This walkthrough assumes you have registered for the site and logged in. If you have not registered for the site, see that stage of the walkthrough on the registration page.
So now you’re registered, are familiar with the applet system for daily puzzles, and now want to solve some other puzzles as well. (There are a great deal of similarities between the process for solving applet and freeform puzzles; if you’re familiar with solving applet puzzles on the site, jump down the page to the differences.)
1. Select the “Play Puzzles” page
Press the Rätselspaß button in the fourth tab at the top of any page on the site The result will be this page:
2. Select the “Daily Puzzles” page
There are several different sections with lots of different puzzles, but in this walk-through we will concern ourselves with the top-right one, about daily puzzles. There is no charge for participation.
Click on the Uberraschungsratsel box, or the link beneath it. The result will be this rather long page:
3. Select a daily puzzle to play
Arguably the daily puzzles are the heart of the site; success in the daily puzzles drives progress through the site’s internal grading scheme, as discussed later.
The top of the page provides an explanation, in German, as to how the series works. The big table at the bottom of the page shows what daily puzzles are available. In general, a puzzle will be published each day at 11pm UK time, and the past seven puzzles are available to play at any one time.
Puzzles will be listed as either “U1” in blue or “U2” in red. “U1” puzzles are one of the 40 standard types, and solved using an applet, in a process very similar to that of the prize puzzles. “U2” puzzles will not fall into one of the 40 standard types and are published as .pdf files which you might choose to solve on-screen using a graphical scratchpad or to print out and solve on paper. Either way, “U2” puzzles will generate answer codes for you to submit.
Looking again at the table at the bottom of the page, the columns from left-to-right read as follows:
1) U1/U2 – a description of what format the puzzle takes (U1 for applet, U2 for .pdf).
2) HS – a link to the puzzle’s high-score table.
3) The date on which the puzzle was posted.
4) The type of the puzzle.
5) Two numbers and a percentage – these represent the number of people who have attempted the puzzle and the number who have completed it, also expressed as a percentage ratio of finishers to starters.
6) A time – the fastest time in which the puzzle was solved.
7) A name – the name of the author.
8) A series name – each puzzle is associated with a series, and clicking on the name of the series links to an overall scoring system for the puzzles in that series.
9) Either a dash or a time – if you have solved a puzzle, your time will be listed here.
We have returned to this page some weeks later and start from the bottom of the Uberraschungratsel page, which now looks like so:
As in the selection phase above, we research our potential puzzle to make sure that it is the right puzzle for us at that moment in time. So not to spoil any of the seven live puzzles, we consider solving the Mystery-ratsel puzzle dated 8.5.2014 (no longer available, so this does not constitute a spoiler). We click on the “HS” button to the left of the date, and get a long high-score table in response, the top and middle of which are shown here:
You don’t have to solve every puzzle; pick a puzzle type that you’re familiar with and of a level of difficulty that suits you at that particular moment in time. To begin with, pay more attention to the times taken by the slowest solvers than the fastest ones.
Be aware that U2 puzzles can take any form, though generally the site will give instructions in German and an example first.
4. Playing a U2 (freeform) puzzle
As 224 people have attempted the puzzle, making the median solver about 112th, and as the median solver has taken about seven minutes, this seems like the right puzzle at the time and so we decide to attempt it. We can click on the “Ratsel starten” link at the top of the page, or return to the previous page and click on the U2 button next to our selected puzzle, to get to this page:
The interface is the same for all U2 puzzles, but “Mystery-Ratsel” puzzles work in a particular fashion. Specifically, for “Mystery-Ratsel” puzzles, working out the rules of the puzzle, whether by deduction or induction, is part of that particular challenge. (Can you see how the example works?)
As with a U1 puzzle, press the “Initialiseren” and “Starten” buttons in that order to commit to solving the puzzle and starting the timer. This produces the following result:
This is the puzzle to solve. Above it is a link which produces the following .pdf file:
You can print this file out and solve it with pen on paper if you like. Alternatively, you can use the user interface to solve the puzzle on-screen if you prefer. We will demonstrate the user interface next.
The user interface works in a similar way to that of the U1 applet puzzle interface – specifically, you can select a colour and so on. Additionally, you can change your font size in this interface. Click on a box on the graphic and then type a number; the centre of the number you have typed will appear on the graphic where you clicked.
The long arrow does suggest an order in which to solve the 6×6 grids. The first grid looks very similar to a 6×6 sudoku, so we solve it as if it were.
The logic of the overall puzzle is not yet clear. One interpretation of the arrow from the first grid to the second might be to copy the numbers from one grey box to the same places in the grey box in the second grid, but this wouldn’t work in practice as it would leave two “1”s in the left-hand column. Accordingly, we will solve the second grid independent of the first grid, like so:
That’s an interesting relationship between the grey box in the first puzzle and the grey box in the second puzzle. It would be possible to take a guess at the overall answer to the puzzle at this point – perhaps it would be possible to take a guess from about half-way through the puzzle. However, we’ll test out our theory a little more methodically. We will use induction to guess a result for the grey box in the third puzzle:
Happily, this works and means we can quickly fill in the rest of the third puzzle to look like this:
At this point, this pattern is arguably sufficiently convincing to extend it to a possible answer for the final grid in this fashion:
…which we will use as the answer to the overall puzzle, filling it into the box below like so:
Pressing the “Absenden” button will test its accuracy. We hope to see the submitted answer flash blue to confirm its correctness.
Happily, it is correct; the time taken and the number of errors along the way is displayed. As with the U1 puzzle, after a few seconds, the flashing will stop and the applet will change to show a page where you can, optionally, rate the puzzle according to how much you enjoyed it: ++ for a particularly enjoyable puzzle, down to — for one you hated, or “Ohne Bewertung zuruck” if you don’t want to leave a rating at all. Your time will be filled in on the grid, and will appear on the high-score table, in exactly the same way as before.
Croco-Puzzle walkthrough: Registration § Prize puzzles § Daily puzzles § Freeform puzzles § The Croco-League § Ratings and ranking