Panda solving report, continued

[rhu]

Spent a couple more hours on Panda today, making solid progress.

Canasta - Figured out what was going in in Canasta over breakfast and finished it over lunch. Nice mechanism; at first I foolishly expected the question marks to represent other vowels but soon realized what was really going on.

Blackjack - At lunch I re-read the flavortext and had tha aha moment on what to do with the tens. Really worked them after the kids went to bed; what I find interesting is that about halfway through I got the ability to do many of the jumps in my head. The relationship between the tens and elevens was pretty obvious at that point, although I'm not sure how to parse the resulting phrase -- are there quotation marks in there or is there one more level of indirection?

Whist - This is why Al Gore invented the internet. Or, more precisely, online cryptogram solving tools. Nice mechanism for turning the results into an answer, although either I made a transcription mistake or TIRAM and RAMCH swapped places. In any case, I have an answer that makes me happy.

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Overall status - I have answers to 9 puzzles (Blackjack, Bridge, Canasta, Crazy Eights, Cribbage, Old Maid, Texas, War, and Whist). I have a work-in-progress on Spades, but probably won't come back to it unless I need to. Authors and Matrimony will be Amazon- and IMDB- heavy, so I've been putting them off. (I don't trust myself with Authors --- if you ask me out of the blue, I probably know most of them, but in context I'm going to get tricked.) Go Fish will require printing out a second copy and cutting it up.

But you'd think with 9 of 13 answers I should be able to start working on the meta. Just one problem -- maybe I'm missing something obvious, but where's the meta? [Although I'm wondering if War really has a two-letter answer and it plus Whist are actually telling us what to do with the preceding 11 answers. Or maybe it will be Authors plus Blackjack?]

Well, anyway, that's where I am. I hope to make progress on the research-heavy ones over the next few days. It's nice that, with the exception of the logic puzzle, things are pretty much falling in a straightforward manner, since I don't have time for a series of brainbusters right now.

Comments

[devjoe.livejournal.com]

what I find interesting is that about halfway through I got the ability to do many of the jumps in my head

I acquired this ability long ago. Clearly I have done too many puzzles that worked like this. (Actually, I think it goes back to puzzles based on sums and products of letter values, from very, very long ago.)

[foggyb.livejournal.com]

I wrote Whist to confound online cryptogram solving tools...interesting that you were still able to use them to tackle that puzzle.