Uc party solving report

[rhu]

I haven't had time to look at any of the other cryptics that were distributed at Uc's party. I did thoroughly enjoy solving foggyb's miniganza with, inter alia, tahnan, Jennie H., DNess, and Uc's brother and sister-in-law. I hope Foggy publishes this online Edited: Foggy has now published this online; I heartily recommend it. There's a Set-based puzzle that stood out as a lot of fun, but many of the other puzzles were also noteworthy.

One aspect that I want to highlight is that when we were dividing up into teams, Uc's sister-in-law insisted "Oh, don't count me; I'm no good at puzzles." Two minutes later, she was fully engaged in the Set puzzle, coming up with great ideas and clearly having a ball. This just demonstrates two things: (1) People who think they're "no good at puzzles" often mean "I don't enjoy crossword puzzles so I don't do them enough to get efficient at them" and don't realize that there are a lot of great sui generis puzzles that they will be good at and enjoy. I wonder if we'd get more participants if we stopped calling them "puzzles" and started calling them "games." And (2) Foggy writes some awesomely fun and engaging puzzles games.

And for the first and possibly the only time in my life, I was the first person to solve the meta. Woot!

Comments

[foggyb.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! Glad to hear you enjoyed it (glad to Lance got to be on the solving end of one of my ganzas and not have to test-solve it). I'll be posting the puzzles for everyone at some point soon.