*MIT Logic Puzzle Open arguably counts, but that both felt and was a lot smaller.
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| I'll probably either post this puzzle in its own post later or one with the same theme, if I can find a good one. That poor, poor symmetry region inside a symmetry region... |
And then it was travel day! Oh, travel. Yay.
Fortunately, dinner was not missed - after meeting Elyot Grant and Jamie Hargrove in the lobby and eating, I was able to meet up with the rest of the US contingent at the instructions Q&A meeting, including Wei-Hwa Huang (B), roommate ft ("kaz", also B team) and my teammate Anderson Wang. Immediately, big shake-up to the WPC as there was apparently some printing mishaps and so none of the team rounds were ready (!!!!), forcing most of the event to reschedule. The first round would be at 8:45 (ooooof, but checking the old schedule this wasn't even a change, I just misread) and the first two days would be all individual rounds. Jamie was stickering people during this with leftover stickers from a sudoku team round, getting me with an 8. I put it on my updated schedule over the icon for round 13, sideways, and drew a right arrow under it. After the session, there was an in-person speed-setting event that I elected not to participate in, instead taking much of the time to talk to organizer Chiel (bakpao) from the Netherlands. I had missed the chance to purchase Toketa 11 on this "rest day" as well, and couldn't get the ATM to exchange anything anyway. I later swapped 20 USD for 20 CAD with Walker (losing the exchange rate but winning the convenience rate) to get this another day. After doing some quick round attack order planning, I ended up going to bed around midnight, which should give enough time to wake up, get ready, eat, and puzzle. I barely had anything to eat the following morning - a bit of bacon and some home fries (breakfast foods aren't my favorite, and I arrived pretty late for breakfast anyway) before it was time for my second in-person competition, after the MIT Logic Puzzle Open.
Day One
Round 1 (Welcome to Canada): 10 puzzles, 60 minutes, 600 points
Top score: 940. Tenth score: 690. My score: 720. (6th)
Tomtom, Battleships, Kurotto, Fillomino and Yajilin. My plan going in was to just do the round in reverse order and see how much I could do, as this would serve as a bit of a calibration on expectations for this WPC as a whole. The higher point value Yajilin was easier than the lower point value one, especially after I counted entrances correctly. The 145 point Fillomino - by Jamie - was a very nice puzzle with a cool arrangement of 3s that I was a bit blind on the resolution to. The 155 point Kurotto I was on the right track early and then didn't see a way to resolve the bottom right, forcing me to redo the top third of the puzzle. Turns out I was right and wasted a bunch of time for no reason, as when I got back to the same situation again I did find my way forward. Spent some time counting carefully on any large areas here as the penalty for an error would be huge, and moved to the Tomtoms first as I still had tons of time left in the round. I got walled on the first one, solved the second smoothly, knocked out both Battleships, and eventually saw the key interaction and submitted with 12 minutes of bonus. This was an okay performance I felt, and since I didn't plan to look at any results to not get in my own head, I didn't know exactly how good it was. This would become a bit of a running theme.
Top score: 940. Tenth score: 690. My score: 720. (6th)
Tomtom, Battleships, Kurotto, Fillomino and Yajilin. My plan going in was to just do the round in reverse order and see how much I could do, as this would serve as a bit of a calibration on expectations for this WPC as a whole. The higher point value Yajilin was easier than the lower point value one, especially after I counted entrances correctly. The 145 point Fillomino - by Jamie - was a very nice puzzle with a cool arrangement of 3s that I was a bit blind on the resolution to. The 155 point Kurotto I was on the right track early and then didn't see a way to resolve the bottom right, forcing me to redo the top third of the puzzle. Turns out I was right and wasted a bunch of time for no reason, as when I got back to the same situation again I did find my way forward. Spent some time counting carefully on any large areas here as the penalty for an error would be huge, and moved to the Tomtoms first as I still had tons of time left in the round. I got walled on the first one, solved the second smoothly, knocked out both Battleships, and eventually saw the key interaction and submitted with 12 minutes of bonus. This was an okay performance I felt, and since I didn't plan to look at any results to not get in my own head, I didn't know exactly how good it was. This would become a bit of a running theme.
Round 2 (Jacob E. Funk): 6 puzzles, 45 minutes, 450 points
Top score: 620. Tenth score: 460. My score: 365. (20th)
The dreaded Kakuro round. I had no real expectations, hoping to escape with 310 (everything but Konkat-kuro). Except I actually did finish the round with 2 minutes to spare, which I was completely over the moon about - I had tons of time with just Konkat and Gapped remaining, started the former, got stuck, solved the latter, then saw the progress and solved it. I happened to have an error in the Gapped costing 85 + 20 points of bonus, but since 365 is more than the 310 I was shooting for, I was quite happy with this. The Gapped was a silly mistake too, missing a possible arrangement of numbers in the last corner and ending up with 8+2=9.
Top score: 620. Tenth score: 460. My score: 365. (20th)
The dreaded Kakuro round. I had no real expectations, hoping to escape with 310 (everything but Konkat-kuro). Except I actually did finish the round with 2 minutes to spare, which I was completely over the moon about - I had tons of time with just Konkat and Gapped remaining, started the former, got stuck, solved the latter, then saw the progress and solved it. I happened to have an error in the Gapped costing 85 + 20 points of bonus, but since 365 is more than the 310 I was shooting for, I was quite happy with this. The Gapped was a silly mistake too, missing a possible arrangement of numbers in the last corner and ending up with 8+2=9.
Round 3 (Niagara Falls): 4+4 puzzles, 50 minutes, 500 points
Top score: 570. Tenth score: 440. My score: 340. (20th)
The even more dreaded distilling Latin Square round. My hope was to get everything except the Easy as Japanese Sums pair, and that's exactly what I did, going Smashed Sums (Doppelblock), Top Heavy Number Place (First Seen) and Skyscrapers (Gap). I had some pretty significant progress on the final pair as well and with a minute left made a guess on the left one which was unfortunately the wrong choice of two possible options, which would have swung me 80 points. Still, I was very very happy with surviving the number placement rounds - what I expected to be my weakest - with the scores I was hoping for.
Top score: 570. Tenth score: 440. My score: 340. (20th)
The even more dreaded distilling Latin Square round. My hope was to get everything except the Easy as Japanese Sums pair, and that's exactly what I did, going Smashed Sums (Doppelblock), Top Heavy Number Place (First Seen) and Skyscrapers (Gap). I had some pretty significant progress on the final pair as well and with a minute left made a guess on the left one which was unfortunately the wrong choice of two possible options, which would have swung me 80 points. Still, I was very very happy with surviving the number placement rounds - what I expected to be my weakest - with the scores I was hoping for.
Round 4 (Road to GMPuzzles): 6 puzzles, 40 minutes, 400 points
Top score: 640. Tenth score: 550. My score: 600. (2nd)
The slightly dreaded Math Path round. The final one of these on the GMPuzzles Sunday Special was a brutal 8x8 monster, and so we were pretty worried about the difficulty of this round and especially the hardest puzzles in it. My original plan was to go front to back and skip to the 130 pointer halfway through, but with how finishable these rounds were I elected to go back to front instead. I didn't have any real struggles and took the time to both number every cell and draw the path to make 100% sure I was correct, and declared halfway through the round for a massive 20 minutes of bonus - I'd looked up at 21:00 and rather than declare and get probably 20 minutes, I took the minute to look through and check. The score held, and it was a great experience waiting outside the competition hall and eventually moving to the stairs to chat with other finishers (including Kevin Sun of Canada). The excitement the US contingent had whenever another one of us left the room was palpable - there were over 50 finishers in this round.
Top score: 640. Tenth score: 550. My score: 600. (2nd)
The slightly dreaded Math Path round. The final one of these on the GMPuzzles Sunday Special was a brutal 8x8 monster, and so we were pretty worried about the difficulty of this round and especially the hardest puzzles in it. My original plan was to go front to back and skip to the 130 pointer halfway through, but with how finishable these rounds were I elected to go back to front instead. I didn't have any real struggles and took the time to both number every cell and draw the path to make 100% sure I was correct, and declared halfway through the round for a massive 20 minutes of bonus - I'd looked up at 21:00 and rather than declare and get probably 20 minutes, I took the minute to look through and check. The score held, and it was a great experience waiting outside the competition hall and eventually moving to the stairs to chat with other finishers (including Kevin Sun of Canada). The excitement the US contingent had whenever another one of us left the room was palpable - there were over 50 finishers in this round.
Lunch (yum)
Between rounds I kept trying to find different groups of people to talk to, whether it be the US B/C/D teams in the back, US A up in the front, or other people I knew like fellow Lunarch employee Martin Ender on the other side of the room, by the water. Lunch was mostly uneventful, though after Math Path it was very clear that the team competition was a two horse race between USA-A and JAP-A, with no one else even close. On the individual side, the US was doing pretty well considering none of us are number placement people - again I didn't know too much about in-the-moment scoring, other than my Kakuro error which didn't faze me at all. So what if my scores were only above my expectations instead of way above?
Oh also Rever (a friend from Witness Randomizer speedrunning) arrived to help with grading and generally hang out starting this afternoon, Jamie and I ambushed him in the lobby and yes, meeting a friend you've known for years does just click exactly the way you think it will. Would recommend. But anyway it's approaching 2 PM time for...
