A 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!