Coming up this weekend

weekly calendarA quick round-up of matters arising:

  • The World Puzzle Federation’s ongoing Puzzle Grand Prix contest has its third round this weekend, with our friends from Japan supplying the puzzles. Choose your own starting time between 11am on Friday and 9:30pm on Monday, UK times, then you have 90 minutes to score as many points as possible by solving puzzles, with the (at least nominally) harder puzzles worth more. Take a look at the latest instruction booklet to see precisely which types of culture-free language-neutral logic puzzles are coming up this time. This round of the contest has more, relatively low-valued, puzzles than the previous rounds; you may well find things to your taste even if this is your first online puzzle contest.
     
  • If that isn’t enough for you, and you live in the UK, you can get a whole weekend of puzzles at the UK Puzzle Association’s in-person UK Open Puzzle and Sudoku Championships taking place in Croydon this Saturday and Sunday. Further details are available in my preview a couple of weeks ago. The day rate of £25 is very reasonable for what you get, and adding a night’s B&B for another £60 is a good rate for a prestigious venue. The UKPA’s contest page has the instruction books, which are discussed on the UKPA forum. The hardest of the hardcore solvers will likely treat the WPF Grand Prix as just a Friday leg-stretcher for the contests on Saturday and Sunday.
     
  • If you live in the UK, but rather closer to the West Midlands than to Croydon, you may well be interested in Keyhunter‘s “pop-up discounts” on their Facebook page. A 50% discount code popped up, but tantalisingly, it was only good for bookings made within a few hours. Teases! Keep following their Facebook page to look out for possible further such discounts in the future. Keyhunter have three different games, so perhaps you could use this to play another of their games if you’ve played one already, or perhaps you could try two games for the price of one – if you can find a booking slot in their timetable!

24 hour Puzzle Championship preview

Two clock facesI have long held a suspicion that Hungary is home to one of the coolest puzzle communities of them all, and this provides yet more evidence why.

Next weekend sees the 14th “24 hour Puzzle Championship” take place in Budapest, Hungary. In recent years this event has been annual in the autumn, but 2013 was a fallow year and the schedule seems to have sprung to spring. Between 10am on Saturday 22nd March and 10am on Sunday 23rd March, participants sit 13 individual 100-minute puzzle contests; the remaining 140 minutes of the 1440 are taken up with ten 10-minute comfort breaks and two 20-minute meal breaks between rounds. The contests are in culture-free language-neutral logic puzzles, and you can see the instruction booklets in advance to see what sorts of puzzles there will be.

In practice, there are 14 different papers sat over the 24-hour period. Many of the participants will have written, or at least co-written, one of them, so everybody skips one of the thirteen (very probably the one that they wrote themself) and solves the fourteenth instead. Each paper will feature typically around 20-25 different puzzles, normally of around 10-15 different types. Scoring is normalised so that unusually hard or easy papers do not have an excessive effect on the overall result.

This year, there look to be at least 31 participants from 12 countries, which is fairly typical. Four of them come from the UK, all veterans of top-level competition at the World Puzzle Championship. Liane Robinson has experienced the extreme exhaustion several times and has written about her experience in 2010. Sounds like a contest and an experience like no other. One for a future year, perhaps.

The other reason why this is particularly cool is that the Hungarian organiser is also a big fan of exit games, and indeed of taking the opportunity to participate in (presumably not all of!) Budapest’s 44 exit games. Gyorgy writesWe’re also please to organise your extended stay in Budapest e.g. if you want to visit some logical live-action games […] So, if you want to do some extra mental games, we’re more than happy to reserve a place in one of the dozen great places – and we can also delegate some Hungarian puzzlers if you don’t have enough friends to form a team for these games.” This might even be a way to get to enjoy the exit games of Budapest without speaking Hungarian, if you’re in the sort of company who would enjoy translating and interpreting the content.

It’s rare to trigger both the “puzzle event” and “exit game” focuses of this site, but the 24 hour Puzzle Championship is one of a kind!

UK Open Puzzle and Sudoku tournaments preview

UK Puzzle Association logo
The UK Puzzle Association will be holding the UK Open Puzzle tournament and UK Open Sudoku tournament at a four-star hotel in Croydon in the UK on Saturday 29th and Sunday 30th March. £85 per head gets entry to both tournaments, one night’s bed and breakfast at the Selsdon Park Hotel, two lunches, transfers from the nearby East Croydon railway station and more.

The UKPA have more details about the competitions as well as sample papers from the counterpart contests in 2012. The Sudoku contest will feature plenty of problems of the classic type, but also related variants; the puzzle contest will feature a wide variety of culture-free, language-neutral logic problems. Many newspapers have puzzles pages with a couple of sudoku and a few puzzles of other types; it’s not unreasonable to consider the puzzle tournament to test skill in “the other types”.

I was lucky enough to be at the 2012 weekend; the puzzles were great fun, though very challenging, and the company was excellent. Sadly I cannot attend this time but nevertheless it should be a spectacular weekend. If any readers attend, the site would be delighted to host a report. The venue sounds particularly promising; the UK are set to host the 23rd World Puzzle Championship, and the 9th World Sudoku Championship, there from August 10th to 17th.

Competition for the national teams to attend the World Championships is extremely fierce for most of the competitors these days. However, it wasn’t always this way; the old maxim runs “80% of success is showing up”, and little more than showing up was required to get me into the nascent UK team for the World Puzzle Championships in 2000 and 2001. I wrote a review of my experience in 2000 for a site that is long gone, but the Wayback Machine has an archive of all five of the daily parts. I very much doubt I’ll ever make a WPC team again, but attending the UK Open tournaments would be a good way to get a similar experience – while still being able to solve some of the puzzles!