Solved. As is usually true of the Kegler cryptics distributed at con, this is a very fair puzzle which is a good choice for a solver newer to cryptics.
• The World's Shortest Crossword! (crossword by Al Desuda). This is a joking response to the World's Longest Crossword Puzzle by Frank Longo (a puzzle 9 squares high and 22 feet long which nevertheless follows all the American crossword puzzle conventions: no unches, no 2-letter words, no repeated words, and 180-degree symmetry). The shortest crossword should have been constructed by Will Shortz in order to have the same name gimmick as Longo's puzzle, but it wasn't, so instead he wrote it under Will's name as a pseudonym with an explanation at the bottom of the page. The 1x12 puzzle has another [spoily] interesting feature which makes it worth solving.
• Item for the Media (cryptic by Ucaoimhu). I was working on this puzzle at the end of the con and I am a long way from finishing.
• Rebus Word Search (by Vroo et al.). This original puzzle type asks you to find groups of letters in the grid which form rebuses for the words to find, which are themselves only clued rather than given outright.
• (Movie puzzle). There was a puzzle based on movies, where you had to identify titles of movies which had been remade from the names of the stars of two versions and the years of those versions. There seemed to be limited copies of this puzzle and I did not get one, but my limited knowledge of movies also meant I didn't try hard to find it. I did work on it a little in the Hospitality Suite at one point when Xemu and his kids and a couple other people were co-solving it, and it looked like they had chosen the most well-known remade movies possible; I was in fact able to solve a number of them.
  
• "Three Forms for TexSACon" and "Forms: To Three Dimensions and Beyond" (puzzles and article by Grendel). Yep, beyond. 4 and 5 dimensional forms. Looked like all squares. I plan to solve these sometime, but that time was not during the con. The 4 pages of clues just seemed a bit much to me.

Pursuit of the Hidden Contest
Just like Games Magazine has done periodically over its 20+ year lifespan, the NPL Convention always has a contest hidden somewhere. This year's contest was credited in the program as being by Zebraboy, who was not present at the con, so people kept looking for things that could have been set up to represent Zebraboy's contest idea. It turned out it was hidden in the variant of Zebraboy's con logo which appeared on the cover of the packet of flats from the flat-solving competition, and thus completely inaccessible until that event on Saturday. This did not keep people from looking for the contest elsewhere earlier in the con.

• The numerous con handouts, including an additional page by Willz listing most of those puzzles which was at one point suspected of hiding the contest.
• The hospitality suite was in room 404, which led to jokes about the suite being "not found", as in the World Wide Web error message with this number. The suite's room number sign had a space below the room number for a card indicating the name of a group reserving the room, similar to our ballroom space on the ground floor. We did not have anything posted there, but at some point during the con, somebody wrote "ERROR: Solution not found" and "Ow, my cortex!" on a slip of paper and inserted it here. This was considered for hidden contest possibilities, but it was apparently just a joke and, for some reason, a headache reference.
• There was some joking about various people's shirts being hidden contests. In particular, there was a panel discussion on what makes a good puzzle (for several classes of puzzles) and three of the five panelists wore interesting shirts. Willz sat at the far right, and wore a referee's striped shirt. Rubrick, next to him, wore a Trogdor the Burninator shirt. Saxifrage was next; she wore some sort of athletic jersey with the word DRAGONS on it, and a picture which looked more like Woody Woodpecker than a dragon. Two sort-of fake dragons side by side? The two plain-shirted people at the left made this seem less like a hidden message.
• At the start of Friday night's events, Willz went around to room and distributed extra copies of the program. This got some of us looking as to whether these copies were different or whether there was a hidden contest in the program itself which we'd missed earlier.
• At the start of Saturday's events, in addition to the programs posted at the back of the room for people to sign for people who couldn't attend the con, Xemu put a shirt there for Zebraboy with the con logo on it. Xemu had made shirts like this for his family which they wore earlier in the con, but the announcement of the shirt-to-sign-for-Zebraboy, with the hidden contest not being found yet and known to be by Zebraboy, inspired about 20 people to get up and check the shirt for a hidden contest, but it was not there.
• Shortly after the flat-solving competition ended (around the time the last of the papers were being collected) Saxifrage and Spelvin went to the front of the room and yelled out "Friendship!" It was explained that the cover of the flat solving booklet contained a modified form of Zebraboy's con logo. The outer rim of the circular decoration, which normally alternated bars and balls, here had an irregular pattern which was identified as Morse code, and asked solvers to shout the motto of the state of Texas (no, it isn't "Don't Mess with Texas") to claim their prize. It certainly helped them that they also won the flat-solving competition (pairs division) with a submitted set of answers lacking only one from being perfect, with several minutes remaining.
  

