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Your country needs you

Latest UK Puzzle Association logo Next weekend, the UK Puzzle Association will be holding its annual UK Puzzle Championship. This takes place online, it’s free to enter and it’s open to everyone in the world. You should enter.

Clear yourself a 2½ hour window at a time of your choosing between noon on Friday 26th June and 2am on Tuesday 30th June. (Both times are quoted as British Summer Time; you can start at any point up to 11:30pm on Monday 29th June, so you have 3½ days.) During that time, you aim to score as many points as possible by solving the 28 puzzles, submitting your answers on a web form as you go.

The puzzles are a mixture of logic puzzles, arithmetic puzzles and word puzzles. Go to the contest page and download the instruction booklet which tells you what sorts of puzzles that there are on offer this year. Maybe you can find ways to practice some of them, or puzzles like the ones in the contest, but some are original and working out how to solve them is part of the fun.

There are plenty of online puzzle contests in the calendar; however, the UK Puzzle Championship has been my favourite or second favourite of the year for several years running. It’s deliberately accessible, so as many people as possible can enjoy the thrill of proving to themselves that they really can solve puzzles that looked impossible at first. Normally I finish about three or four places from the bottom (which used to be good when there were only half a dozen UK entrants at the start, but these days there are something like two dozen, so it’s rather less good) but even so I have had a great deal of fun along the way – and you can too, no matter how little you rate your own puzzle solving skills.

Why does your country need you? Well, the UK Puzzle Association uses this as a qualifying tournament for its team at the World Puzzle Championship, which this year will be held in Sofia in Bulgaria in mid-October. Last year’s event was in Croydon here in the UK; this site covered the event extensively. Opportunities to represent your country in meaningful global competition come rarely; puzzle fans, there are no better ones!

Competition season’s coming

Grid of squares, with a "TEST" button If you’re a competitive sort then there are a few interesting opportunities coming up.

The biggest regular cash prize in the world of puzzles – at least, in this country – is that of the annual Sudoku championship held by The Times. Next week is qualification week, with a puzzle printed in the newspaper every weekday. Solve it and send your time in. You don’t need to be a subscriber to see the competition’s terms and conditions. Incidentally, the regular qualifier is because the world of armchair treasure hunts occasionally pays out bigger purses, as do related prize puzzles; notably, Eternity paid out a cool million pounds back in 2000.

The 20 fastest solvers of each of the five puzzles, plus the eight best solvers from the previous year’s event, qualify to attend the finals. (The 100 qualifiers have to pay £25 per head for the privilege of taking up their place; last year’s top eight get in for free.) Whoever turns up on the day will take part in one of two one-hour, four-puzzle semi-finals; the fastest four from each make this year’s elite eight who shoot it out in one further round to win a top prize of a greasy grand in the hand, with second and third paying £200 and £100 respectively. You can find descriptions of finals day from 2013 and 2014, by Mark Goodliffe, who won the second of the two.

That’s not the only way to win a thousand pounds with your puzzle-solving ability; Twisted Attractions have launched an exit game called Panic! in Birmingham with a thousand pounds being paid to the fastest team of 6-8 players to complete the game over the course of the four months or so that it’s open. More on this to follow.

Alternatively, a contest that you can play against worldwide competition from the comfort of your own – but just for fun! – is the current (sixth of eight) round of the WPF Puzzle Grand Prix. This has been running all weekend, but you have until 11pm UK time on Monday night to complete the 90-minute paper, starting at a point in time of your choice. There are 24 puzzles: six different styles, four examples of varying difficulties in each. This round is produced by German authors; the Instruction Booklet reveals the six styles this time, and there are some corkers. You can practice Spiral Galaxies as part of the essential freeware Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection, you can practice Skyscrapers, Snake, Japanese Sums (without zeroes) and ABC-Box at the wonderful Croco-Puzzle and Battleships has several sites devoted to it alone. Looks sure to be a lot of fun; if you can carve out 90 minutes, give it a try!