Between rounds I kept trying to find different groups of people to talk to, whether it be the US B/C/D teams in the back, US A up in the front, or other people I knew like fellow Lunarch employee Martin Ender on the other side of the room, by the water. Lunch was mostly uneventful, though after Math Path it was very clear that the team competition was a two horse race between USA-A and JAP-A, with no one else even close. On the individual side, the US was doing pretty well considering none of us are number placement people - again I didn't know too much about in-the-moment scoring, other than my Kakuro error which didn't faze me at all. So what if my scores were only above my expectations instead of way above?
Oh also Rever (a friend from Witness Randomizer speedrunning) arrived to help with grading and generally hang out starting this afternoon, Jamie and I ambushed him in the lobby and yes, meeting a friend you've known for years does just click exactly the way you think it will. Would recommend. But anyway it's approaching 2 PM time for...
Round 5 (American Stars): 6 puzzles, 35 minutes, 350 points
Top score: 480. Tenth score: 350. My score: 315. (11th)
The worrisome (for me) Star Battle round. This has never been one of my strong genres and my plan was to just work backwards, starting with the 110 point vanilla (3 stars...) which went well enough. I didn't see at all how to break into the Double variant so moved to the Builder and broke it. I was able to trace the source of my error (a region can touch itself at a corner) and fix it. Back to the Double, nothing, so I knocked out the three vanillas at the front. Okay, now it's just the Double and I have about 11 minutes left, wait a second these regions are symmetric okay I can work with that. Found the break-in and declared with 4 minutes left, which again I was very happy with. It turned out I had an error in the 35 pointer stemming from an overzealous empty marking, dropping my potential score from a very good 390 to a still good 315. I had no real expectations for this round so, like Kakuro, this 75 point hit didn't faze me at all.
Top score: 480. Tenth score: 350. My score: 315. (11th)
The worrisome (for me) Star Battle round. This has never been one of my strong genres and my plan was to just work backwards, starting with the 110 point vanilla (3 stars...) which went well enough. I didn't see at all how to break into the Double variant so moved to the Builder and broke it. I was able to trace the source of my error (a region can touch itself at a corner) and fix it. Back to the Double, nothing, so I knocked out the three vanillas at the front. Okay, now it's just the Double and I have about 11 minutes left, wait a second these regions are symmetric okay I can work with that. Found the break-in and declared with 4 minutes left, which again I was very happy with. It turned out I had an error in the 35 pointer stemming from an overzealous empty marking, dropping my potential score from a very good 390 to a still good 315. I had no real expectations for this round so, like Kakuro, this 75 point hit didn't faze me at all.
Round 6 (North American Siblings): 6 puzzles 1 puzzle, 35 minutes, 360 points
Top score: 530. Tenth score: 420. My score: 240. (27th)
This round, however, did. A single interconnected puzzle, with partial points only for fully completed correct grids. I had 1 grid at the halfway point from being slow to find the progress and matchings, erasing on the sheened paper barely worked, there wasn't enough room on the tables...with 5 minutes left I had two finished grids and all the matchings, and very frantically tried to finish everything. With a minute left I did, but the Minesweeper wasn't resolving uniquely. I was barely able to trace back my error in the Parking Lot and fix that when time ran out before I could fix the Minesweeper, already knowing exactly what to change. To add insult to injury, I also had an extra 5th submarine in the Battleships which I almost definitely would have caught if the round was timed better. Yes, people were finishing this with lots of time left but that extra minute would have been a huge swing for me, and even beyond that my tablemate Derek Kisman (CAN-B) scored a 0 due to how deep you had to be to get any finished grids. The people sitting behind me also both scored 0. Literally half of the room scored 0. This really should have been a team round, or given lots of extra time to allow more people to make progress, or not buried the partial points so deep that you had to solve 90% of the puzzle to get anything. I stand by stating that this was a great puzzle, but a poor round.
Interlude - team scores. Japan-A has a total score of 11859. US-A has a total score of 10661. 1200 points is a lot this early, especially given how much of this is bonus scoring which is capped. It looks like team rounds are where we'll have to try to mount a comeback. I was also exactly tied with Thomas Luo in 11th overall at this point, and Japan had 1-2-7-8.
Top score: 530. Tenth score: 420. My score: 240. (27th)
This round, however, did. A single interconnected puzzle, with partial points only for fully completed correct grids. I had 1 grid at the halfway point from being slow to find the progress and matchings, erasing on the sheened paper barely worked, there wasn't enough room on the tables...with 5 minutes left I had two finished grids and all the matchings, and very frantically tried to finish everything. With a minute left I did, but the Minesweeper wasn't resolving uniquely. I was barely able to trace back my error in the Parking Lot and fix that when time ran out before I could fix the Minesweeper, already knowing exactly what to change. To add insult to injury, I also had an extra 5th submarine in the Battleships which I almost definitely would have caught if the round was timed better. Yes, people were finishing this with lots of time left but that extra minute would have been a huge swing for me, and even beyond that my tablemate Derek Kisman (CAN-B) scored a 0 due to how deep you had to be to get any finished grids. The people sitting behind me also both scored 0. Literally half of the room scored 0. This really should have been a team round, or given lots of extra time to allow more people to make progress, or not buried the partial points so deep that you had to solve 90% of the puzzle to get anything. I stand by stating that this was a great puzzle, but a poor round.
Interlude - team scores. Japan-A has a total score of 11859. US-A has a total score of 10661. 1200 points is a lot this early, especially given how much of this is bonus scoring which is capped. It looks like team rounds are where we'll have to try to mount a comeback. I was also exactly tied with Thomas Luo in 11th overall at this point, and Japan had 1-2-7-8.
Round 7 (A Galaxy Far, Far Away): 10 puzzles, 50 minutes, 500 points
Top score: 620. Tenth score: 480. My score: 570. (4th)
This round was all Myopia variants of various object placement puzzles. I started with the Minedoku since the one on the USPC was pretty comfortable, then Wittgenstein Briquet went smoothly enough. The second Akari tripped me up at the start with a bad deduction on seeing through clue blocks, which I quickly corrected and found the logic for. It was still a methodical solve to make sure I had it right before Jamie's Statue Parks (breezy) and two Battleships. The second one had a non-standard fleet of 15 length 2 ships and I just did not see any logic here, so kept trying things in the bottom left (which seemed quite restricted) until something worked. Looking back, I can kinda see the logic, but this was definitely worth taking the intuition route on. This is where the original schedule would go into team rounds, but instead it was time for my favorite: shading puzzles.
Top score: 620. Tenth score: 480. My score: 570. (4th)
This round was all Myopia variants of various object placement puzzles. I started with the Minedoku since the one on the USPC was pretty comfortable, then Wittgenstein Briquet went smoothly enough. The second Akari tripped me up at the start with a bad deduction on seeing through clue blocks, which I quickly corrected and found the logic for. It was still a methodical solve to make sure I had it right before Jamie's Statue Parks (breezy) and two Battleships. The second one had a non-standard fleet of 15 length 2 ships and I just did not see any logic here, so kept trying things in the bottom left (which seemed quite restricted) until something worked. Looking back, I can kinda see the logic, but this was definitely worth taking the intuition route on. This is where the original schedule would go into team rounds, but instead it was time for my favorite: shading puzzles.
Round 11 (What is the Meaning of Aqre?): 6 puzzles, 40 minutes, 400 points
Top score: 620. Tenth score: 480. My score: 480. (9th)
This was a really frustrating round right after it happened. I went straight for the Aqre (Symmetry) at the start, expecting a quite large puzzle, and was met with an 11x11. I logiced through the middle, found the continuation in the bottom left, and it broke. So I tried the other option, and it broke. Over 10 minutes into the round, I fully erased the puzzle and started again since 130 points (and some knowledge of what didn't work) was too much to leave on the table. After finally getting it, I went through in forwards order instead of backwards order, going for the lower variance play of shooting for 300 (leaving the 100 point vanilla) over going for it and potentially also whiffing. I ended up having to double bifurcate to solve that one but I did get it in the end, but hearing the sheer number of "finished!" in the hall definitely put a damper on my potential hopes at making this playoff. Still, the next two rounds seemed to suit my very well, and this was "only" losing 10 minutes on what I needed. Surely that could be made up, right?
Top score: 620. Tenth score: 480. My score: 480. (9th)
This was a really frustrating round right after it happened. I went straight for the Aqre (Symmetry) at the start, expecting a quite large puzzle, and was met with an 11x11. I logiced through the middle, found the continuation in the bottom left, and it broke. So I tried the other option, and it broke. Over 10 minutes into the round, I fully erased the puzzle and started again since 130 points (and some knowledge of what didn't work) was too much to leave on the table. After finally getting it, I went through in forwards order instead of backwards order, going for the lower variance play of shooting for 300 (leaving the 100 point vanilla) over going for it and potentially also whiffing. I ended up having to double bifurcate to solve that one but I did get it in the end, but hearing the sheer number of "finished!" in the hall definitely put a damper on my potential hopes at making this playoff. Still, the next two rounds seemed to suit my very well, and this was "only" losing 10 minutes on what I needed. Surely that could be made up, right?
Round 12 (Stretching Our Legs): 8 puzzles, 75 minutes, 750 points
Top score: 1050. Tenth score: 750. My score: 950. (2nd)
As predicted from the USPC having a large Nurikabe and Canal View from WPC authors, this round was all quite large shading puzzles. This kind of round suits me generally, since I approach most puzzles logically and on standard sized puzzles, guessing has a better expected value. So since I don't guess often, I can break away on stuff like this.