Official Puzzles and Games
These are a lot like the unofficial handouts, but except for the cryptics there are set times for these puzzles to be distributed and solved, and the proportion of cryptics among this set is much less.

• Cryptics for Co-solving: Hidden Agenda by Spelvin (a cryptic crostic) and You Must Re-member This by Harth. As is my tradition, I try to find two people I have never co-solved with, at least one of them a new member (at least new enough that I do not remember meeting them before). I worked on the Spelvin puzzle with Spiel, and the Harth puzzle with Momus.
• Five Minute Flats: members were asked to rate themselves at four levels of flat-writing experience, from the "know-nothing" blue card level to veteran flat authors in the red level. As someone who only writes flats occasionally, but has had nearly two dozen of them published in The Enigma, I signed on as a red player. They paired reds with blues, yellows with greens, and gave each pair a simple flat base (most were deletions, transposals, and other simple base types, with words that were common but interesting enough to inspire ideas). And they asked us to co-write a flat in 5 minutes. When these flats were turned in, pairs got mixed and matched and people got to do it again. I managed to co-write four flats over the course of the event. These flats were grouped into bundles of 15, and various people read them and voted for the ones they liked. Ten top vote-getters (unfortunately none of mine) were posted for everybody to read and vote on.
• Fifty-Fifty Trivia: This was a repetition of a previously run game, with a new scoring system. People are split into teams of roughly four and each comes up with a trivia question they think about half the group will answer correctly (with restrictions to avoid true-false and multiple-choice type questions where nobody has any real idea but can guess one of two answers). The questions are compiled into a test which people later take individually, and during this test they also rate each question based on whether they think more or less than half the solvers will get it right (too easy/too hard). Players get scored three ways: One point for each question they answer correctly, one point for each question they correctly rate as being too easy/hard, and a sliding scale from 0 to the number of questions (30) based on how close your team's question was to being answered correctly by exactly half the players. I got 18 questions correct out of 30, and the top score was 23. The best predictors got 25 right, and the best score on question difficulty was around 47% or 53% correct (this should be a score of 30*47/50 or about 28.2 points). The top individual winner scored 73 out of the 90 possible points (and compare with 76.2 for the theoretical person who got the top score each way). The overall average was in fact very close to 50%.
• Video flats: This was a new installment of a previous con event by Sue++, Sir Plus, and other Boston-area members. Flats are presented as short movies featuring a dog puppet named Sir Hound. This time there was an Alfred Hitchcock theme, each movie doing some kind of take-off on a different Hitchcock film. I co-solved with Treesong and the collaboration allowed us to solve all the flats during the time they were being presented. Although they are flats and are meant to be solved, the movies are also intended to be entertaining. Perhaps the best part of this occurs when solving one part of a flat allows you to guess another part before its cluing comes up, and then when that part is clued, it occurs in a particularly outlandish way. In one flat which included a letter bank (4, 9), a picture of a lion was shown, and Treesong immediately wrote down nonillion, a larger number in that sequence million, billion, trillion, quadrillion... Sir Hound has a disagreement with the director during this one, and said something wouldn't be right for a thousand thousand thousand ... thousand years. Then he followed this up by saying if you were British, it might take (even more "thousands") years. [The number words billion and above have different meanings in British and American English based on mutlipliers of a million or a thousand.] Before each movie where a flat type was introduced for the first time in this event, an animation (created by Dart) showing an example of the flat type was shown. These were created in Flash and Dart promised to get them up on the NPL web site some time.
• End Game: This was a quick quiz by Willz in the style of his puzzles on National Public Radio. We were given a category, word length, and two initial letters. We had to find two items in the category of the given length which ended with the same two letters. For instance, U.S. state capitals (7) starting with A and A was AUGUSTA and ATLANTA. I got 13 right out of 15; winners got all 15 in as fast as 3 minutes!
• Triple Plays: This was an original puzzle where three word phrases were clued in two ways: a direct or punny clue, and another set of three words where each word forms a two-word phrase with the corresponding word in the answer. We were allowed to work in pairs for this game, and I paired up with Groucho. Our completely correct answer toward the end of the solving time got us mentioned on Sunday, but we were not fast enough for a prize.
• Three of a Kind: Bluff presented a game based on the familiar concept, from Tribond and elsewhere, of trying to name a category based on three items from the category. In this version of the game, we worked in small teams to try to guess the category from only one or two items, and to try to guess the third item given two of the items. Teams scored 5 points for getting the category after the first item, 3 for getting it after the second item, 1 for getting it after the third item, and 1 extra point for correctly anticipating the third item. My team scored 85, a good score making us about 7th best in the room. Only one team scored more than 100 out of the 144 possible points.
  
