First, Scrabble. I have to blame the Boon Companion for this; he got me addicted to iPad Scrabble, which we’re still playing at home. But most of my playing is via Lexulous, which is the Facebook game once known as Scrabulous, given a new name and a slightly different board configuration after an encounter with Hasbro’s lawyers. It’s still on Facebook, where you can play both in real time and via the correspondence method (“You have a move to make on Lexulous, Rich”); but I prefer to play on lexulous.com, where there are literally hundreds of Scrabble fanatics sitting in chat rooms 24 hours a day waiting to play with you immediately.

It turns out I’m a moderately good Scrabble player — but I’m an even better timed Lexulous player, and most of the fanatics on the site want to play timed. Timed games fit well with my satisficer personality, which races to find the best move available that can be thought up in the first 30 seconds, i.e., roughly the 85% move on average, and then gets bored and anxious trying to come up with something that’s 5 points better. Typically I play 8 minute games with a 10-second Fischer delay, but as I get better I’m going to inch the time limit down little by little.

(Side note: I saw Bobby Fischer in an elevator when I was going to the pediatrician’s, in Century City in L.A., when I was about eight or nine. This would put it in about 1974 or 1975. I was with my mom, who recognized him; she explained who he was, and I remembered hearing about him on the news — I was kind of a chess kid. I think that was both the most famous and the craziest person I met up to that point, at least until we saw Farrah Fawcett in the grocery store a few years later. Or I think it was Farrah. Anyway, I digress.)

The other game is SimCity 4, with the Rush Hour expansion pack, which I played for months before I started playing Civ IV. I figure it’s time to give it another shot, playing a bit more strategically. I’ll have more to say when I get a city to a more interesting point in development, but here’s the one I’m working now:

Or just buy a Scrabble set at your local drugstore ($14.99). But what fun is that? There’s nothing to click or push or slide, it doesn’t beep, and you have to rotate the board yourself.

Below are a couple of photos demonstrating that, yes, this complicated Bluetooth-enabled setup does in fact work. The game even keeps track of where you’re sitting, and rotates the board to face you when it’s your turn. (The first few times, this is really creepy.) Photos are reversed, because they were already uploaded that way and I’m lazy.

I don’t know why I shouldn’t have days like this — and weather like today’s, nasty and oppressive and miserable, is the perfect day to stay indoors in the A/C and have one — but I feel vaguely guilty about it, as though there’s something More Important I should be doing. But there isn’t; it’s Sunday, so why not? Besides, this is life, as much as the stuff we do weekdays from 9 to 6 is. Right?

Bonus photos: current game of Civ IV. I’m playing green.

This game, which I played as Gandhi (whose color on the board is that lilac purple) was by far the longest, most involved, and most interesting game I’ve played so far. I did win a time victory (when the clock ran out, I was at around 3500 points, more than 1000 ahead of my next rival, and almost triple the score of my sworn enemy Montezuma. Great game, with several active civilizations and a dozen zones of triple or quadruple cultural influence.

I concentrated this time first on territorial advance and consolidation, second on cultural dominance, and only after that on research and on militarization, which may explain why I ended up in a hundred-year war of attrition with Montezuma. It didn’t affect my lead, but it sure did consume a lot of resources. Lesson learned: arm earlier, arm everywhere, and think carefully about how remote colonies will be supplied and protected.

Speaking of which, it was the first game in which I ended up with three or four completely separate and significant areas of influence, including most of the northern icecap, due to two things: an early bid to range as far as possible and plant colonies early, as soon as I got oceangoing transport; and the success of my long campaign against Montezuma (who, it must be said, declared war on me and not the other way around), who lost two large cities on his home continent of Montezumaland, and would have lost more if the clock hadn’t run out. Montezuma harried my polar cities, but only took two of the remotest ones (razing one and keeping the other); I’m not sure why, but I’m assuming he was just overextended.

It was my first game with such a heavy sea component, and because the icecaps effectively divided the world into a western sea and an eastern sea (with my continent at the middle, of course), I had to run two completely separate sea supply and defense operations, which I didn’t get figured out for a while. That cost me. In the early days, I depended on an alliance with Mao for an outlet to the eastern sea, and after he closed his borders I briefly had to go to war with him (with the help of Peter, who took Chengdu and opened the sea lanes again), but we made peace right after that. I tend to play the way I live, which is to say relatively amicably with almost everyone — that may explain why at the end of the game, despite my victory, I was rated with the strategic prowess of Ethelred the Unready (worst of all save Dan Quayle), but I think it makes the game interesting.

