Some Assembly Required #2

Submitted by Nathan on Sun, 06/05/2011 - 3:41pm

For Day 5 of ToPuWriMo, I've got a Some Assembly Required puzzle with a twist. As far as twists go, it's pretty tame: three of the Pieces are not given, and it is up to you to find them. Acknowledgements to Patrick Berry.

I'm back from my camping trip, so my posting schedule should be back to normal. I wrote one and a half puzzles while I was out camping, but I still have to format them and such. You should be seeing one of them tomorrow.

Puzzle: 
PDF
Solution: 
PDF

Puzzle type:

Comments

Anonymous (not verified)

Mon, 06/06/2011 - 8:21pm

This was, needless to say, not an easy puzzle to do when you only print out the second page. (That was deliberate; I always do SAR puzzles without the pieces. I think once I had to yield and look at them.) Misplacing the first two letters of #23 certainly didn't help.

One thing that did strike me while solving was how short most of the words are. That's fairly apparent if you compare this to, say, the first SAR at Patrick's website (http://www.aframegames.com/puzzles_other.html): you can look at the pieces; or do the math, and see that he uses 23 pieces to cover a 14x14 square grid, which is an average answer length of 8.5, and that this grid is slightly smaller, at 177 squares, and has 32 pieces (including the coins), for an average answer length of 5.5. Mathematical digression aside, I think this has an effect on the solving: with a nine-letter answer like #28, I can tentatively put it into the grid once I've got, say, three likely-looking letters, and it'll be immediately informative; but with a four-letter word, if I need three letters before I can place it with any degree of confidence, it's not giving me much more information to do so.

Mind you, with that said, I certainly enjoyed the puzzle, and also for god's sake it's a TuPuWriMo puzzle, which means that it's impressive to be able to put something together at all within a time limit—and, let me add, I cannot for the life of me write grids, so I'm impressed by anyone who can. (I just recently managed a 6x6 grid for a convention cryptic. I had to write a computer program to do it for me, which worked because it was so heavily constrained in what words it could consider.) I'm just throwing these thoughts out there, not in any way as a complaint or even really criticism, but just as feedback.

Anonymous (not verified)

Mon, 06/06/2011 - 8:23pm

Sorry, that was Tahnan; I forgot I wasn't going to get a place to put a username without logging in.

Nathan

Mon, 06/06/2011 - 11:05pm

Oh, I totally agree with you about the word count/word length issue. I did a bit better in my first SAR (196 letters/31 entries = 6.3 LPE), but that's still miles away from 8.5. Of course, I'm not Patrick Berry, and it would take a fair bit of practice to come close to those numbers. But then, practice at writing puzzles is one of the purposes of ToPuWriMo, so it's all good.

I think there is much to be said about word length vis-a-vis the solving experience, which I intend to expand upon in a blog post in the near future. My first impression, as a constructor, was that fewer words = longer words = more interesting words = more fun for solvers, in general. Higher word-count puzzles can still have some zippy fill, but are bound to have some boring old four-letter words or the like. Of course, zippy is in the eye of the beholder. I gave MB 4 or 5 to one of my BAPHL teammates who isn't as heavily into puzzles, and the thought some of the words were too obscure. This is a comparative danger with shorter word-count constructions, as you scramble to nail down those last crossings, but it's a risk I'm willing to take. But it had never occurred to me that shorter words can bog down the solving experience for the reason you just described. That's good for me to know.

In any event, I would have liked to get the word lengths up in this puzzle, but there were a number of factors working against me. The first one was the attempt to fit three specific words in the fill. This constrained things around those pieces somewhat. The second factor was geometry. Sometimes I'd try to place an entry in the grid, only to realize that it would wall off future entries, and the only solution in a couple of corners was to break down and have a bunch of 4s and 5s. I'm still trying to get the hang of the inherent geometry of SAR, and using a nonstandard grid shape may have been a further hindrance.

I'm curious to know what your impression was of solving Mark Halpin's Picture Puzzles from the 2008 and 2010 Mystery Hunts. I'm pretty sure the average word length in those puzzles is even lower than it was here, but those puzzles are so incredibly constrained I get a headache just thinking about the construction. If there's anything that justifies a high word count, it's a big payoff at the end, and those puzzles deliver. My puzzle has a much smaller payoff, but I'm okay with that.

Lance (not verified)

Tue, 06/14/2011 - 9:53am

I don't think I worked on the '10 iteration.  I worked on the 2008 puzzle with, I think, David Greenebaum, and very much enjoyed it, though of course anything that happened during any given Mystery Hunt is so much of a blur that I can't guarantee I remember it properly.  The payoff was, though, impressive.