• What Makes a Perfect Puzzle?: A panel discussion where several selected constructors (Manx for crosswords, Trazom for cryptics, Saxifrage for flats, Rubrick for extravaganzas/puzzle hunts, and Willz for NPR-style word quizzes) each described their ideals of their respective puzzle types, and then opened the floor for questions on construction.
• From A to Z (flat-solving competition): Again I co-solved with Groucho, and we got through a respectable 26 of the 40 flats to again get our names read in non-prizewinning positions Sunday.
• Fusion (extravaganza): Saturday evening at the con always features this event, usually a puzzle hunt of some sort with connected or related puzzles. This year the theme was a parody of the NPL itself run by Ralf P. Olio (the league's name for the April Fool). The parody league was called the Naturally Puzzled League, and the event name became Con Fusion. Since it wasn't April, Ralf didn't show up himself, but sent a set of puzzles to present his message. The last part of this extravaganza had us drawing lines with magic marker over two of the pages from our puzzle set and taping them up on the wall, resulting in a two-line message which (due to some manipulation of the final puzzles by the organizers) included the winning team's name. At one point during the event everybody's attention was drawn to a bingo game (called RALFO) in which the cards and sequence of numbers were rigged so that when 7 was called, everybody in the room got a bingo.
  

After Hours Games
These games took place any time there were not scheduled events.