To my amazement, I held Darjeeling throughout the hundred years’ war, despite light defenses, a century of bombardment, and a land border with Montezuma (at a city he’d taken from me). This was for the same reason that it had originally been hard to settle: the city itself was cut off by a mountain from the adjacent lands, so it would have had to have been attacked by sea, and he must have not had marines or the capacity to use them. (See the bottom photo below.)

Here are a couple of photos. Click through to see larger images, or to see the whole set, which is also here.

If you aren’t familiar with EC2K (which you aren’t, since we invented it ourselves earlier this year), it’s kind of like paintball for people who (1) like to play at night, (2) prefer the “playing” part over the “winning” part, and (3) don’t really like getting sprayed with paint. I’ve never been much of a running-around group gamer, and I sat out the previous rounds on the sidelines, but this just goes to show that if you throw me in with the right crowd and cajole me enough, I can enjoy myself playing along with anything.

Here’s what you need:

• Somewhere between six (6) and twenty (20) fun-loving and group-oriented friends, who don’t mind running around in the dark on potentially treacherous terrain;
• Grounds to play on, with some acreage and varied land features;
• Dark outfits for everyone, to help make the game harder;
• A supply of glow bracelets in various colors;
• A golf cart and some flashlights;
• Additional adventure accoutrements to taste (robot breastplates, face makeup, etc.).

It’s worth noting that most of the supplies we needed (aside from the golf cart) were available at the Dollar Tree a few miles away on Route 22.

The rules, which are still evolving, are straightforward. Imagine yourself in a dystopian future, with whatever backstory you choose. For starters, just to calibrate your brain, imagine a gigantic game of “Logan’s Run” played in the dark, between a small group of Seekers and a larger band of Runners. The object of the game is for the Runners to find all the energeon rings (we used glow bracelets) that were previously hidden by the Seekers, and return the rings to base, before the Seekers can find and apprehend all the Runners. The Runners must wear the energeon rings visibly (that’s part of the game), so what you see at the height of a round is flashes of luminescent blue and green in the distance, pursued at intervals by furious flashlight-waving lunatics in a golf cart. In the dark. Loads of fun!

We had two Seekers in a golf cart chasing between six and ten Runners, which was about right for the size of playing field we had. We also had one or two Jailers, who kept time and score and looked after the detainees. In the two largest rounds, we added a third Seeker on foot; the Foot Seeker was required to wear a ridiculous flashing necklace to make him visible to Runners, but in both rounds, despite that handicap, the Foot Seeker did an able job of apprehending Runners, who need to put their eyes in every direction at once and can’t possibly do it.

We played about 15 rounds over the course of the weekend, tinkering with the rules, and experimented with various things: what are the rules of engagement for apprehending Runners, what is the proper ratio of energeon rings to runners, how may flashlights be employed, how must Seekers on foot identify themselves, should there be a time limit, where and how is it permissible for the Seekers to hide energeon rings, how must rings be displayed by Runners once found, how may jailed Runners be broken out of jail to rejoin the game, etc.

In a group of our size, playing on our field with our rules, rounds typically take about 15 to 20 minutes (down from 30 minutes when we first started, before we got good); and with adept Seekers, the odds of winning the round are roughly even between Runners and Seekers.

The game definitely goes better if everyone stays in character; we had a lot of “Run, Runner, Run!” and “You can’t hide forever!” from the Seekers, which kept us all focused.

Below is a satellite map of our playing field in daylight (remember, we played by moonlight, so everyone had to commit the map to memory). We ruled certain parts of the property nearest the house out of bounds (so as not to disturb our kind and generous hosts, who were already in bed), but otherwise we had the run of the place, and we took full advantage.

Note the maze at right, which is a set of winding paths cut into a field of tall grasses (where yours truly got his nasty horsefly bite, when he dove into a patch of native wildflowers to avoid the oncoming Seekers); the pond with dock and rowboat at upper right; the woods at the top; and the large tree-studded lawns elsewhere. Most of these areas were in play. Each part of the field involved its own strategy and had its own dangers — like the tree full of ants I hid behind at one point.

