Panda update

[rhu]

Made some good progress today...

Crazy Eights - pretty straightforward. I just need to figure out "A piece of evil sorcery" to get the last two letters. I'm sure once I see the answer I will smack myself on the forehead.

Cribbage threw me for a moment, because the first answer of set 2 happens to fall at the beginning. But then I realized those answers were alphabetical, and I got the answer with about half the puzzle still unsolved. I'll go back later to enjoy finishing it.

Bridge - I did this at the JCDS "party in the park"; lucretia_borgia joined me and I explained how I expected the puzzle to work. My guess was off on one detail (bigrams vs. single letters) but once I demonstrated what we were doing she got into it. She's not a member of the "puzzler community" but she ought to be :-) and I directed her to the Panda Magazine website for more samples. In any case, we have a lovely phrase but I'm not sure it clues an unambiguous final answer; once I start working on the meta I'm sure that will resolve itself.

Blackjack - I started to solve the Aces; I've gotten half of them but am not sure how they'll fit in with the tens. Time will tell.

Old Maid - Reminds me of the Peter Wimsey short story about the mirror-reversed twins; this being a mirror-reversed variant of a Siamese Twins puzzle. I like how it started easy at the top and then around the critical part it got wicked hard, with lots of "I dunnos" crossing the "nonsense" row. I've got some Google time booked for later to finish that row off. But it's clear that the nonsense row from each puzzle needs to be averaged; whether that gives the answer or merely the next step will soon be revealed....

Spades - Oh, God, how I hate trudging through multi-dimensional logic puzzles. And this one has two one-to-several mappings. I've already sunk an hour into it, and I have 5 of the day/bird associations and the complete day/cost, and most of the cost/age. I just hope I haven't made a mistake, because backtracking will be hell. And I'm not sure if I'm going to put the time in to finish the rest of it. I'm sure there's a computer tool out there that would make quick work of this sort of thing, and I should probably find it and add it to my toolchest. Because, as I think I've mentioned, I hate trudging through multi-dimensional logic puzzles.

So that's where I'm at at the (almost) end of my first day. Overall, the puzzles that I've attacked so far have seemed easier than in past issues. But until I've solved the meta I'm withholding judgment --- maybe I just haven't hit the really tricky ones yet.

Comments

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Oh, and one other thing about Crazy Eights -- I wish the inner cards had used a much lighter image so that they could be written on in pencil. I resented having to recreate that portion of the puzzle on a sheet of graph paper.