First off, why do you guys hate Nibbs so much? Shawn! Hugs! Stat! Second, thanks to Melissa for beta-testing some stuff.
Gilman was the most unique player this round, as none of his answers were duplicated by his opponents. Eight of you advance to the winner’s bracket and the other eight head to the loser’s bracket. Open the spreadsheet link right below if you want to look column by column suspensefully, otherwise head past the jump for the run down. Details of every word played inside!
Sorry it took so long, but there were a couple stragglers and this was a bitch to score timewise. It was fun though seeing what you came up with.
Group A: Beau (34), Greek (28.5), Novak (28), Todashy (27.5), HJ (21), Gilman (0)
Group B: Kelly (42), Brooks (38), AMR (25), Will (15.5), Jon (15), Dean (10)
Group C: Margaret (30), Nibbish (28), Melissa (26), Annette (21), Bret (21), TDO (11)
There is your top six! Who else advanced? Well, I know I said the next two highest scorers, but considering Gilman had to back out, Group A had their scores skewed higher with there being no zeroes assigned. So I compared Novak, Toadashy, AMR and Melissa against each other.
Tiebreaker: Novak (35.5), Melissa (32.5), Todashy (32), AMR (28)
Congrats guys and girls. Hopefully that wasn’t too much of a headache. Let me know of any way I can make round two better. I am thinking of cutting it down to two boards. I am also not sure that the turn-tile was very worthwhile. You guys sure slammed Pete with it though! Only 12 Turn-tiles were used, and 6 of them were against Pete, by four different opponents! He showed you I guess.
If there is anything you should take away from the first round, is that you better have a balanced attack on the categories or you could miss out. Melissa and Todashy dominated on standard scoring, but didn’t give enough attention to the other two categories and it hurt.
Even if you only throw an answer or two in the other two categories, that could mean a one or two place difference in the rankings for that category. Hell, blackout you could have just copy/pasted your entire standard word list and wound up with a blackout in x amount of moves which may have beat an opponent who couldn’t use all 16 letters. I’ll put that partly on me for clarifying in the Round 1 email, but not updating the post.
Special Answers:
Round 1: Dulcet (dull set)
Round 2: Savage
Round 3: Up! date (update)
Congrats to Spooks on being the only one to find update. I didn’t expect anyone to get ‘dulcet’ really.
I look forward to your input & questions, so we can get Round 2 started.
January 31, 2014 at 4:21 pm
That spreadsheet looks terrifying from a creation standpoint. Thanks for putting in all the time to make sense of that.
January 31, 2014 at 4:29 pm
I second that. The whole thing constitutes a buttload of work and it certainly is a lot of fun.
January 31, 2014 at 6:53 pm
Agreed, this was a lot of fun to play, and looks like it had to have been about twelve tonnes of work. Thanks.
January 31, 2014 at 4:41 pm
Thanks for the work.
I like having 3 boards. Hate having special words. And as discussed, some special categories worked better than others. No matter what though, I gotta figure out a better rhythm to getting my answers down, instead of jumping back and forth so much.
January 31, 2014 at 4:57 pm
I would like to argue that my answer for “update” still worked. I submitted “to UP!” Because they went TO UP. See!? SEE!?!?
January 31, 2014 at 5:00 pm
Toup is not a word.
January 31, 2014 at 5:14 pm
It’s TWO words. So I should get DOUBLE the points.
I know this argument is making sense to you.
January 31, 2014 at 6:42 pm
But both of them are 2-letter words. And either way, bonus words are a bad idea.
January 31, 2014 at 6:55 pm
Why exactly DID everyone hit me so hard? I don’t think it negatively impacted me too much, but I was pretty surprised by how many tiles were flipped around when I logged on.
January 31, 2014 at 7:19 pm
We’re all a bunch of 6th graders. We ruthlessly abuse the ones we like the most.
January 31, 2014 at 7:37 pm
I put all my things on you just because i remember you foundly from Werewolf. So it’s that painful love i gave you.
January 31, 2014 at 8:04 pm
Man that 3 minute clock just killed me. I just couldn’t concentrate, being rushed like that. No surprise I took up the rear.
January 31, 2014 at 8:50 pm
Sometimes I wonder why you haven’t done a second season of Puzzler, and then I see your spreadsheets and wonder how the hell you ever even did the first one. Really, really fun game. I love Boggle (I suppose it shows). I have a couple of games built on the same theme on my iPad that I play now and again.
January 31, 2014 at 10:39 pm
I’m curious about those–especially Spooky– who didn’t try the blackout. For me it was the easiest special category because I knew how the limit of what others could do. The diagonal was the toughest for me.
January 31, 2014 at 10:46 pm
I completely misunderstood the rule. I thought I had to black it out with all the letters but no duplicates, and after I typed in all the letters to get me within one point, I erased them all because I thought I had it wrong. I pointed it out to Ryan but he suggested I was going to be fine anyway.
January 31, 2014 at 10:50 pm
Bah, didn’t refresh my screen before starting to post.
January 31, 2014 at 11:31 pm
I also thought that I had to do the blackout with no duplicates.
Fortunately, I didn’t realize until after submitting that I had doubled up a letter.
January 31, 2014 at 11:37 pm
Fun-Hot-Pads-Yin-Ate
There it is.
January 31, 2014 at 10:50 pm
I take part of the blame there. I explained it generally in the initial rules post. In the email that went out with the boards I mentioned that it was worth your time to put words there even if you didn’t use all 16, but I didn’t update the posts.
He told me he understood it as you needed all or nothing to even be considered for points on it.
February 1, 2014 at 12:02 am
A scoring question, was there a reason I got 0 on the diagonal scoring category? I had three words on my sheet that I was pretty sure satisfied the criteria.
Not angling for more points, just curious if I misunderstood the category.
February 1, 2014 at 12:32 am
Ya, I messed up. I hadn’t yet formatted the default spreadsheets with the pink/gray colored background so I could identify if they came from the other goals. I retroactively did that to everyone’s sheets. I missed doing that on your diagonals so they got mixed in with all the regular words.
February 1, 2014 at 11:00 am
Why did hungry joe get dinged for “avid?”
February 1, 2014 at 11:05 am
Because you cannot make that word on that board.
February 1, 2014 at 11:17 am
Hm. I suppose that’s a pretty good reason.