I’m proud to say that, during my one round as Seeker, I was responsible for three of the best ring hides of the weekend: in the left rear wheel well of my VW New Beetle, nine feet up in the crook of an oak tree, and tied to the boat rope hanging from the dock into the pond. Our rules say that the rings had to be visible from somewhere on the field, but it didn’t say from where, so all these hides were legit. Someone else wrapped a ring around the flagpole (ingenious!), and yet another sneak placed one right under the lights at the front gate, making it impossible to retrieve without being fully illuminated for the benefit of the Seekers.

Here’s our merry band just before going out for the first round of night 3:

It’s important to note that, despite possible appearances to the contrary, this is not a game to be played under the influence, of alcohol or otherwise. Not only do you need your reflexes to stay in the game (it’s surprising how quickly your primal reactions take over when you’re being chased by two lunatics in a golf cart yelling “Run, Runner, Run!” in the dark), but remember we’re all running around on hilly terrain in the dark and being chased across that terrain by a golf cart with no headlights. We did have one accident on night 2 involving a face and a low-hanging tree limb (which was subsequently tagged with a “caution” glow ring), whose victim jumped right back into the game on night 3 (good sport!), but it could easily have been worse: golf cart in the pond, player run over in the maze, etc.

So play with your friends, look out for each other, stay alert, and keep the game fun. I’m looking forward to the next round, later in the summer.

(Photos courtesy Keren Form)

Sorry, gotta go play Civ IV…

For the record, I’ve spent more than an hour, over two days, on Puzzle 22, and I’m still missing about a third of the fill. These are very, very hard puzzles. (Peter recently asked if the puzzles were too hard, just right, or not hard enough, and the votes were slightly in favor of “not hard enough” — he apparently pays attention.) And, hello, compared to everyone except the top 100 solvers in the world, I’m really good at crosswords.

Sign up here for 10 bucks a year. And buy Peter’s books — they pay his mortgage.

Subscription is $10 per year, or $70 if you want the right to provide an entry for 1-Across in a future puzzle. Very much worth the money. Please subscribe — we want Peter to be subsidized to keep this effort up!

What made it hard, I think, is that the way the clues and the theme combine to create the theme entries is a little different than in other puzzles. This threw me (along with a couple hundred of my friends), such that the theme took me a long time to start puzzling out, and I didn’t get it until it was too late. In fact, I realize now that I understood the theme logic a little incorrectly in competition — it’s only now as I re-solve that I have it right.

If anyone has a lock of Brendan Quigley’s hair, or a fingernail clipping, or anything I can use for some protective white magic in advance of next year’s tournament, please send it my way. I was originally in a somewhat less generous mood and thinking voodoo, but white magic is so much more in the spirit of the event. Besides, with crossword construction powers like his, he’s probably immune to black magic anyway. Along with my white magic, I plan to do every puzzle on Brendan’s Web site between now and next year’s tournament. Best to be prepared.

On the whole: solid and fair and emotionally rewarding puzzles, no real complaints about clueing, nothing out of the ordinary. An honorable set of puzzles, as is to be expected at the preeminent crossword event in the world.

Puzzle 1. “Flip-Flops,” by Stan Newman, editor of the Newsday crossword. 15 minutes, 78 words, 15 x 15. A solid warmup puzzle; lightly themed, as usual. Speed is necessary in Puzzle 1, and unfortunately (per gossip I heard, and my own experience) it was slow-and-steady going, which I think put a lot of us behind from the start. In NYT terms, a hard Wednesday or easy Thursday.

Puzzle 2. “Can We Tawk?” by Elizabeth Gorski, veteran constructor of over 1,500 crosswords. 25 minutes, 94 words, 17 x 17. Harder; more challenging theme, saucier clueing. One particular letter was misentered by many, many people, including some high rankers. A hard Thursday or easy Friday.

Puzzle 3. “The Sports Bar,” by Patrick Berry, one of the most creative and intricate constructors working today. 30 minutes, 118 words, 19 x 19. Trickier clueing; waggish theme; a few obscure entries.

Puzzle 4. “Without Fail,” by Mike Nothnagel, a beloved and thoughtful solo and team constructor. 20 minutes, 78 words, 15 x 15. Theme was subtle — in fact, I didn’t figure it out until after I finished.