“A long time ago, in a galaxy…” …on the other side of the planet

One Earth year ago, give or take, this site wrote about the Australian tradition of online puzzle hunts, just before the start of the 2014 edition of the Melbourne University Maths (and Stats) Society‘s annual puzzle hunt. It’ll not come as that big a surprise that the 2015 edition started today – and, as befits an event starting on May 4th, this year’s edition has a very loose Star Wars theme.

The Australian tradition (though other hunts like the USC Puzzle Hunt of South Carolina do similar things) is to release one round of four puzzles per day, for each of five days. Solving the puzzle on the day it is released earns five points, so a perfect score is a hundred. A day later, a hint is released for the previous days’ puzzles, but their value drops by a point – to a limit of three hints and a value of two points, though they can still remain extremely challenging even when triply hinted. Last year spawned a “behind the scenes” document which was a great read; fingers crossed for another one this ear.

The MUMS hunt has rules limiting teams to ten members, which is a higher limit than that of its counterparts; Sydney’s SUMS hunt is open to teams of up to five and Canon’s CiSRA hunt is open to teams of up to four. This might point to it having a higher difficulty ceiling on its puzzles than the others; this year’s day one is a particularly difficult example of the same, looking at the score table and noting the relatively low scores; for instance, the team with the name most like that of last year’s winners have only solved two of the first day’s puzzles so far. Definitely no-holds-barred, black diamond difficulty. (On the other hand, if you find these horribly hard, particularly if you’re solving alone, rest assured that the counterpart puzzles at Puzzled Pint, DASH and elsewhere are deliberately much more accessible.)

There are some other familiar (and British?) names missing from the score table, but good luck to anyone who takes part. Another hunt still in progress is the Escape Reviewer puzzle contest, in collaboration with two other review sites from the Greater Toronto Area. Pots of local prizes to be won – but there have been enough completing (at least the first level of!) the hunt to show that it really is up for grabs.

Cheryl and her birthday

Calendar with ten possible birthdays marked Probably this year’s most-talked-about logic puzzle concerns a birthday which is not explicitly revealed, but in that familiar fashion where just sufficiently many hints are given to reveal the information if you think about the clues and their implications.

The puzzle’s Singaporean origin is much discussed, generally making glowing and reverent reference to the nation’s world-renowned education system; at first, the puzzle was claimed to be a question asked of 11-year-olds, but a Singaporean site provides photographic evidence that it’s question 24 out of 25 (and, traditionally, the hardest questions are at the end) of a Singapore and Asian Schools Math Olympiad paper. This is aimed at the top 40% or so of students aged 14 or 15. Does that make you feel less bad about it? Not so much here, either…

The Guardian newspaper reports on the question and inspires over four thousand comments in the answers. They kindly follow up by posting a worked solution. A second answer proves popular in the comments and another post at the Guardian, two days later, argues in its favour.

If you’re curious, the answer I came up with was the second one, but I was convinced by the argument that the first one proves correct. For the argument from the definitive source, see the executive director of the contest’s clarification. Good enough for me; I was wrong.

Other than that, it’s interesting to see the world report on the reporting, as this post does once all the hoo-ha has died down. This site enjoyed the take at ronald.gl with a cute tale at the bottom and also coverage at the aperiodical which is the most comprehensive of the lot, not only with links to discussions in favour of the various arguments, many with videos, but also with links to several other puzzles at a variety of levels of formality and difficulty if you want to explore the field in further detail.

If this leaves you in the mood for more puzzles, the Escape Reviewer site of the Greater Toronto Area is running a contest starting at noon Eastern time (5pm UK time) today, in collaboration with Escape Games Review and Escape Room Addict who produced a puzzle hunt between them last month. There are scores of exit game prizes of interest to people nearby, but the puzzles should entice solvers worldwide. The previous puzzle hunt’s solutions are a work of art and feature ringing endorsements from known puzzle hunt veterans, though when they say “not too hard” there perhaps needs to be some… context applied from who’s being quoted.

Anyway, this leaves the world looking forward to this contest; as all the puzzles are being rolled out at once, rather than on a daily basis, perhaps that’s something to keep the world occupied this weekend!