And I did - outside of Ken Endo and Walker Anderson (who unfortunately had an error on the Nanro, costing 80 points + 128 bonus points), no one else did better. I didn't gain much over the competition for the shading playoff here, though only about 10 people finished the round and this definitely narrowed the field. I remember starting with the Nurikabe (very comfy) into the Heyawake (dotting every unshaded - saved me from a barely unfinished puzzle) and Choco Banana (super smooth). I then went to the front with the Canal View (kinda slow), Tapa (definitely slow), Nanro (good) and LITS (pretty slick) before ending with the Cross the Streams. I took this really slow and careful since it felt quite narrow and any error would require a full restart, and took my 20 minutes of bonus. Definitely could have done better here but really, I have very little to complain about.
Top score: 1050. Tenth score: 750. My score: 950. (2nd)
As predicted from the USPC having a large Nurikabe and Canal View from WPC authors, this round was all quite large shading puzzles. This kind of round suits me generally, since I approach most puzzles logically and on standard sized puzzles, guessing has a better expected value. So since I don't guess often, I can break away on stuff like this.
And I did - outside of Ken Endo and Walker Anderson (who unfortunately had an error on the Nanro, costing 80 points + 128 bonus points), no one else did better. I didn't gain much over the competition for the shading playoff here, though only about 10 people finished the round and this definitely narrowed the field. I remember starting with the Nurikabe (very comfy) into the Heyawake (dotting every unshaded - saved me from a barely unfinished puzzle) and Choco Banana (super smooth). I then went to the front with the Canal View (kinda slow), Tapa (definitely slow), Nanro (good) and LITS (pretty slick) before ending with the Cross the Streams. I took this really slow and careful since it felt quite narrow and any error would require a full restart, and took my 20 minutes of bonus. Definitely could have done better here but really, I have very little to complain about.
At the end of day one I'd climbed up to 5th place on the individual rankings, and in fact the team was 2-5-6-12. Japan was still holding on to 1-3-7-14 (Hideaki having a bit of a rough event) and in terms of team totals, the US team had narrowed the gap from 1200 down to only about 850. The gap to Germany in third was a whopping 4500 - completely out of the running. Based on the progression of scored rounds and what we already knew, it was clear at night that the team competition was going to come down to the team rounds. I think there was some event in the competition hall in the evening (geography quiz?) but I wasn't really paying attention, Jamie had brought some puzzle construction notebooks and I was looking through those. Did you know he makes puzzles on paper, in pen? Insane. I also got the chance to talk to some other solvers throughout the day, including Tom Collyer (volunteer) at one of the meals, Michael Tang (US-D) in the hall, and just generally had a good time. I remember feeling pretty good about how things were going in the competition, and even outside of the competition the general vibe was fantastic. Everyone was just tons of fun to hang out with. I ended up going to sleep a bit closer to 1 AM that day, mostly from not being able to fall asleep for an hour or so. Nothing as extreme as Thomas Luo last year, though my standings also weren't quite as outstanding. Yet.
That's right, yet. Because first thing the next morning was...
Day Two
Round 13 (Islands of Insight): 9 puzzles, 70 minutes, 700 points
Top score: 1040. Tenth score: 740. My score: 1020. (2nd)
I literally work on this game. That's my job. Deriving the consequences of these rules on a puzzle by puzzle basis? Yeah I did a lot of prototyping. Interactions? I've already seen all of this. My team? They were primed on all of this. I honestly felt a bit slow here, especially on puzzles 1, 3 and 7. On puzzle 7 I even filled in the big symmetric area incorrectly at first (a single cell off) but caught it when I turned my paper to check the symmetry, as checking lateral symmetry is really quick. Like with the Math Path round, the US team members kept finishing early, but unlike the Math Path round, the other teams weren't. Third was Phillipp Weiss (GER-A) at 950, Ken Endo fourth (940), Thomas Luo 5th (880), Anderson Wang 6th (820), Kaz next (650, due to a minor error on 7) and then only two JAP-B team members (Taigo Ando and Yuki Kanabe, 800 and 790) left the hall early. An absolutely crushing performance from the US team here, scoring a full 1000 points over the next closest team in Germany-A. And Germany? Helped in a similar way by Martin Ender. Put aside these two well prepared teams, and the top team score is 2475 from Japan-B. US-A scored 3760, an average of 24 minutes left.
Top score: 1040. Tenth score: 740. My score: 1020. (2nd)
I literally work on this game. That's my job. Deriving the consequences of these rules on a puzzle by puzzle basis? Yeah I did a lot of prototyping. Interactions? I've already seen all of this. My team? They were primed on all of this. I honestly felt a bit slow here, especially on puzzles 1, 3 and 7. On puzzle 7 I even filled in the big symmetric area incorrectly at first (a single cell off) but caught it when I turned my paper to check the symmetry, as checking lateral symmetry is really quick. Like with the Math Path round, the US team members kept finishing early, but unlike the Math Path round, the other teams weren't. Third was Phillipp Weiss (GER-A) at 950, Ken Endo fourth (940), Thomas Luo 5th (880), Anderson Wang 6th (820), Kaz next (650, due to a minor error on 7) and then only two JAP-B team members (Taigo Ando and Yuki Kanabe, 800 and 790) left the hall early. An absolutely crushing performance from the US team here, scoring a full 1000 points over the next closest team in Germany-A. And Germany? Helped in a similar way by Martin Ender. Put aside these two well prepared teams, and the top team score is 2475 from Japan-B. US-A scored 3760, an average of 24 minutes left.
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| No, seriously. I basically predicted the entire round, mostly missing the domino Kurodoko and the area size for the letters (and lack of unclued areas in those puzzles). But I did predict letters would always have something else to go with it. |
Naturally, this put us on top of the team standings, and launched me into 3rd place individual. Ken and Walker were well out of reach, so the only place to go was down - at this point, I started hoping for a top 5 finish. Maybe, if things went just right, a podium spot was possible, but I wasn't counting on it.
Also, as long as I was clean (I was, Elyot confirmed it a bit later before results were live), that was shading playoff. Goal: achieved! New goal: don't embarrass myself in front of the crowd later!
Also, as long as I was clean (I was, Elyot confirmed it a bit later before results were live), that was shading playoff. Goal: achieved! New goal: don't embarrass myself in front of the crowd later!
Round 14 (Melon's Puzzles): 6 puzzles, 40 minutes, 400 points
Top score: 600. Tenth score: 430. My score: 530. (5th)
A round of only Castle Wall, with 3 variant puzzles. I liked this round quite a bit, the Antisymmetry puzzle was very tough and I ended up guessing the orientation of black and white after narrowing the entire grid to two cases - I guessed right, but the wrong case would have died quickly. Some very cool logic here. The 105 point vanilla was also a very slick construction, and I cruised to an easy finish. It felt a bit slow, and in hindsight it was as I would end up missing a spot in the loop playoff by a mere 10 points. Though actually, saving a minute here would have been an even tie for the spot, and without that minute I'd lose the tiebreaker over Naoki Sekiya (JAP-A) so maybe I wasn't quite as close as I thought. Anyway, good round. Fun round.
Top score: 600. Tenth score: 430. My score: 530. (5th)
A round of only Castle Wall, with 3 variant puzzles. I liked this round quite a bit, the Antisymmetry puzzle was very tough and I ended up guessing the orientation of black and white after narrowing the entire grid to two cases - I guessed right, but the wrong case would have died quickly. Some very cool logic here. The 105 point vanilla was also a very slick construction, and I cruised to an easy finish. It felt a bit slow, and in hindsight it was as I would end up missing a spot in the loop playoff by a mere 10 points. Though actually, saving a minute here would have been an even tie for the spot, and without that minute I'd lose the tiebreaker over Naoki Sekiya (JAP-A) so maybe I wasn't quite as close as I thought. Anyway, good round. Fun round.
Round 15 (All Over the Map): 6 puzzles, 65 minutes, 650 points
Top score: 920. Tenth score: 660. My score: 840. (3rd)
Oof, all big grids on irregular shapes, this was a really tough round. I ended up going through in order, not hitting any big issues until breaking the Masyu (Ice) with a Great Lakes theme very late into the solve. I had a brief moment of panic - this was some 6 minutes into the solve, and erasing would be quite time consuming - but trying to fix a puzzle like this can be nearly impossible, depending on where the break crept in - and my solve path was so sporadic with progress everywhere that I had no way of knowing what I could and couldn't trust. Fortunately, I was able to logic through a few pearls to see that the thing I thought was a problem could be trivially forced, and therefore my issue must be that something else had another option I missed. Four instances of this kind of logic later, I found the root cause and successfully performed surgery on this puzzle. I still spent a full minute carefully tracing the entire loop to make sure I had exactly one loop (I did) before moving onto the Masyu (Triangular) which I also kept breaking. But these were short range breaks that were effectively accidental bifurcations, and after an extremely careful solve of an Irregular Slitherlink shaped like the logo for this year, I declared with 19 minutes left. It was somewhere around this round that I realized bakpao was a desk in front of me, with Neil Zussman (UK-A) and Michael Mosshammer (UN-1, I think from Austria) were one desk over, who finished official 13th and 18th respectively.