Puzzle 5. “You’re Solving… With What?” by Brendan Emmett Quigley, one of the most active professional constructors working today. 25 minutes, 94 words, 17 x 17. Absolutely devilish. Not only did I not solve clean in 25 minutes, I left a zillion squares blank. I’ll have more to say about this later. (Not at all suggesting it wasn’t a fair puzzle — in fact, to stump so many of us, it was obviously a great one.)

Puzzle 6. “Misfilings,” by Maura Jacobson, constructor of the New York Magazine crossword and the only constructor to have had a puzzle in every ACPT for 33 years running. 30 minutes, 122 words, 19 x 19. Witty theme, light solve, just like the NY Mag puzzles themselves — but don’t be lulled into a false sense of security; you need to keep your time up if you want to keep your score up.

Puzzle 7. “Heads of State,” by Merl Reagle, punster extraordinaire. 45 minutes, 144 words, 21 x 21. Not as wicked as some of his previous contest puzzles (as I recall, he had a Puzzle 5 a few years back), but still a challenge. Many, many puns in the clues; keep your eyes open. As always, a couple of laugh-out-loud theme entries. Note: Buy Merl’s books; his style cannot be imitated and the puzzles are fantastic.

Puzzle 8. “Talent Show,” the championship puzzle, by Mike Shenk, crossword editor of the Wall Street Journal. Clues supplied in A (wicked), B (very difficult), and C (difficult) versions. 15 minutes, 70 words, 15 x 15. A rough, rough themeless puzzle, as the championship puzzles always are. As someone who was not in the final round, I solved this one for fun while the poor schnooks on stage (in Division C) solved it on the white board. They all finished before I did. I solved the B clues, which were very tricky; I don’t think I would have finished in the time allotted if I had been solving in competition. The person sitting next to me solved from the A clues and just plain could not complete it without help. So there you go.

• There’s a big digital minutes-and-seconds countdown clock in the corner of the room. Every puzzle has a time limit (e.g., 20 minutes). Everyone starts at the same time, and the clock starts counting down. When you finish, you put up your hand and a roving official picks up your paper and notes how many full minutes you have left on the clock (e.g., 11 minutes if the clock says “11:15″). The officials are usually quite fast and are aware of the time you put up your hand, and there are only very rare disagreements.
• Because early-completion bonuses are awarded based on full minutes left, handing in your paper at 11:55 and at 11:04 counts the same for your score, so we’re trained to use the full fractional minute we have left to check our work before putting up our hands. For some of us, taking an extra minute to try to find errors may be beneficial, if we finish near the minute boundary and/or it was a tough solve.
• The scoring (which is explained here) counterbalances the need for accuracy against the need for speed. On the whole, according to how the scoring system is calibrated, accuracy is worth a lot of time: one is better served to take up to seven minutes longer to produce a clean solve, rather than a puzzle with as few as two wrong letters handed in earlier. At the high end of the scale, even more arcane rules come into play; for example, in the on-stage finals, extra time (in the form of an early start, by a margin of a few seconds) may be awarded to one or another of the finalists based on nearly microscopic differentials in their scores.
• Whiteboard solving is hard. I’ve never done it, but I’ve seen a friend do it, and (to put it bluntly) he choked — I concurrently solved the same puzzle on paper faster than he could do it on the whiteboard, even though he’s a much better solver than I am. In the Division A finals, it probably doesn’t help that you have to wear headphones (pumping in God knows what) to prevent you from hearing the amplified play-by-play by Neal Conan and Merl Reagle that’s being broadcast to the audience sitting behind you.

The luminaries of the crossword puzzle world who made it onto the leaderboard yet again — including Howard Barkin, Tyler Hinman, Trip Payne, Kiran Kedlaya, Stella Zawistowski, Francis Heaney, Al Sanders, and Ellen Ripstein — all deserve our respect. As easy as the competition seems for them (unfortunately, I always sit near Trip, who seems to put up his hand at just about the time I break into the puzzle), they work as hard as any of us to perfect their craft, and many of them additionally construct, edit, or otherwise work in the world of puzzles. They’re an example for all of us, and certainly for me, inspiring me to work harder, solve faster, and practice more.

I’ll have more to say later, along with photos and additional links, but here are some initial thoughts about this year’s event.