Mid-April news

breaking-news

This site has got a little behind on news, so this post and the next will catch up on stories arising, some from within the country and others from overseas.

The most recent episode of Push Your Luck podcast features Prof. Scott Nicholson talk about, obviously, exit games along with one of his friends who used the exit game format to co-organise the very exciting-sounding Library Lockdown, teaching upper secondary students in Singapore about library skills. Every time Scott speaks, there’s something new worth listening to; he estimates that his white paper contained about 30% of what he learnt from the survey, and more and more of the remaining 70% is being revealed in different ways.

This time, there is a particularly interesting take on designing replayability in exit games, with mention of an unnamed but extremely exciting-sounding live-action adventure game in Wisconsin Dells – at a guess, Wizard Quest? Scott has a charming and practical take on safety as well; with hundreds of thousands or millions of players, we’re into the territory where one-in-a-million accidents will happen, and so it’s worth making sure that the worst consequences happen once-in-a-billion rather than once-in-a-million.

It’s clear that the podcast was recorded a few weeks ago, for there is mention that the MIT Escape Room Game Jam had not happened yet. (The #escapemit hashtag hasn’t revealed much for a while; has anyone blogged about their experience at the event? Have any of the game ideas been published?) There is also mention of an interview with Newsweek, which only in the last day or two has been published; it’s very good work, especially for a mainstream piece. The research is thorough, featuring not just Scott but Dave Spira of Room Escape Artist and two site owners. Everyone comes off looking good, not least the writer Stuart Miller.

Lastly for this post, Escape Reviewer of Toronto is teaming up with Escape Games Review and Escape Room Addict to run a Puzzle Contest, fresh off the global success of the puzzle hunt organised by the latter two web sites. This has attracted even more support from the Greater Toronto Area exit game community, with 23 sites donating over 80 prizes, some free games and others discounted games. The fun starts on April 25th!

Early April news

Rolled-up newspaper

A quick round-up of a few news stories:

The BBC quote Netmums as suggesting that On average, parents spend £135 on their child’s party, with one-in-six parents admitting to splashing out over £300. A few sites emphasise their suitability for parties, at least for older children; The Room of Glasgow have a room designed to be played by 10-16-year-olds (and 10-16 of them!) and The Gr8 Escape of Belfast have a number of party packages available. Definitely a route well worth considering.

This site was excited to see Can You Escape? of Edinburgh make a Pitch to Rich as part of Virgin Media Business’ so-entitled competition. The site launches its second, Operation Odyssey, room on Thursday, and even other local sites’ owners are looking forward to getting to play it. Can You Escape?‘s pitch seems to have got off to a popular start; this site wishes it well – and any other sites pitching for the funding, of course.

The Escape Game Addicts team played six exit games in a single day on Tuesday, escaping all of them, and made a must-read post about their epic day. To the best of this site’s knowledge, that’s an all-comers record for the UK – unless you know otherwise – though Daniel Hill of Escape played eight in a day in Budapest once. (Doubt that would have taken 110 miles of driving, mind you…)

Many congratulations to Enigma Escape of London, whose Kickstarter campaign finished up 112% funded, the first UK campaign to reach its goal. Follow its founders’ Twitter accounts at @sam_the_enigma and @hon_the_enigma to learn the behind-the-scenes story as the site gets built and under way.

Finally, this weekend sees the fourth round of the Puzzle Grand Prix series organised by the World Puzzle Federation – and this round has puzzles from Dutch authors. Take a look at the instruction booklet and if it’s for you, you have until Monday night to carve out a 90-minute window in which to answer puzzles to score yourself as many points as you can.

Starting tomorrow: an online puzzle hunt from exit game bloggers

Puzzle Hunt logo This is cool. It’s a sign of how successful exit games have been in the Toronto area, and how popular their blogs have proven, that two of them – Escape Games Review and Escape Room Addict have been able to attract sponsorship from seven exit games in their area to offer a total of nine prizes for an online puzzle hunt that starts tomorrow. The prizes are all credit for the games themselves and so less likely to be of use to people from outside the area, but a cool puzzle is fun by itself and the hunt is open globally even if you’re not going to turn up and take use of the prizes in practice.

