Welcome everyone and thanks for joining the competition! I hope everyone has fun and you find yourself challenged enough. If you haven’t joined and would like to, you have until 9 p.m. CST on Sunday to join and submit your puzzle. Let me know if you wanted to partake in the Power version as I would need to email you your puzzle for that.
If you did not receive the email, please post here to let me know so I make sure I get it right for when I need to contact you for other game purpose
Pure & Power Puzzlers
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If you haven’t read the guide please read it here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aA9o6Q7DDMK8qMxqsElPQVpSUxJ3gEblHQOdgBB9FBA/edit
Power puzzlers, please read it to check out my final modifications (as highlighted in magenta).
If anyone has questions about the rules, powers or how a puzzle works, please email me. I will try to make things as clear as possible, and notify you of any action you need to take and what your options are.
I have linked the first week’s puzzles ail in jpeg and pdf form at the end of this post. There are two puzzles: a wordfind and one called “Elvis Lives”. If you have trouble with either of these formats let me know. You can either write on a printout of the puzzle and email me the scan, or simply email me your answers for each puzzle to adobery@gmail.com. You have until 9p.m. CST on Sunday to turn in your puzzle answers. I will send out a warning email the day before. If you send in your puzzle early and later find you want to change an answer, you are welcome to resubmit. Your most recent submission will be the one that gets counted.
If you feel you’ve found a hidden bonus answer, be sure to label your answer with “Bonus Answer: ” Any one puzzle would have only have “bonus answer” to it if there was one. There are two different types of puzzles this week, so each one could have one.
Hints: You each start out with 6 hints as outlined in the guide linked above. Email me to use them. Use them wisely (or not at all!).
Standings: I will send each of you your running point totals each week, but I will only be listing the Top 5 in the standings publicly. I don’t want anyone to feel bad if they were really far behind. If I hear from everyone they want the full standings listed I’ll do it, but this is how it will be for now.
Remember! You are not allowed to get help from anyone in or out of the competition in solving the puzzles. You are allowed to research the answers with other means such as books and the internet though. Just no asking other people!
I’m guessing a couple of you are familiar with a site for unscrambling words, which I am referencing here so everyone is on a level playing field. This may help you in some cases, but I can guarantee it will not in others.
http://wordsmith.org/anagram/index.html
Power Puzzlers
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There will be no power use this week as none of you have any points yet! This week’s mini-puzzle will be Scattergories. It will be a timed puzzle. The method will be familiar to those playing Turbo Survivor. I will give you an address to send an email to and you will receive an auto-reply message from that account containing the puzzle. Your timer starts as soon as you send the e-mail to the specified account. You can start this puzzle anytime before the 9 CST deadline this Sunday. I will explain the details of this further in the email I send to you Tuesday.
Leftovers!
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For any of you craving more puzzles, here’s another branch of the competition for you to win. Each week, any appropriate mini-puzzles played by the Power Puzzlers as well as “Bonus Answers” from that week’s puzzle will be available for all to solve. I will email everyone these questions and I will point out if that week’s puzzle had a Bonus Answer. You will have until the very end of the competition to turn in answers to any of these. Whoever accumulates the most points will be crowned King/Queen Nosh.
Power puzzlers: Any appropriate mini-puzzles you solved will automatically be credited to your “Leftovers!” point total.
Pure puzzlers: Any Bonus Answers you already solved will be credited to your “Leftovers!” point total.
Good luck everyone!
-Ryan
or the jpegs
April 23, 2012 at 1:53 pm
I wasn’t understanding Puzzle 2. Then I typed out my questions and it suddenly made sense. The one question I have is whether the comma stays with the R or with the box?
April 23, 2012 at 2:04 pm
Comma does not stay at all. That is just there for the cutesy scrambled phrase. I forgot to mention that.
April 23, 2012 at 2:06 pm
Wait, cutesy phrase? I thought it was a person… or is the person it all corresponds to Elvis? And you mean it doesn’t stay with the R or doesn’t stay with the box? Or either (as in, there is no comma?). Now I’m confused again.
April 23, 2012 at 2:06 pm
Admit it, you had to expect this from me.
April 23, 2012 at 2:31 pm
I don’t know, you might have outdone yourself here.
April 23, 2012 at 2:39 pm
LOL, and I agree.
April 23, 2012 at 2:11 pm
The cutesy scrambled phrase is “Err, Unwise Voyage”. The comma was merely there to make that phrase read like I wanted. When that phrase is unscramble, it reveals the name of someone. The comma is not part of that.
Elvis Lives used to be the name of a puzzle on Boxerjam.com that played similarly. They always made a phrase out of a person’s scramble name. Lives is an anagram of Elvis. That is the only significance there.
April 23, 2012 at 2:20 pm
This makes so much more sense now. I should have looked closer (or perhaps from further away, because now that I step back, I can see the “err, unwise voyage” bit).
April 23, 2012 at 2:09 pm
Another question that has come up. I did not or would I include the same word twice (intentionally) in a puzzle. So if you find that, you first have to decide whether or not it is an answer to the puzzle and then if so, you only need to list one of them.
No one has asked this, but there will never be a word completely inside another word’s circle. Example: Blue moon and moon. It would be one or the other or neither. Never both.
April 23, 2012 at 2:21 pm
So then finding both must be a bonus!
April 23, 2012 at 2:26 pm
This is going to be a long 12 weeks.
April 23, 2012 at 2:41 pm
Novak, I love that you both embrace and exaggerate your ubiquitous confusion.
April 23, 2012 at 3:27 pm
I don’t see any dotted line winding its way around the pencils, so I assume I’m not represented in your graphic?
April 23, 2012 at 3:32 pm
It’s cropped out, but both of those pencils have lanced you (one through the mouth and out the back of your throat and the other through your nethers), the puzzled look frozen on your face for eternity.
April 23, 2012 at 7:27 pm
Well done, adobery. I’m enjoying these!
April 23, 2012 at 10:15 pm
Likewise. Those were fun.
April 26, 2012 at 2:47 am
Yup. I’ve discovered that word scrambles are still not my thing.
April 26, 2012 at 2:52 am
Don’t beat yourself up over it. I could have sworn ‘mooonstr’ was a word too.
April 26, 2012 at 2:55 am
Yeah… I think I might get 2 points there. That’s ok. Some types of puzzles I’m just not wired for. Others I am.
And I’m really not thinking of this as a competition. At least, not one I can be taken seriously in. It makes it more fun.
April 27, 2012 at 12:58 pm
I can’t believe how bad I am at this word scramble thing. Wow. So bad.