Thanks to Will Shortz, Helene Hovanec, and this year’s officials, constructors, and staff for a terrific event — good mojo, a fair competition, and plenty of fun and frolic around the edges. And thanks to the staff of the Marriott Brooklyn Bridge. This is the third year in Brooklyn (after decades in Stamford), and after a couple of rough years, the hotel has adjusted to us (and we’ve adjusted to it): service in the restaurant and bar has improved; we’re used to the room; spillover social activity has moved out of the hotel lobby into nearby bars and nightspots. I think a lot of the frustration with the hotel (and there still is some) is a matter of simple resistance to change; objectively, the hotel is fine and the staff seem to be doing their part to make it work well for us.

The social events were a hit. Sure, they were schmaltzy, but that’s kind of the point — getting the community together to celebrate with one another in our quirky way. All things considered, I think we all enjoyed the talent show and hope it’s done again next year, and ditto for the Friday games despite their unevenness.

This year’s puzzle #5 was a killer; or, at the level I’m solving at, it’s a time game — take your pick. I had six clean solves in what I thought was fairly good time (bombing on puzzle #5, about which you’ve already heard, and I’ll have more to say) — but I still dropped more than 40 places. Comparing myself (at 232 this year) with the contestants in the 180s where I ranked last year, there’s a gap of less than 350 points. Either a clean solve of puzzle #5 (and not necessarily a fast one, either), or an average of 2 minutes’ advantage in each of the other 6 puzzles, would have ranked me up in the 180s again. And achieving both of those would have earned me the additional 300 points I needed to reach the target rank of 150 that I was shooting for going in. And wIthout a doubt, once you get above roughly 100 in the rankings, it’s all about solve time — at that point you can take for granted that virtually everyone has a clean solve of all seven puzzles.

Much of the fun in this whole enterprise revolves around meeting and schmoozing with the constructors. Puzzle constructing is a small, small world; something like 100 people alive have ever done it for a prominent outlet, and most of them were at the tournament. It’s surprising what a varied group it is, in terms of ages, personalities, and so forth. After a few years I’m used to most of them, but rarely do you meet a crossword constructor and think, “Why, that’s exactly what I would have expected him/her to look like; I’d have recognized him/her anywhere!” I’ll refrain from embarrassing myself by pointing out exactly which constructors I pegged totally wrong, based on no particular evidence, before I eventually met them at the tournament.

As a corollary to that: I should try constructing. Part of the fun of the puzzle world is making it all happen. The solver skillset and the constructor skillset aren’t exactly the same, but there’s a fair amount of overlap. Chatting at the bar on Saturday afternoon with an aspiring constructor (I forget your name, but if you’re reading this, say hi — you’ll recognize the code word “COLD FRAME”) about constructing got me excited about it again — and now that I have Parallels working I needn’t be afraid of Windows constructor software anymore.

Plenty more to come, including a list of crossword events, a puzzle-by-puzzle rundown (but no spoilers here!), some hallway gossip, and a lot of photos. Stay tuned.

For the record: my tournament buddy held steady in the 120s, for the 3rd year in a row, coming up 2 places — this despite having almost as much trouble on puzzle #5 as I did. This tends to confirm the “it’s a time game” theory of tournament play. Also for the record: you can see scans of my filled-in puzzle sheets here, but don’t click if you plan to do the puzzles yourself — you’ll see the answers!

Image credit: Don Christensen, source here

1. Dan Feyer
2. Howard Barkin
3. Anne Erdmann
4. Tyler Hinman, 4-time-running champ
5. Kiran Kedlaya
6. Trip Payne, the most recent running champ before Tyler
7. Stella Zawistowski
8. Francis Heaney
9. Al Sanders
10. Ellen Ripstein

See what I mean? Anything could happen. It’s especially exciting to see the well-liked Anne Erdmann so high up. But note that these people are all very close together; what will determine the final leaderboard is finish order in puzzle #7. Exciting!!

On the upside, I think I had a clean solve of Merl Reagle’s puzzle #7 in fairly good time, so I should come up at least a few positions when they lock the rankings.

After puzzle #4, I’d dropped from #189 last year back into the 200s; after puzzle #6 (propelled down into the sewer by the horrific puzzle #5) I’m down even further, in the 220s, roughly where I was 2 years ago.

This is a disaster, awful, horrible, perhaps portending the end of the world as we know it!

Seriously — given that only a few hundred points are separating me from the 120s (squarely in B Division territory), there’s really nothing for me to be ashamed of. A slightly better time on all the puzzles I finished correctly, or an incrementally better showing on puzzle #5, would have put me up in the 150s where I was shooting for. (And a good #7 in the morning will pull ne up a little bit.)