The rules set expectations clearly. Any size team can participate, but the prizes dictate what sorts of team sizes are sensible, and the puzzle hunt’s front page suggests what sorts of skills are likely to be tested by the variety of difficult puzzles over the course of the hunt: steganography, involving manipulating both images and audio files to extract messages, cryptography and research (with Board Game Geek a likely frequent starting-point).

Puzzles will be posted daily; teams are required to comment on the first puzzle to register within ten days of starting and then to comment on every puzzle thereafter. The first team to complete all fourteen puzzles gets first choice of the prizes; the remaining prizes will be split by random draw among teams who have completed all fourteen puzzles by the end of the fourteenth day. The difficulty level is likely to be reasonably high, but hints will be posted on Twitter on a schedule, and additional hints are available on request after 24 hours. The whole thing will be wrapped up by the end of the month, no fooling around.

Extremely exciting; good for those hunts who have sponsored – hopefully they will enjoy the extra attention they receive and perhaps this might be a model that could be repeated elsewhere. However it turns out, it’s one to enjoy wherever in the world you are!

Pi-day Preview: the Tim Tang Test and its Puzzle Hunt

Tim Tang Test banner

One of the more famous online puzzles is the Tim Tang Test, which features scores of riddles (250, apparently) and has welcomed well over four million visitors in its eight years of existence. This site wouldn’t go as far as claiming any such online contest to be the first, or to be the most famous, though Notpron is also extremely well-known, among others. These sometimes bill themselves as riddle contests rather than puzzle contests; certainly a large part of the challenge is getting into the mentality and understanding the approach that the riddle setter is applying, rather than trying to understand the internal logic of the challenge in question.

Tim Tang has gone on from this success to start, with a team, the wittily-titled Escape Key exit game. It’s in the metro Vancouver area – specifically, Richmond in British Columbia. The key motif is particularly strongly used, with successful teams getting their names on keys on the “keyboard”; most teams earn placement on a silver key, the fastest on a golden key.

Returning to the Tim Tang Test, the event will be spinning off its own online puzzle hunt, starting shortly. If you format your dates month-day-year, as is habitually the case in North America, then coming up shortly is 3/14/15, which is a particularly auspicious date for those of a mathematical leaning, especially if you can start an event at 9:26 and some number of seconds and decimal parts of a second to include as many digits of pi as you would like. The Puzzle Hunt Calendar suggests a few hunts that are taking the pi theme as a good excuse, and it is convenient that it’s happening on a Saturday. (This site has heard of at least one wedding set to use the pi theme that day – not sure whether it’s starting at 09:26; it could just as easily be 9:26 pm, after all).

The TTT Puzzle Hunt FAQ page suggests that the hunt is to be played by teams of two people, who must both have registered TTT accounts already. Further than that, The exact schedule will be out soon, but it will start on March 14th and run for about 8 days, and The competition format will be very similar to other puzzle hunts around the world, such as the SUMS puzzle hunt. Prizes are promised; these may be paid as in-game currency, which can be used towards hints and answers for the titular test, but which might also be converted into physical silver. Additional prizes are to be paid to holders of the most successful participants who hold the CaretCard, which offers discounts to those playing Escape Key.

Never mind the prizes, though; with such an illustrious history of puzzle design, this is an exciting new puzzle hunt worth looking forward to!

This weekend’s competitions

"In the Navy" (Image derived from a Casablanca Records property.)

This site has previously written about a couple of cryptography competitions, more specifically involving the decryption of ciphers, aimed at UK school students of various ages. Starting yesterday, the US Navy have launched a second story-heavy game which “will once again challenge followers on ((Facebook)) with puzzles to help stop a fictitious opposition group“.

More specifically, this photo leads to a very weakly hidden message (easy to decipher, though the community tend to point hints – or even outright spoilers – in the comments for each puzzle) which acts as a “location puzzle”, if you will, to another location online where the actual game’s puzzles will be posted on a daily basis. The first ten solvers to e-mail the answer to the final puzzle to the given e-mail address will be declared winners and certificated accordingly.