Top score: 920. Tenth score: 660. My score: 840. (3rd)
Oof, all big grids on irregular shapes, this was a really tough round. I ended up going through in order, not hitting any big issues until breaking the Masyu (Ice) with a Great Lakes theme very late into the solve. I had a brief moment of panic - this was some 6 minutes into the solve, and erasing would be quite time consuming - but trying to fix a puzzle like this can be nearly impossible, depending on where the break crept in - and my solve path was so sporadic with progress everywhere that I had no way of knowing what I could and couldn't trust. Fortunately, I was able to logic through a few pearls to see that the thing I thought was a problem could be trivially forced, and therefore my issue must be that something else had another option I missed. Four instances of this kind of logic later, I found the root cause and successfully performed surgery on this puzzle. I still spent a full minute carefully tracing the entire loop to make sure I had exactly one loop (I did) before moving onto the Masyu (Triangular) which I also kept breaking. But these were short range breaks that were effectively accidental bifurcations, and after an extremely careful solve of an Irregular Slitherlink shaped like the logo for this year, I declared with 19 minutes left. It was somewhere around this round that I realized bakpao was a desk in front of me, with Neil Zussman (UK-A) and Michael Mosshammer (UN-1, I think from Austria) were one desk over, who finished official 13th and 18th respectively.
Then it was lunchtime, and I learned from the previous day to take my stuff with me rather than have to go back in, get it, and then wait in the lunch line. Standings update: the US team is now 2-3-4-8, placements we will never deviate from for the rest of the competition. In terms of team scores, Japan has kept the gap even with where it was after round 13, 600 points back. But the momentum shift from this morning is clear, if we can just hold onto it.
Round 16 (The Breadth of America): 12 puzzles, 65 minutes, 650 points
Top score: 870. Tenth score: 670. My score: 720. (7th)
Three puzzles each of four new/unfamiliar types. I went through mostly in order, until I broke the big 100 point Disorderly Loop and couldn't fix it. I moved onto the CBPL puzzles and got stuck halfway through the big one, erased the Disorderly and started over, then kept switching whenever I got stuck. Eventually I had nothing on both, so I did the Exercises and again got stuck on the third one. I finally found what I was missing on the Disorderly (an extra case in the bottom left, and a missed number in the top left that would make it unique) but that cost about 10 minutes and put me in a scary spot at the end of the round. Do I go for the 105 point CBPL I have some progress on but don't see anything else? Or the 140 point Exercise I have basically nothing on, but could get any time? Well, given that the Exercise is higher variance, it should be saved for last, so I did, and did in fact solve both puzzles easily enough once I spotted how to orient the loop in the Exercise. In hindsight this was actually a really good showing, as not breaking the Disorderly could have put me in the top 3 for the round, very close to the top scores.
Top score: 870. Tenth score: 670. My score: 720. (7th)
Three puzzles each of four new/unfamiliar types. I went through mostly in order, until I broke the big 100 point Disorderly Loop and couldn't fix it. I moved onto the CBPL puzzles and got stuck halfway through the big one, erased the Disorderly and started over, then kept switching whenever I got stuck. Eventually I had nothing on both, so I did the Exercises and again got stuck on the third one. I finally found what I was missing on the Disorderly (an extra case in the bottom left, and a missed number in the top left that would make it unique) but that cost about 10 minutes and put me in a scary spot at the end of the round. Do I go for the 105 point CBPL I have some progress on but don't see anything else? Or the 140 point Exercise I have basically nothing on, but could get any time? Well, given that the Exercise is higher variance, it should be saved for last, so I did, and did in fact solve both puzzles easily enough once I spotted how to orient the loop in the Exercise. In hindsight this was actually a really good showing, as not breaking the Disorderly could have put me in the top 3 for the round, very close to the top scores.
Round 18 (Roger's Bag): 6 puzzles, 40 minutes, 400 points
Top score: 580. Tenth score: 420. My score: 384. (14th)
Cave is one of my better genres, and unfortunately I started slipping a bit here. I don't think it was fatigue, I just miscounted a 9 on the penultimate puzzle and so filled out the 5s in the corner wrong, costing me a potential 540 (-156 points) which definitely stung. I don't think I would have caught it, though, and I jumped around a lot during this round. I had hoped to have a shot at the regions playoff but that error already put it out of reach. Still, I'm choosing to look at this in terms of what it did show: this is one of my better genres, as I kept up with Walker and Ken for the most part during this round, aside from the very unfortunate mistake, which is the sort of error that inevitably creeps in sometimes. There's nothing to learn from here, it simply is - which is how I've felt about every error I've had up to this point.
Top score: 580. Tenth score: 420. My score: 384. (14th)
Cave is one of my better genres, and unfortunately I started slipping a bit here. I don't think it was fatigue, I just miscounted a 9 on the penultimate puzzle and so filled out the 5s in the corner wrong, costing me a potential 540 (-156 points) which definitely stung. I don't think I would have caught it, though, and I jumped around a lot during this round. I had hoped to have a shot at the regions playoff but that error already put it out of reach. Still, I'm choosing to look at this in terms of what it did show: this is one of my better genres, as I kept up with Walker and Ken for the most part during this round, aside from the very unfortunate mistake, which is the sort of error that inevitably creeps in sometimes. There's nothing to learn from here, it simply is - which is how I've felt about every error I've had up to this point.
Interlude about errors - it's been just the Gapped Kakuro (genuine logic error, maybe checkable but everything else worked so I thought it was right), Star Battle (simple mismark that resolved everything else, would have been checkable but I wouldn't have had time to fix during the round anyway), extra ship in the Object Placement (checkable, fixable, ran out of time before I could check), and now this Cave (checkable, fixable, but a miscount and checking the count on every clue is a waste of time when everything still resolves afterwards). These errors cost 105, 75, 60, and 154 points total, and I scored 9294. Given how much scoring was bonus driven this WPC, and that I lost none of my massive bonuses (aside from the Cave, but 54 of that is bonus and 100 is puzzle) and that of these errors, 2 were in rounds I expected to do poorly in, and one would have been fixed if the round was timed better... I'm very happy with this accuracy overall. It's a place with room for improvement, for sure, but my checking-as-I-go and then "check to make sure it looks like a solution" at the end works.
Round 19 (Holesome Diet): "8" (2) puzzles, 45 minutes, 440 points
Top score: 590. Tenth score: 424. My score: 300. (25th)
This round was a miserable solving experience, start to finish. The gimmick was that you had 4 Fillominos and 4 Arafs, and each grid had holes in it. The puzzles of each type would form a stack where they would see either holes (not part of the grid), a clue (a clue in the grid) or nothing (an empty cell in the grid). Only one problem: my holes were misaligned, so lining them up in one place wouldn't line them up elsewhere. Another problem: notating a region division solution on these was basically impossible to do clearly, since the holes often poked out of their cells. And forget about numbering things in Fillomino or drawing all connecting lines.
I started with the Araf and found the base level, and solved it after a bit of struggle. Quite tough. I then couldn't find the second level, so I went to the Fillomino and found the base level. It broke at the last cell, so I looked for another base level and found it. It broke at the last cell, so I looked for another base level and found it. That one finally solved, and from there I slowly managed my way through all of the Fillomino, with more breaks from not seeing what was under holes. Back to the Araf, and with 6 minutes left I finally remember that there have to be an even number of circles and get the second layer (I even expected this to be used before the round...) with 3 minutes left. I don't see any difference between the two remaining puzzles other than knowing the exact layout of one, but I don't want to solve it and guess a placement for a 50/50 at 70 points when trying to find the difference could potentially intuit me all 140. I don't see the difference, and it turns out it's because it was that one option stacked 3 holes to be not part of the grid and thus have no solutions. But again, my holes were misaligned so this was completely unreasonable to see.
Top score: 590. Tenth score: 424. My score: 300. (25th)
This round was a miserable solving experience, start to finish. The gimmick was that you had 4 Fillominos and 4 Arafs, and each grid had holes in it. The puzzles of each type would form a stack where they would see either holes (not part of the grid), a clue (a clue in the grid) or nothing (an empty cell in the grid). Only one problem: my holes were misaligned, so lining them up in one place wouldn't line them up elsewhere. Another problem: notating a region division solution on these was basically impossible to do clearly, since the holes often poked out of their cells. And forget about numbering things in Fillomino or drawing all connecting lines.
I started with the Araf and found the base level, and solved it after a bit of struggle. Quite tough. I then couldn't find the second level, so I went to the Fillomino and found the base level. It broke at the last cell, so I looked for another base level and found it. It broke at the last cell, so I looked for another base level and found it. That one finally solved, and from there I slowly managed my way through all of the Fillomino, with more breaks from not seeing what was under holes. Back to the Araf, and with 6 minutes left I finally remember that there have to be an even number of circles and get the second layer (I even expected this to be used before the round...) with 3 minutes left. I don't see any difference between the two remaining puzzles other than knowing the exact layout of one, but I don't want to solve it and guess a placement for a 50/50 at 70 points when trying to find the difference could potentially intuit me all 140. I don't see the difference, and it turns out it's because it was that one option stacked 3 holes to be not part of the grid and thus have no solutions. But again, my holes were misaligned so this was completely unreasonable to see.
I came out of this round knowing Thomas Luo had passed me, barring any catastrophes, though it was only by 20 points looking back. I also felt that it, like North American Siblings, would have been better as a team round with more puzzles, and that more care needed to be taken for the actual experience of solving (no real way to erase either, bad holes here).