• Battle Line: Treesong explained this game to me. There are 9 flags to be won by playing up to 3 cards on either side of the flag. The normal cards were several suits of 1-10. There were also some special cards which modified the rules for a particular flag or acted as partial or complete wild cards. To win you had to either win three adjacent flags or any five. I won the one game we played.
• Lost Cities: It wouldn't be con without some of this. Treesong is a rabid fan of the game, and after I pointed out to him its availability online at Brettspielwelt a couple years ago, he joined primarily to play this one game. There are five suits of cards each containing one each of 2 through 10 and three unnumbered "handshake" cards which are officially called investment cards. You have a hand of eight cards and each turn you must either play or discard one of them (it goes into a stack for its own color on your side of the board if played, or on a discard pile of its own color shared by both players). You must play cards in ascending order, not necessarily consecutive. That is, you can never play a smaller card on top of a higher card of its color, and you cannot play a handshake on any numbered card. Each suit for each player is scored separately according to this rule: If no card is played there, score 0. Otherwise, start at -20 and add the values of your numbered cards. If you played handshakes, mutliply the result (whether positive or negative) by 1 plus the number of handshakes. Add an extra 20 if you played 8 cards or more in the suit. Then add up your scores for the five colors.
• Texas Word 'Em: This is a betting game in the style of Texas Hold 'Em but instead of poker hands, you are dealt letter cards with which you try to form valid words. You can use all 7 cards you have available if you can form a word that long. Longer words beat shorter words, and within words of the same length, rank was determined by the sum of values printed on each card, which are somewhat like the Scrabble values, but not exactly, and for extra randomness, not all the cards of the same letter had the same value. We did not really seem to get the right players for this game, or many at all who stayed for any length of time; it seemed the poker players wanted to play real poker (a hold 'em tournament was held somewhere) and the word game players wanted to play other games.
• Jeopardy: Some people create their own questions for games in the style of the game show Jeopardy. I didn't play any of the Jeopardies, because seats are limited (6 players play each game, using the electronic "buzzer" system from the board game Quizzard, and each host's time is limited to run the game maybe 2-5 times over the course of the con), and my reaction time is not good for this format. But one particular game bears mentioning; I watched this one after being advised it was too good to miss -- either play it or watch it. I will feel free to spoil parts here since it is unlikely to be run again. Texas Jeopardy featured a Texas-sized board with 7 categories of 6 instead of the usual 6 categories of 5. It also featured two hosts who really hammed up acting Texan throughout the game, and an extra-large serving of non-standard daily doubles. In one daily double the players played one hand of Texas Hold 'Em poker with their game points (and a bonus of 1200 from the hosts in the pot in lieu of blinds to start the game off). Another one was called the daily W and asked the player to find the WMDs. The player was allowed to flip five of six cards that were presented. There weren't actually any WMDs; the only way to win was to say this before flipping your fifth card.
• Ladybug: This new game was an interesting Categories variant. Players had to name words in a category starting with the end letter of the previous word and ending with a new letter. This was a lot of fun even with the tendency to get stuck whenever somebody ended a word with X. There were times, though, when we were able to get past X, not only with common words like x-ray, but once on the parts of the body category when I called out xiphoid process. A few categories went down to just a few letters remaining and got stuck on whatever usable letter happened to come up last.
• Sixth Sense: This was an original game by T McAy, who has a history of making a lot of original, one-shot games (one-shot in the sense that there is one set of questions/puzzles/whatever so you are spoiled after playing it and cannot play again). It was played with the mechanism from the Split Second game, where each player writes their answer on a dry-erase panel on the end of a spring-loaded arm. When released, the arms flip the answers into the middle, thus recording the order of completion. I did not see the game, but those who played liked it a lot. He also ran another game I played previously at the Stamford crossword tournament, called Mystery Game; since this one promises to be run again in the future, I won't spoil it.
• GenCon puzzles: We got a sneak preview of some puzzles for a puzzle hunt to be run at the upcoming GenCon. No, I won't tell you about them. :-) I had fun solving several of what were apparently something like 40 puzzles.
• Quick on the Draw: This game by Dart has become as much a Con tradition as Jeopardy. The game is a variant of the many drawing games like Pictionary. One player attempts to clue a series of phrases or compound words which include a word that is repeated through the entire set by drawing on a dry erase board with colored markers. For instance, if the repeated word was red, you might have to clue red light, red tape, see red, and paint the town red, among others. A few rare cards are category cards, with phrases in a category rather than having a common word; these tend to be harder than the normal ones. All the other players playing guess; there are no teams, and no score beyond the number of phrases one person successfully clues in one round. After the first phrase is guessed, Dart tells the group which word is the repeated one, or what the category is. When they guess a word that is in a phrase, Dart will let them know that, too.
  In the past, we played with 60-second rounds, and with 10 phrases on a card, the best anybody would do was to occasionally finish a card with 5-10 seconds left, and have time to start on a second card, with 11 or perhaps 12 phrases solved as a record. Because we have done so many of the easier cards in the several occasions this game has been run in the past, the cards we are getting now are on average a little tougher. As a result, or to allow more players to reach the harder words toward the end of the cards, the game was played with 90-second rounds this year. Dart also made up some short cards with only 5 words to use as continuations when somebody completes a card. When starting a continuation card, the common word is given to the guessers immediately (the idea being that these cards make up for the fact that the regular cards are not infinitely long). I have been one of the best at drawing for this game in the past, having gotten 10 or 11 solved several times. Under the new time limit, 10 was common for me and twice I managed to reach 16. There were a few other 13s and 14s among the group including by Dart himself. In one round I completed a category card about holiday events. If you think these scores sound insane, cluing better than one phrase every 6 seconds, remember that this is the NPL, and the guessers include many talented people, sometimes 10 or more of them. This is the same group which, when Willz reads out clues from his radio puzzles (often cluing two word phrases where the initials are given) people shout out answers long before the question is completed, sometimes after only a couple words. Also the number of guesses is unlimited, so if you draw an animal shape and they can't figure it out, they will yell out cat, dog, horse, cow, goat, etc.
  Usually players just take a black marker and use it throughout unless some card requires color. My holiday events card had Easter egg first. Suspecting a strong need for colors on this card, I grabbed a handful of colored markers at the start. Those came in handy later when drawing things like jack-o'-lantern and a couple of trees. Having already done the Christmas tree, when I drew a normal green-circle tree with black trunk later, Arbor Day was guessed quickly. Near the end of this card were some less obvious "holiday" things like mattress sale, which got a red tag after cluing mattress.
  