If you prefer sudoku to ciphers, you have about another week to solve the Sudoku Excavation 2015 competition. This has puzzles in each of fifteen sudoku types – neatly, six 6×6 and nine 9×9 – and a meta-puzzle where the clues are unlocked by correct answers to the first fifteen outer puzzles. These first fifteen are in a range of difficulties and come highly recommended by someone with a very strong track record for sudoku solving.

Also coming up this week: Sunday is Quiz The Nation once more; the standard may be getting higher, but the number of competitors is not yet too vast so you might well be able to pump some cash out of it. Additionally, Tuesday 10th sees Puzzled Pint, which this month expands to fourteen locations in thirteen cities in three countries, not least in London. (There’s no reason why it couldn’t happen elsewhere in the UK as well; all it needs is a bar, maybe 1-3 people to act as Game Control by checking answers and handing out hints, and at least a couple of teams of players.) This month’s location puzzle has now been posted, so go and see if you can find your way through it.

Puzzles in pubs and public

Puzzled Pint London logo After last month’s play-by-e-mail involuntary experiment, the regular format meetings of Puzzled Pint in London (and in ten other cities, now not just in US but also in Canada!) resumed on the second Tuesday of this month, as every month. This month’s London event was the largest yet in the city, featuring a record 18 teams and 77 players, and was warmly received.

The London location has spawned its own Facebook page and Twitter account, to which the latest information will be posted (full disclosure: often by my wife, who is part of the Game Control team there). Getting 77 extra people to turn up for a few hours on a Tuesday night would be a real boon to some pubs; perhaps other pubs might find it in their interest to hold puzzle events yet. (Or, quite possibly, perhaps the success of Puzzled Pint is something that cannot be caught in a bottle and replicated, and its casual, non-commercial nature is part of its success.)

One interesting, slightly related, event that’s starting up from Sunday night is Quiz The Nation, which will be broadcast on an (admittedly slightly obscure) satellite TV channel weekly at 8pm on Sunday evenings. Get your team together, work out the answers to the questions in real time and submit them in the custom app. Over a hundred pubs have said that they will host gatherings for people who all want to play along, and will presumably have a TV set to the channel rather than Sunday night sport. After each round, the app will notify you of your score and position, both nationally and relative to inhabitants of wherever you’re playing. However, if you don’t have a local pub that’s playing, you can play along at home; if you’re at home and don’t have satellite TV, you may be able to stream the channel from the showcase TV site. (It might be a few seconds behind satellite TV, though, and if speed of response is scored, those seconds might be crucial.)

So far, so standard. Quizzes and their players are fun, but not really this site’s sort of fun. The reason why this site is reporting on this is that the quiz and app come from the team behind The Krypton Factor, and are importing some of that show’s signature mental agility tests into this new venture. This turns it from a straight quiz, with all its attendant downfalls, limitations, flaws and elements of brokenness into something much more puzzly, and thus much more interesting. Perhaps this might be a way to get puzzles – even if not by name – into scores of pubs at once and across the country? Perhaps this might be a way for puzzlers to plunder precious prizes! This site looks forward to finding out.

The next MIT Mystery Hunt starts on Friday 16th at a random 17 minutes after noon Boston time (so 5:17pm UK time, etc.), as counted down by this occasionally acid countdown timer, and plenty of puzzle fans are getting mighty excited about it already, as witnessed by the raging #mysteryhunt hashtag. Some people have made relatively short practice hunts for their teams, and at least one has been made available to the public.

However, with the MIT Mystery Hunt in mind, the craziest thing that this site has enjoyed recently is a couple of rounds of Spaghetti at Eric Berlin’s blog. The MIT Mystery Hunt is known for getting people to make remarkable leaps of logic to find patterns between collections of answers to solve meta-puzzles. Eric Berlin helps people practice this by creating collections of random words and phrases – and everybody’s in on the joke – and inviting people to solve them as if they were answers from which a metapuzzle answer must be extracted. The creativity to make something out of absolutely nothing is remarkable, and that of the second game is even more mind-blowing.

Thankfully this site gets to play with much more sensible puzzles!