Round 20 (Pentominous+): 10 puzzles, 60 minutes, 600 points
Top score: 790. Tenth score: 610. My score: 610. (7th)
My dumbest error in any round, possibly ever, was in this round. Did you know that to fill out a 5 Skyscraper clue, it goes "1-2-3-4-5" and not "5-4-3-2-1"? For over 15 minutes, I didn't! Really dumb error immediately on the big Skyscrapers, that I only noticed with about 5:30 left on the clock. I went on a miracle last minute sprint, complete with intuit and tweak for small enclosed areas, and heroically got the solve with a minute to spare to end the round. But man, if I didn't make that error, like the Cave round this could have been right up there with the top scores, as 4th place in the round was 680. Everything else was a nice, clean solve - I think this one was fatigue, but I definitely wasn't helped by the 5 having an opposing 1 clue. Honestly, I'm mostly just glad I noticed to get the 95 points at all- this could have been a disaster. I later found out Michael Tang (US-D) made the same mistake, but he didn't catch it during the round.
Top score: 790. Tenth score: 610. My score: 610. (7th)
My dumbest error in any round, possibly ever, was in this round. Did you know that to fill out a 5 Skyscraper clue, it goes "1-2-3-4-5" and not "5-4-3-2-1"? For over 15 minutes, I didn't! Really dumb error immediately on the big Skyscrapers, that I only noticed with about 5:30 left on the clock. I went on a miracle last minute sprint, complete with intuit and tweak for small enclosed areas, and heroically got the solve with a minute to spare to end the round. But man, if I didn't make that error, like the Cave round this could have been right up there with the top scores, as 4th place in the round was 680. Everything else was a nice, clean solve - I think this one was fatigue, but I definitely wasn't helped by the 5 having an opposing 1 clue. Honestly, I'm mostly just glad I noticed to get the 95 points at all- this could have been a disaster. I later found out Michael Tang (US-D) made the same mistake, but he didn't catch it during the round.
Round 10 (Words CAN Define US): 7 puzzles, 50 minutes, 500 points
Top score: 530. Tenth score: 400. My score: 310. (25th)
I was about 15 seconds away from 395 here, and this round was honestly grossly mistimed. I started with the first Wordle Bank - to see if the second 105 point one was worth trying - and determined it wasn't. I then picked off the One or Two (60, slightly undervalued), Crisscross Crash (60, undervalued) and Piece Arch (word search, 80, good value) simultaneously, switching whenever I hit a wall. Regular Crisscross next - undervalued at 100 points before the Star Crossed (85) knowing that the Wordle Bank was potentially very guessable if I had time. And I just ran out of time when I went to put in the TAYLOR and OH ending because I had LEVY and CERA swapped from earlier. This probably should have been a 60 minute 600 point round, even with no additional puzzles, especially since the round had only 3 finishers (I believe the lowest of any round) being Kevin Sun (CAN-A 3 minutes spare), Dan Katz (US-B, 2 minutes spare) and teammate Anderson Wang (0 minutes spare). In hindsight, I should have saved the Wordle Banks for the end no matter what, as since they're higher variance puzzles and prone to being guessable, doing puzzles like that last is basically always the correct move in a round. In this case, the rest of the rounds were all quite finishable, though, so I thought it wouldn't matter and it probably shouldn't have mattered. But it did, and I ended up leaving a lot on the table as a result.
Top score: 530. Tenth score: 400. My score: 310. (25th)
I was about 15 seconds away from 395 here, and this round was honestly grossly mistimed. I started with the first Wordle Bank - to see if the second 105 point one was worth trying - and determined it wasn't. I then picked off the One or Two (60, slightly undervalued), Crisscross Crash (60, undervalued) and Piece Arch (word search, 80, good value) simultaneously, switching whenever I hit a wall. Regular Crisscross next - undervalued at 100 points before the Star Crossed (85) knowing that the Wordle Bank was potentially very guessable if I had time. And I just ran out of time when I went to put in the TAYLOR and OH ending because I had LEVY and CERA swapped from earlier. This probably should have been a 60 minute 600 point round, even with no additional puzzles, especially since the round had only 3 finishers (I believe the lowest of any round) being Kevin Sun (CAN-A 3 minutes spare), Dan Katz (US-B, 2 minutes spare) and teammate Anderson Wang (0 minutes spare). In hindsight, I should have saved the Wordle Banks for the end no matter what, as since they're higher variance puzzles and prone to being guessable, doing puzzles like that last is basically always the correct move in a round. In this case, the rest of the rounds were all quite finishable, though, so I thought it wouldn't matter and it probably shouldn't have mattered. But it did, and I ended up leaving a lot on the table as a result.
With the individual competitions complete, I was pretty sure I was in 4th or 5th, depending on how well Christian König (GER-A) had done on these last few rounds. The answer: worse than me on words, barely better on Pentominous. So I ended in 4th individual, which felt like a very strong performance - it'll be tough to match that in future years, but I think I can stay around top 10 easily enough! Team scores through these rounds mostly widened the gap over Japan, until the word round took our lead from 951 to 1706. Honestly a super unfair round, when looking at the results, in a way that something like Islands of Insight (which was mostly in preparation, which was possible to have pre-derived stuff like snake and rectangles) wasn't.
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| This wasn't awarded until after dinner on day 3 but it goes better here. |
Wait, those are day 3 and we're still only on day 2, surely more happened on day 2.
You can also read ft's recap of the event which has this photo that shows a bit of the disbelief on my face folding the trophy.
Day Three
Unique this year instead of a single playoff was a series of 5, categorized into Number Placement, Object Placement, Shading, Loops, and Region Division. While these classifications borrow from GMPuzzles - and with it carry the completely incorrect classification of Cave as regions - this is how it was structured. The top 3 across the 3 rounds of each discipline would compete on 3 puzzles to determine a final, mostly for fun ordering. As mentioned earlier, I qualified for shading and was 10 points off of making it to loops. So I had one chance. One shot, if you will.
Right before starting, I tried a few different notations and motions for shading a cell to figure out what's most efficient while still being readable. I don't like any of them, and a second later I stepped back, shook my head, and half threw my arm down in defeat. This format is uncomfortable, and I could tell the only way to get a feel for it is to go for it, and the only way to go for it is to rip the bandage off. Just start.
Aqre - it's shaped like a trophy. There's also some immediate easy progress in the lower left and lower right which feeds into the top right - but that's a red herring, the path really does just spiral around. At one point my hand moved ahead of my brain and shaded a cell I wanted to dot, so I put an X in it - not clear. An E? Still not clear and now this is looking worse - I made a passing comment to my grader that it's unshaded (I have no better way to mark it with what I have, and this is clear) and I'll repeat this when I'm done solving. Ken declares at 1:14 - I don't know this yet. I declare at 1:38 - paper is rustling to the side, so I know I'm about 30 seconds back at this point. That's fine.
30 seconds.
Yes.
Puzzle GP Finals
I had qualified for the Puzzle GP Finals this year, seeded 9th out of 16 potential attendees. There was a lengthy online stage and a really bizarre format that turned most of the ranking into a lottery (Walker Anderson placed at the bottom of this, somehow!).
First match: Skyscrapers + Kakuro, some areas are cloned between both grids. Great, I broke this puzzle twice and turned the second worst time. To make matters worse, I was matched with Naoki Sekiya, who's quite good at number placement in both mathy and latin square forms. I lost, obviously, but since I went into the room not having seen the results, I had no idea what was in store for me next.
Second match: Cave (Inside+Outside) vs. Anderson Wang. I remember feeling pretty slow on this one but still turned in a win from the 4th fastest time. Guess I'm good at Cave?
Third match: Letter Touch vs. Hideaki Jo. Lucky matchup as this was my second worst solve of the set, it was a tough puzzle and Hideaki did also have a rough solve, so I moved to 2 and 1.
Fourth match: Aqre vs. Zimi Li (apiad). I turned in the second fastest time on this puzzle, and fortunately was matched with the slower of the two Chinese competitors, and advanced to 3 and 1. Again, I had no idea and was pretty shocked that I was guaranteed at worst an even record, which was something I'd be happy with.
Fifth match: Nurikabe vs. Christian König. Since Ken Endo had swept, his picks didn't matter for this round. This meant the pick went to Kota Morinishi, who didn't submit picks. Which meant the pick went to me! I was really close to a monstrously fast time on this - sub minute - but finagled the 6 the wrong way and ended up at a slow for the field 2:43. But CJK had a 4:42 so I moved up to 4 and 1, guaranteeing that I'd get to solve on the stage. Wait, I'm not prepared for this uhhhhhhhh
Sixth match: Kakuro, not competing. 4:32 was good but not great.
Sixth match: Kakuro, not competing. 4:32 was good but not great.
Seventh match: Sukoro, not competing. 1:56 beat everyone except Cai Ji again.
So I had to go up front and solve under pressure, which was a new experience. I... can't really describe what it's like being at a desk at the front of the room, and I was suuuuuper nervous. First match in person was against teammate Thomas Luo, who like me rose from middle of the pack to have 1 loss at this stage. Ken Endo had picked a Cave for round one, and Thomas obliterated it in 1:42.9 (Ken solved in 1:42.4). I took 3:09, but I really struggled to see the key interaction of the 8 clue - looked everywhere else before finding it. So my time was slow, but that's fine - next, Ken picked a Pentominous for Thomas to face Naoki (to determine the 1-2 matchup) while I had to face Kota Morinishi for the chance to face the loser of that match for third. 2:17. I won, with Thomas losing his match 3:32 to 4:34, resulting in a rematch for third place. Ken picked a Kakuro - which if he'd picked for the previous round, would have been a disaster - over the other option of a Slitherlink - also probably a disaster!. First there were placement matches to determine 9-10 and 7-8. Then 5-6 and 3-4, my match. We knew from the prior round that this was about a 3 minute puzzle, and when the dust settled my 2:38 defeated Thomas's 2:50, securing third place! Then Ken dropped a 1:39 on the same puzzle to take the win, undefeated. I was, uh, very unprepared for the photography later and felt like a bit of an impostor up there, but looking back this was actually a mostly deserved placement. Or at least, not a ridiculous outlier. While I certainly got lucky in a couple matchups and quite lucky with Ken's pick order, this was a good first exposure to the spotlight. WHICH IS A GOOD THING I GOT THOSE JITTERS OUT OF THE WAY, HUH.