• WIM: WIM is a word game created by roy. The play is a lot like Scrabble and similar games, but the tiles are printed with a font that allows many letters to be read upside-down or sideways as the same or different letters. And there is no board; double and triple bonuses are based on reusing the previously played tiles in different directions, possibly as new words. roy is trying to market this game commercially, but as yet it only exists as prototypes. Dart also has a font called Torturer that works this way. His uses different letter shapes which result in different pairings of letters, and was featured a few years ago in a puzzle he made called A Form of Torture that consisted of a poster-sized form (with attached clues) cut up into pieces that needed to be reassembled.
  
• Old Dog: Old Dog is a new trick-taking game by Vroo which I playtested. The basic mechanic was that when somebody cannot follow suit, later players on the same trick can follow either previously played suit. The new suit is not trump, but instead, all suits tied for being played the most times on a trick are possible winners. The mechanics of the game are established, but Vroo was having trouble choosing a scoring system which both makes the strategy work the way he wants and is not too complicated. We helped him come up with an idea he liked a lot better by the end of con. He also had another game which we played with these cards which was very raw and had a number of problems.
• Word Sets: A game invented by Bluff. The game has the "add a letter to a word to steal it" mechanism from Anagrams, the "forming partial words" mechanism from Ghost, the "not declaring your words when played" mechanism from Bluff's other game Word Bluff, and the taking turns playing one card at a time mechanism from lots of games. Every set you control must be able to be arranged into a complete word at the end of the game, or else you lose points for its length rather than gaining them. Somebody asked about the rather bland name once, and Bluff explained that he had some other, non-word Sets games that played with the same mechanism, though I am not sure what the sets are trying to form in these cases.
• Can't Stop: This one is a classic, and doesn't need explanation for many of you, I'm sure. Played a few 4-player games.
• Shadows Over Camelot: This is a cooperative game where players, representing various knights and King Arthur, are trying to complete several quests. One of the players may be a traitor, but only he knows who until his game actions reveal him. He wins if evil wins the game, and otherwise everybody else wins (even if there was no traitor, and it means everybody wins). Our traitor did a fine job of keeping his identity secret while working effectively against us, keeping us from ever completing the grail quest by throwing all those cards into Excalibur at the start of the game, and just holding on to them later. Good still almost won, and only lost because King Arthur forgot to use his power to trade a relevant card to another player who could use it at a critical junction (this at 7 AM when they were getting ready to kick us out of the ballroom to prepare it for breakfast).
• Corsari: On the last leg of the flight home, I sat next to Junebug and Iambic and we played this commercially-published rummy-style game. The deck contains 10 colored suits of cards numbered 1 to 11 with pirates on them, and you are trying to build a crew made of two of these suits with no repeated numbers among your crew. In addition to draws from the discard pile and deck, there is a row of 8 exposed cards called the tavern you can draw from the top of. The color of the top remaining card in the tavern is the "prisoner" suit; cards in this color do not count during scoring. Cards which do not fit into your crew and are not prisoners count as stowaways; you're trying to minimize the sum of these cards, or in particular, to "knock" when your stowaway total is less than any of your opponents' stowaway totals when, in addition to their crew and prisoner cards, they also get to play off cards onto your crew if they match one of your suits but not one of your numbers.

And these are only the ones I played (except Jeopardy and Sixth Sense). I also saw people playing Word Bluff, Cluesome, Fluxx (they borrowed my deck to start a second game of Fluxx), and other games. I also brought the Hoffman-Singleton Game and explained it once, but never actually played the game. I won the cards as a prize for being the first to solve Xeipon's harder puzzle in this article.

Business Meeting
There is always one of these at the con, and recent attempts to schedule it right at the end of and in the same location as breakfast have improved attendance in recent years.

There were reports from the officers: a reading of the minutes from the last meeting, a treasurer's report, a webmaster's report, maybe some others so boring and noneventful I forgot them. There were three other items of business.

• Saxifrage announced she was stepping down as Editor, declining to run again for this position in this year's elections, but she nominated Crax (who has been editing extras and managing submissions for the Sphinx logo on the cover) to be Editor. All the other officers are running again for their current positions. Nobody nominated any other officer candidates during the meeting.
• Some proposed amendments to the by-laws were discussed, mainly attempting to align the by-laws with current practice of choosing the convention site two years in advance rather than one year.
• Proposals for convention sites were heard. We've already established we are meeting in Ann Arbor next year, but based on surveys which were distributed by e-mail and at the con, they decided to go for the July 14th weekend next year. For 2008's con, T McAy presented his proposal for a Denver con, which was accepted. Two other groups expressed their interest in hosting conventions in subsequent years in Annapolis and Seattle.