I’m also cheered that I had a clean solve of #3 and (apparently, based on the scores) a clean solve of #6. So it mostly comes down to a few minutes of finish time — plus that devilish Brendan Quigley!

Meanwhile, my tournament buddy is crowing. He rose from the 120s last year all the way into the 80s after puzzle #4, and even after a rough #5 and #6 he’s still squarely in the 120s where he always seems to end up. (He just did the math — if he’d had a perfect solve of #2 as I did, rather than one error, he’d be alllll the way up at 103.)

I’m trying not to think about the fact that I’ve dropped from the top quintile of Division C down into the lower half, or that I’ve been outsolved by a whole mess of D’s and an E or two. Ugh.

More handicapping later — our pizza is here.

No standings are up, so it’s really hard to know how I’m doing — if everyone else was hit as hard as I was by 5, my performance just might have been par for my level.

At the breaks, everyone was trying to handicap what the incrementally reduced attendance (due to the economy) would mean for the standings. This is especially important for people like me, who rank near a division boundary.

Last year, out of a field of 800 or so, I was in the top quintile or so of C division, in the 180s. In a field of the same size, all other things being equal, I’d only have to improve 25 places or so to cross into B division (and, in theory, if I had a great year I could conceivably have had a shot at the C championship round this year).

But with attendance down 10-15 percent, what does that mean for me? The sense of the group (and here I’m reproducing gossip from the smoking clique from the front steps, most of whom are high B’s and low A’s, which is passed to me by my high-B tournament buddy): the dropoff will mostly be in C and below, since A’s and B’s are the ones most likely to figure out a way to make it to the tournament no matter what. (If you’re an A, and you’ve been coming for 10 years; or if you’re a puzzle constructor; or if you’re Jim Jenista who starts working on his costumes for next year as soon as he gets home, dude, you’re coming.) This doesn’t bode well for me, since it just incrementally biases the field as a whole toward the top of the scale. (We’ll see…)

For those who are joining us late, I ranked 364th in the world in 2007, 257th in 2008, and 189th in 2009. My goal this year is to break 150. I’m afraid rising much closer to 100 will be very difficult, as at that point you start to enter the range of the brilliant misfits who dominate the world of puzzling, which (for all my many charms) I am afraid I am not one of. (Or am I?)

After an informal social puzzle competition on Friday night, the winnowing begins in earnest on Saturday, with 6 competitive, timed puzzles (in a hotel ballroom set up like the room you took the SATs in), scored according to an arcane formula (which every single participant could explain to you from memory) that balances speed against accuracy. One final qualifying puzzle follows on Sunday. By convention, puzzle 2 is difficult, puzzle 5 is absolute and obscene torture, and puzzle 6 is an entertaining schmaltzfest by New York magazine crossword constructor Maura Jacobson, who has had a puzzle in every competition since the very first. Interim rankings are posted two or three times during the day on Saturday, so that the obsessives in the competition (i.e., everybody) can micro-obsess about their micro-standings throughout the whole damn weekend.

The top three by rank in each of Divisions A and B will competitively solve an eighth championship puzzle on a whiteboard up on a stage on Sunday beginning around noon, with live play-by-play announcing by NPR’s Neal Conan and crossword constructor Merl Reagle. The championship puzzle has three different sets of clues, of different levels of difficulty, for the three divisions. In Division A, college prodigy Tyler Hinman, professional crossword puzzle contestant Trip Payne, bookish “Wordplay” star/fashion plate Ellen Ripstein, and eternal Catholic schoolboy/crossword constructor Francis Heaney are all favored. (Yes, there is such a thing as crossword tournament VIPs; see “briliant misfit,” above, which most of them would consider a compliment.) This event is not technically open to the public, but security is not tight by that point in the tournament — if you’re in New York, adventurous, and up early on Sunday, it’s quite an experience. (Just don’t expect to see me on the stage.)

Perhaps not surprisingly, crossword puzzle people are very heavy drinkers — I wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow was the busiest night of the year in the hotel bar.

If you’d like to try your luck, puzzle #1 from last year’s tournament (PDF) is here. If you think you’re good enough to place in the top half of the Tournament pack, you should be able to complete this puzzle with no errors within about 10 minutes without breaking a sweat.