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| The first award I got, and probably the least expected. |
You can also read ft's recap of the event which has this photo that shows a bit of the disbelief on my face folding the trophy.
Also, after the GP finals, the Japan team started selling books, so Rever and I bought Toketa! They also had two more books, so I got those too - Jamie spotted me 15 CAD "to be paid back in some way later, idk I'll ask for a game on Steam or something" so I could get them all, which amused the sellers quite a bit that I came back for the last one. No regrets, even though I've barely started on Toketa 11 and haven't started on the other two yet. The US teams did a little bit of strategizing for the team rounds the next day, and that was it for day two.
Day Three
Round 8 (Aha Moments): 5 puzzles, 45 minutes, 1800 points
Top score: 2640. Team score: 2640. (1st)
Going into the team rounds, the US A team had one goal: finish all of them. We were pretty sure we had a large enough buffer that if we just finished them all, we could keep the ~1200 point lead we presumed we had over Japan - just don't lose all 5 team rounds by a collective 30 minutes. Easy, right?
Well, apparently so, as we won the round by a minute over Germany-A, by finishing with 21 extra minutes - with taking a minute to check! It felt like pretty good teamwork, with Anderson and I checking each others grids (a word puzzle for him - perfect - and a double latin square thing for me - ehhh, but I was probably the best on the team for it). Thomas and Walker did the same thing for their loop and network puzzles, and both halves ended up at the final stage at about the same time. I helped brief on the final rules - since I understood our half better, and their half was easier - then we triple-teamed the loop drawing part while Anderson fiddled with the latin square. By the time we figured out where it went, he basically had it except with a rotation on a symbol (which wasn't allowed) but it was really close to right. Ultimately I think Thomas and Anderson arrived at the same answer at the same time, we took the extra minute to check, and declared. Outside the hall, teams kept coming out and word from them was that Japan didn't finish. Specifically that they never got the word puzzle in the first stage, but... the scores ended up showing an incorrect/unfinished final stage puzzle too, so we gained 2000 points on them in this round alone! The back of the envelope math (assuming 1200 lead from individuals, and then 1575 here) was that we had about a 2400 lead - enough to start being comfortable. The feeling among the team was palpable at this point, it felt like we'd pulled off a bit of a coup both outscoring Japan on the individual rounds and now taking that lead into a clean win on the team rounds - but let's not celebrate too soon!
Top score: 2640. Team score: 2640. (1st)
Going into the team rounds, the US A team had one goal: finish all of them. We were pretty sure we had a large enough buffer that if we just finished them all, we could keep the ~1200 point lead we presumed we had over Japan - just don't lose all 5 team rounds by a collective 30 minutes. Easy, right?
Well, apparently so, as we won the round by a minute over Germany-A, by finishing with 21 extra minutes - with taking a minute to check! It felt like pretty good teamwork, with Anderson and I checking each others grids (a word puzzle for him - perfect - and a double latin square thing for me - ehhh, but I was probably the best on the team for it). Thomas and Walker did the same thing for their loop and network puzzles, and both halves ended up at the final stage at about the same time. I helped brief on the final rules - since I understood our half better, and their half was easier - then we triple-teamed the loop drawing part while Anderson fiddled with the latin square. By the time we figured out where it went, he basically had it except with a rotation on a symbol (which wasn't allowed) but it was really close to right. Ultimately I think Thomas and Anderson arrived at the same answer at the same time, we took the extra minute to check, and declared. Outside the hall, teams kept coming out and word from them was that Japan didn't finish. Specifically that they never got the word puzzle in the first stage, but... the scores ended up showing an incorrect/unfinished final stage puzzle too, so we gained 2000 points on them in this round alone! The back of the envelope math (assuming 1200 lead from individuals, and then 1575 here) was that we had about a 2400 lead - enough to start being comfortable. The feeling among the team was palpable at this point, it felt like we'd pulled off a bit of a coup both outscoring Japan on the individual rounds and now taking that lead into a clean win on the team rounds - but let's not celebrate too soon!
Round 9 (Neon Knetwork): 1 puzzle, 45 minutes, 1800 points
Top score: 2640. Team score: 1920. (7th)
Find the tile in the grid that matches stuff on your paper, then color in everything that doesn't match. What a ""fun"" round. Germany destroyed this round and the US B team did as well, finishing with 21 and 10 spare minutes respectively. We were deliberately a bit slow and careful to ensure the full score on this, and there were definitely shortcuts that could have been taken with the pattern (especially because the final solution was very patterned) but it just wasn't worth the risk. We ended up outscoring Japan by 40 points (1 minute) here, so didn't lose anything.
Top score: 2640. Team score: 1920. (7th)
Find the tile in the grid that matches stuff on your paper, then color in everything that doesn't match. What a ""fun"" round. Germany destroyed this round and the US B team did as well, finishing with 21 and 10 spare minutes respectively. We were deliberately a bit slow and careful to ensure the full score on this, and there were definitely shortcuts that could have been taken with the pattern (especially because the final solution was very patterned) but it just wasn't worth the risk. We ended up outscoring Japan by 40 points (1 minute) here, so didn't lose anything.
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| When we were checking this, we found 2 small errors and I noticed it was a star on a leaf from a birds-eye view. That was a good confirmation that what we had was actually correct. |
Round 17 (Canadian Summits): 4 puzzles, 30 minutes, 1200 points
Top score: 1880. Team score: 1400. (13th)
The dreaded Cihan Altay reversible jigsaw Fuzuli round. We knew this wasn't our strength and just wanted to finish - and since we did with 5 extra minutes (fastest solve was with 17 extra by Japan - 13 minutes to solve!) we were happy enough. The plan was to find one grid early and have me split off to solve it (as I was both the strongest at latin squares and the weakest at jigsaw-ing puzzles) which we executed okay, with the first grid not solving and the second tweak solving nicely. Then we kept running into issues with 8s on the tops and bottoms until we tried flipping over basically every piece, and eventually we had what looked like 3 more real puzzles. After transcribing and solving these with okay parallelization, we finished the round. Good enough to keep pace, but definitely a rough round. USA-D did extremely well here, with a 15 minute solve - having the sudoku specialists definitely helped there.
Top score: 1880. Team score: 1400. (13th)
The dreaded Cihan Altay reversible jigsaw Fuzuli round. We knew this wasn't our strength and just wanted to finish - and since we did with 5 extra minutes (fastest solve was with 17 extra by Japan - 13 minutes to solve!) we were happy enough. The plan was to find one grid early and have me split off to solve it (as I was both the strongest at latin squares and the weakest at jigsaw-ing puzzles) which we executed okay, with the first grid not solving and the second tweak solving nicely. Then we kept running into issues with 8s on the tops and bottoms until we tried flipping over basically every piece, and eventually we had what looked like 3 more real puzzles. After transcribing and solving these with okay parallelization, we finished the round. Good enough to keep pace, but definitely a rough round. USA-D did extremely well here, with a 15 minute solve - having the sudoku specialists definitely helped there.
Round 21 (Trick or Treat): 9*2 puzzles, 75+15 minutes, 2500 points
Top score: 3020. Team score: 3020. (1st)
The prevailing question here was: what the heck is up with the Trick or Treat round? The gimmicks made themselves clear during the round, though having to bring up the matching mask with each puzzle was quite pointless and just served to clutter the tables more. Solving the round was complete chaos, as we got 9 puzzles at the start. I immediately grabbed the Cave and Walker said "oooh, that looks reversible" and immediately guessed at the gimmick of the round - that every puzzle could be solved in a second way to earn the "treat" to go with the "trick" for the obvious solve. When the tricks came back, they didn't make much sense - and the code pencils weren't being used for anything either? Eventually we got back a trick for turning a puzzle 180 degrees, at which point it was obvious that the tricks had to match with different puzzles (but not before Walker solved the non-consecutive Fillomino in ternary, unclued honestly how). I feel like the teamwork in this round was really good throughout and we did a good job managing what we had and hadn't used.
I ended up looking at the first Cave, first Nonogram, first Scrabble (two thirds along but broken by Anderson, I fixed it in about a minute and solved it a minute later), counting puzzle (checked by Thomas - I had a minor error on ascribing two zodiac signs incorrectly but otherwise good: and I have never been more glad to have read Homestuck when Act 5 was fresh because boy does that burn the zodiac signs into your memory, without having to look them up), second Cave (half started by Thomas), second Country Road, second Statue Park, second Scrabble (half solved by Thomas, collab-solved the rest when we had 3 puzzles to go) and second Nonogram (after figuring out the transformation, also mostly collabed with Thomas while Walker and Anderson checked the rest of our solves). The Nonogram had to be done last or meta-solved, and I didn't think it was very meta-able. This might sound like it was a lot that I did - and it was - but I didn't look at the extremely difficult Tomtoms, Fillominos, or the soul-crushing Word Search pair that Walker spent a ton of time on with Anderson. Really good call to work on that early since it could have walled us hard.
We were the first team to finish this round, and as it went on, other teams... weren't finishing? We sat in the room until the entire +15 ended, and the only other finish was Japan-B, with only 1 minute to spare. And while our score would indicate only 13 minutes of bonus, we would have had 18 on directly turning in - wanted to triple check everything before Thomas Snyder came over to collect everything - the way turning in for this round went was a bit strange.
Still, we finished and at this point, unless the ? points were extremely high, knew we had one the 2023 World Puzzle Championship.
Top score: 3020. Team score: 3020. (1st)
The prevailing question here was: what the heck is up with the Trick or Treat round? The gimmicks made themselves clear during the round, though having to bring up the matching mask with each puzzle was quite pointless and just served to clutter the tables more. Solving the round was complete chaos, as we got 9 puzzles at the start. I immediately grabbed the Cave and Walker said "oooh, that looks reversible" and immediately guessed at the gimmick of the round - that every puzzle could be solved in a second way to earn the "treat" to go with the "trick" for the obvious solve. When the tricks came back, they didn't make much sense - and the code pencils weren't being used for anything either? Eventually we got back a trick for turning a puzzle 180 degrees, at which point it was obvious that the tricks had to match with different puzzles (but not before Walker solved the non-consecutive Fillomino in ternary, unclued honestly how). I feel like the teamwork in this round was really good throughout and we did a good job managing what we had and hadn't used.
I ended up looking at the first Cave, first Nonogram, first Scrabble (two thirds along but broken by Anderson, I fixed it in about a minute and solved it a minute later), counting puzzle (checked by Thomas - I had a minor error on ascribing two zodiac signs incorrectly but otherwise good: and I have never been more glad to have read Homestuck when Act 5 was fresh because boy does that burn the zodiac signs into your memory, without having to look them up), second Cave (half started by Thomas), second Country Road, second Statue Park, second Scrabble (half solved by Thomas, collab-solved the rest when we had 3 puzzles to go) and second Nonogram (after figuring out the transformation, also mostly collabed with Thomas while Walker and Anderson checked the rest of our solves). The Nonogram had to be done last or meta-solved, and I didn't think it was very meta-able. This might sound like it was a lot that I did - and it was - but I didn't look at the extremely difficult Tomtoms, Fillominos, or the soul-crushing Word Search pair that Walker spent a ton of time on with Anderson. Really good call to work on that early since it could have walled us hard.
We were the first team to finish this round, and as it went on, other teams... weren't finishing? We sat in the room until the entire +15 ended, and the only other finish was Japan-B, with only 1 minute to spare. And while our score would indicate only 13 minutes of bonus, we would have had 18 on directly turning in - wanted to triple check everything before Thomas Snyder came over to collect everything - the way turning in for this round went was a bit strange.
Round 22 (Ceremonial Folding): 7? puzzles, 30 minutes, ???? points
Top score: 1540. Team score: 1430. (doesn't matter)
Anderson worked out what the optimal solving list would be. By this point, Walker was most of the way to the floppy disc, I was useless, and Thomas was helping. We just decided to take the 1430 (optimal with floppy) rather than break it and go for the optimal 1540, even though we probably could have. There was a lot of sitting around waiting in this round, and not a lot to do in parallel. I was useless as expected, though I at least figured out one of the padlock pieces that was part of optimal while time was winding down. Another very weird team round, would have loved something more interconnected here but the experience as a whole was phenomenal. Huge shoutouts to the rest of the team for one of the most memorable days I've ever had.
And it's not even over yet. (technically, these pictures are out of chronology but shhhh)
Before dinner, there was one last set of solves to complete.
Top score: 1540. Team score: 1430. (doesn't matter)
Anderson worked out what the optimal solving list would be. By this point, Walker was most of the way to the floppy disc, I was useless, and Thomas was helping. We just decided to take the 1430 (optimal with floppy) rather than break it and go for the optimal 1540, even though we probably could have. There was a lot of sitting around waiting in this round, and not a lot to do in parallel. I was useless as expected, though I at least figured out one of the padlock pieces that was part of optimal while time was winding down. Another very weird team round, would have loved something more interconnected here but the experience as a whole was phenomenal. Huge shoutouts to the rest of the team for one of the most memorable days I've ever had.
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| We let Anderson take the team trophy - I had 1st newcomer (and the GP 3rd), Walker and Thomas had 2nd and 3rd individual, and Anderson had no trophy. So, Anderson got a trophy to go with the team medals. |
Before dinner, there was one last set of solves to complete.
Genre Playoffs
Unique this year instead of a single playoff was a series of 5, categorized into Number Placement, Object Placement, Shading, Loops, and Region Division. While these classifications borrow from GMPuzzles - and with it carry the completely incorrect classification of Cave as regions - this is how it was structured. The top 3 across the 3 rounds of each discipline would compete on 3 puzzles to determine a final, mostly for fun ordering. As mentioned earlier, I qualified for shading and was 10 points off of making it to loops. So I had one chance. One shot, if you will.
Number Placement: Suzhe Qiu of China stalls on the leading Tomtom puzzle and never gets past it. Kota Morinishi takes the win with a trio of blistering solves. Getting stalled like that is exactly what I don't want to do - I'm sitting near the back of the room, trying to watch and get a feel for the format, thinking about how I might notate on giant easels, with a marker and no way to erase, nervous out of my mind.
Object Placement: Ken Endo takes his revenge on Kota, with Walker placing third. I honestly don't remember much about this set other than that Ken won very convincingly.
Shading: Aqre, Tapa, LITS. Aqre, Tapa, LITS. This was what was going through my mind, along with "don't do anything really stupid". I remember going up to the front of the room and being asked to choose a marker. On the table, there were a bunch of black markers, a few red markers, and one single blue marker. There wasn't even a choice, I took that blue marker and in hindsight should have taken a red too just to have some flexibility. When I'm solving in paint, I use blue for shaded so I'm already used to looking at blue - red is harder for me to parse against white, and black could blend with region borders which is relevant twice. Blue is correct. Deep breaths, try to get comfortable.
Have you ever been on a stage before? Before the Puzzle GP finals, I really hadn't been - and this was even more visible. The closest I've come before this was speedrun marathon streams, to a larger audience of a few hundred or a few thousand, compared to the maybe a hundred that were in this room. But oh man, the fact that they were both in this room and also I couldn't see any of them change the dynamic so much. It's impossible to describe what it felt like standing up at that easel - I was both hyper-aware of anything going on in the room and completely unaware of everything except for the puzzle in front of me, the timer in front of me when there wasn't a puzzle, and the occasional sound of rustling paper that meant a puzzle was being turned over - someone was advancing to the next one. The pressure to do well - just okay, not even amazing - even if it was fully internal was immense. I knew I deserved to be on that stage, and I wanted to prove it. I wanted to prove it so badly.
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| Left, offscreen: Walker. Middle: Elyot (grader), Ken. Right: Photographer, Me. |
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| I don't have a better quality unsolved image of the Aqre |
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| Me pointing to the ""empty"" cell while Elyot flips over Ken's paper. Walker is still solving and will declare at 2:08. |
30 seconds.
30 seconds is a long, long, long time to wait.
Have you ever tried to do nothing for 30 seconds? It's agonizing, especially when there's nothing you can do at all.
The grid is sparse.
This LITS.
But this is where all the tension for the audience really kicks in. You see, Ken actually took his look back and checked 6 seconds ago. He went back in, finished the top left corner, and slowly backed up and stepped to the side. But if you look really closely... the region hugging the 0 has no tetromino. This solution is wrong. I. Don't. Know. Going fully on declares, I'm last at this point, but again I don't know - these are silent. The only sound is the rustling paper and not drawing, and there's silence here. But also... I think I see the solution to the LITS, but I am not getting this wrong. I'm writing the letter of each tetromino into each cell. It works. I go to fill each cell. It's 5:09 on the clock.
I won?
Have you ever tried to do nothing for 30 seconds? It's agonizing, especially when there's nothing you can do at all.
The Tapa is revealed. I see it. It's sparse and multi-low number clues.
Crap.
I did a lot of staring after the initial freebies to try to reason out some sort of connectivity argument, as the bottom left is clearly restricted, but I can't quite see any forced commonalities out of it. After about 30 seconds of searching, I find a single cell. This isn't working. Ken declares around 3:10 - I'm vaguely aware of this, but I'm in full lookahead mode and just trying to keep the entire puzzle in my head at once. Which isn't working! Then I see it.
The grid is sparse.
The top corners especially - they're completely empty, and the top center is a 1 clue! The uniqueness! If the cell around the 1 isn't the one directly below it, then there's a whole ton of non-uniqueness issues with those corners - and even stronger, the rest of the wall can't allow any more shaded cells to reach up to those corners, either! 3:14 - marked it. 3:24 - I nod, I know this works, I've done a full puzzle lookahead. 3:29, I start carefully drawing. 3:45, I declare. I've lost about 10 seconds to Ken - I know he's on the final puzzle - but I know I'm still ahead of Walker at this point. (I'm not, actually, he declared at 3:37, but I am, actually, because he got a fresh Tapa) And I didn't stall for too long anywhere.
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| Walker has just declared - but incorrect with a new paper being grabbed, I'm drawing, and the final LITS is showing. |
This LITS.
I immediately go for the freebie cells, faster even than Ken when he saw it. But it's a 9x9 LITS, that's a super sprinty puzzle, 35 seconds should be insurmountable. Ken declares at 4:51, and I'm quite far along for having only 36 seconds at this puzzle. A few seconds prior, Walker finishes his second stab at the Tapa.
But this is where all the tension for the audience really kicks in. You see, Ken actually took his look back and checked 6 seconds ago. He went back in, finished the top left corner, and slowly backed up and stepped to the side. But if you look really closely... the region hugging the 0 has no tetromino. This solution is wrong. I. Don't. Know. Going fully on declares, I'm last at this point, but again I don't know - these are silent. The only sound is the rustling paper and not drawing, and there's silence here. But also... I think I see the solution to the LITS, but I am not getting this wrong. I'm writing the letter of each tetromino into each cell. It works. I go to fill each cell. It's 5:09 on the clock.
6 seconds earlier, Elyot signs an X to the crowd. Ken's solution is no good, and the room knows it.
I start stepping to declare.
I see the bottom right corner - a place I'd noted I knew an L would go earlier with the orientation to be determined - is empty.
I stop mid-step, finger out "nope, I caught this" and fill in the last tetromino. I declare, for real, at 5:14. Four seconds later, Walker is pulled in to do the LITS, I think? Three seconds after that, Elyot taps Ken on the shoulder and points to the grid. Ken scratches his head. Six seconds after that, Ken declares again with a corrected puzzle. He's definitely right now, with the only tension being: am I right?
Five seconds later, my grader raises her hand up. I'm clean. The room knows I won. Ken knows I probably won, and he can do nothing but stare at the clock after the fix. I don't even know I'm right.
Let me repeat that - I've just won the shading playoff, and I have no idea. Since we know Ken is right now, grading is stopped early- I'm told I'm right and 3 seconds later, Thomas Snyder says "Players, you can stop, we have our finishers"... which to me means I'm second. I'm very happy with this, Ken Endo is a machine and Walker is no slouch either, beating either of them is something I'm happy with.
A full minute after I've finished, Thomas continues - "I've made a mistake like that, solving fast..." and my mind just goes completely blank. I know I didn't make a mistake, and Walker was just awarded third. This is the exact moment I started realizing I won. The room already knew, except Will Shortz apparently, who gave me the silver medal - I accepted it, because I'm still not fully believing I won, but then "first place, Jeffrey Bardon" and I go "wait, this is the wrong medal". Ken also notices the mixup and the room has a bit of a laugh over it.
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I... won?
That... actually happened?
It did? (Ken Endo was the first to congratulate me, during the medal mixup)
I was in shock almost - definitely more than a bit of a daze - for the next while.
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| Taken that night, my three solves. The weird Aqre cell sticks out, the Tapa notation shows the ? on the uniqueness thing and shows my care, and the LITS shows a bit of the haste at the end. What a rush. |
The loop playoff then happened, and Naoki Sekiya defeated Ken Endo for a 4th unique winner, with Thomas Luo getting another 3rd place for his collection. I couldn't pay attention to any of it. Not because I didn't want to, but because I was genuinely having trouble processing everything that happened in those 6 minutes. I wanted to pay attention and I tried to, I just couldn't, sitting in the back with ft, Rever and a few others. Apparently about half the room saw my step and did interpret it as an almost-declare. I remember one of the things I said was that "I didn't beat Ken Endo, Ken Endo beat Ken Endo" and while that's sort of true, accuracy matters, and looking back at the timing it was incredibly hard to keep pace in the first place. This could easily have swung the other way, where he wins in spite of the mistake by just being that much faster.
Oh right there's one more playoff.
Region Division: Due to a very strong performance on the Araf, Walker cruised to a seemingly easy win over Ken Endo and Thomas Luo, only about 15 seconds back from Ken. I really want to try that Araf, it seemed like fun. The other two puzzles were a Cave and Pentominous, and from what I saw later both seemed to have pretty clean solves - which I looked at when looking at the third place easel with a couple others, which was interesting when they realized it was my shading set!
So the genre playoffs ended with 5 unique winners crowned, which was a long way from the initial "can we keep Ken from winning even one of these"? Because yeah. He won one, and placed second in the rest. An incredible performance overall.
So then we all went to dinner, and then after dinner took a Puzzlers Club group photo (or maybe this was after the awards ceremony), and after the group photo we coordinated to send it to the starboard immediately after it was posted, no collusion at all. Definitely not.
After all this, Elyot set up Islands of Insight in the back of the competition hall, where people were VERY LOUDLY doing karaoke that made it hard to talk at all. As one of the devs - and basically puzzle editor - I had lots to say while people were playing, and my voice was already beginning to go from having to be generally louder than I usually am to be heard with the normal noise level, let alone this. So I way overexerted my voice and basically completely lost it from trying to talk here, which sucked in the following days. But oh man, it was so much fun getting to show people parts of this game. djmathman, ft, yyao, Walker, and others kept trading off attempting one area with some of the hardest puzzles (all made by me) and I made sure yyao got the "theory" puzzle, which was super funny when people in the crowd kept getting it before he did. The crowd kept growing and checking it out, and even the Japanese team came over at some points. I remember Ken kept smiling and laughing at some of the puzzle setups when he realized what was going on, and that wasn't a unique response either. I wish I had more to say about this part but I'm also not sure exactly how specific I'm allowed to be - if you want details, I'd direct you to someone who's not under an NDA in relation to Islands of Insight, even though basically the whole game was available here for like, 4 hours.
Day Four (Departures)
I couldn't really get to sleep that night even though I didn't go back to my hotel room until almost 2 in the morning, so I ended up oversleeping and missing breakfast. Fortunately didn't miss checkout (11 AM) and ended up hanging out in the lobby with ft, Rever and I think dj for a while. My voice was basically completely gone - anything above a quiet whisper just wouldn't come out. I still tried communicating with gestures and the occasional comment but it was definitely frustrating - though entirely self-imposed. Lesson learned for the future, I suppose. Don't spend hours yelling over something, just go find somewhere quieter instead. Anyway we generally started on Toketa while watching people leave and saying good bye to anyone we knew that we hadn't already. Rever then started figuring out that he could adjust his train ride home to hang out with Lunarch people an extra day, and not just join us for lunch. ft solved a puzzle in Kevin Sun's Art of Sudoku book - which he's been using to try to get a different person to solve every page which is pretty neat. (I took page 60 over one of the meals, and replaced "The Art of Sudoku" at the bottom with "The Art of Sudoko Game..." going into the meme entirely)
Around noon, Alyssa showed up to take us to lunch and successfully guessed who all of Jamie, Rever, Martin and myself were on the first guess, with no one speaking. Not that I could if I wanted to at the time. We went to a nice Mexican place and mostly got tacos (I like tacos) before Riley joined us at the restaurant and completely bombed at guessing who was who. Afterwards, we grabbed snacks before heading to the rented AirBnB, meeting up with Sarah there. Unfortunately, it also had terrible internet, but it was at least stable terrible internet which the hotel couldn't claim. Alexey arrived a bit later while people were just hanging out, and also completely failed at guessing who was who (though to be fair, it only got harder as more people showed up). Elyot ordered poutine for everyone, which I feel like I'm going to annoy people by saying that it was just okay. Why would you want to drown the fries in stuff? I ended up postsolving the rest of my WPC puzzles here (which wasn't many) around the time Jonathan arrived. He managed to get everyone within two guesses, though he also had a list of names to guess from (difficulty balance woo!). For some reason, Riley decided to hide under the table here.Before heading to bed, 5 of us solved some puzzles together - I worked on Toketa 11 after finishing WPC, Martin was working on Toketa 4, Rever and Elyot were working on WPC Round 1 and Jonathan on the Islands of Insight round - and he had the worst notation I've ever seen for solving. A, B, C for separate unshaded areas, O for shaded. It was... bad.
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| DO NOT THE UNIQUENESS is the hot new PC meme, so I put it in my puzzle. |
The next two days were spent either on brainstorming meetings/discussions, getting good food, or trying to socially recharge while resting my voice - which did come back, thankfully. Got Chinese before Rever left (super cool to meet him, gotta find a way to meet up with other cool Witness people at some point), Brazilian steakhouse buffet for dinner after (they sliced the steaks onto your plate, crazy) and after we got back from that - aside from Elyot and his riders, who got more groceries - the rest of the team did some puzzle playtesting when we got back. There was a little impromptu tournament with a winning score of... 3. This is not high, but it was funny - there were roasts, fake boasts, self-roasts, everyone kept laughing - if part of the goal of this was a team-building exercise, consider the team built. Also the difficulty tuning on the puzzles I had made a few months ago was just right, so that was great to see validated.
I overslept the next day - a lot - and missed half of the first meeting (oops) but fortunately there were sticky notes everywhere so I could catch up a bit. We went to a sushi place for dinner and I don't like most seafood, but I was very content with my pair of appetizers (basically, fried chicken and dumplings). Then it was escape room time, and we set the record on the first one - I got to contribute quite a bit more than I expected to, but I also didn't really have a good idea of what an escape room actually was. Once we got back to the house - late - I packed up so I could wake up at 8 (30...) to leave at 9 for my return flight.
So much of this trip was a blur and I wish I could remember more details, but it's so hard to find any time to try to log those details (most of my round notes are in either my IB - solve order - or my updated schedule - scores and brief post-round comments) and also impossible to know what the salient details are going to be. I definitely didn't expect, for instance, the shading playoff or Trick or Treat to be so memorable, but they were.
Anyway, this post is entirely too long (this took 6 hours to write), so I'll leave you with this: if 2024 is in China as is planned I probably won't be going - maybe I'll go to a GDQ instead that year - but you'd better believe I'll see a lot of you again in future years, for as long as I'm able to attend.
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