May 28, 2007 One Word Wonder Puzzle

No one?

long silence...

use previous puzzles to solve this one? *sigh* no thanks.

It seems like it should just be a ceaser cipher which is a simple shift cipher, but I am getting thrown off by the ABXC for the first answer.

2nd, in 4 minutes, 8 seconds. It's not really all that hard--for one thing, the previous puzzles' answers are easy to find even if you never did them.

My first attempt I got something out of it that made sense but it didn't work. Must not be as easy as it seems?

4th. Makes sense, but seems slightly... arbitrary? Like, once you have a sense of what to do, there are a few different ways to do it and I'm not sure why it was this particular way.

6th... thanks to [4].

BNCQIPISBFK
or
JVKYSZSYHLQ!

nope - they don't work...

...sometimes I think if I just opened the dictionary and started entering random words I might find the answer quicker...

Looks like a few folks stumbled upon the way to solve. Any salt for the rest of us?

Could someone at least verify the order of the last three answers. Is it 27th, 26th, 25th or 25th, 26th, 27th?

I've been using 25th, 26th and 27th but the middle one is always junk

Well, the fonts lead me to believe it is order from first to most recent puzzle answers.

[12] It is 25th, 26th, 27th.

Past my 1 hour cranky time again. :)

Is the word "uncover" in the last line especially important, or could it be replaced by something similar like "discover" or "determine"?

# It took you 1 hour, 3 minutes and 16 seconds to solve this puzzle.
# You were the 10th Tanga member to solve this puzzle.

Not bad considering my long break to watch the 3rd period of the NHL game. [4] helped - I had no clue a caesar cipher was a shift cipher.

But only 10 done after an hour is bad. Any help on what to shift?

No help even from the author?

Send more Salt! :)

# It took you 1 hour, 20 minutes and 31 seconds to solve this puzzle.
# You were the 11th Tanga member to solve this puzzle.

You may not recognize the answer. I had never heard of the word before.

the latest post on bgg gave me the push I needed.

EDIT

[20] GM sent. since it was your BGG post that got me there.

12th after 1 hr. 16 min.

Something on BGG just made it click.

# t took you 1 hour, 31 minutes and 3 seconds to solve this puzzle.
# You were the 14th Tanga member to solve this puzzle.
# Average solve time: 44 minutes and 18 seconds.
# Median solve time: 35 minutes and 34 seconds.
# 12.308% of Tanga members that have attempted this puzzle have solved it.

Tough but absolutely fair! God job guys

[21] - I'd heard of the answer word ... it was the solving method that was Greek to me.

Can we eliminate the "just use the past ____ days puzzles to solve" puzzles.

Many of us do not have time to solve every puzzle, or even bother to pan back and forth between previous puzzles and their published solutions, trying to find a shred of commonality.

It is neither more clever nor more interesting. In fact, a previous continuity set had "herrings" in each puzzle which distracted the daily solve.

There is something to be said for a seamless daily puzzle.

[25] So-called "meta puzzles" have become a fairly common puzzle format, particularly for MIT Mystery Hunt formats. Maybe they are better suited for the Puzzlethons, but I don't see a big problem for the occasional daily puzzle sets (I think it's only happened twice, albeit within a week of each other).

That being said, the current meta was not much of a meta, since as you point out, all you have to do (with the historic information) is look up the raw answers. Not much of a meta puzzle there. Workerbee's meta was obvious but a much better meta, since you had to figure out how to use the previously provided information. The ideal meta is somewhere in between--you don't know exactly what information to collect, and you don't automatically know what to do with it.

any one with the BGG link? I missed my favorites

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/1522218#1522218

It took you 2 hours, 5 minutes and 51 seconds to solve this puzzle.
You were the 58th Tanga member to solve this puzzle.

Man, does my brain hurt !!
If it was'nt for BGG and half the salt in the ocean, I would have kissed this one good bye. Thanks Pb.

If it weren't for a game that I really like, I wouldn't have seen the answer word before.

Now I like the game even more. :)

I really like the metapuzzles. Although this was hardly a metapuzzle. Had there simply been three clues to the words rather than instructions to look up the past 3 words then the puzzle would not have changed.

Not a bad puzzle. I got a little confused around the X's, but then I realised I was supposed to work around the X's, so that was all right then.

Sorry I wasn't here to help last night guys. I was exhausted after the holiday weekend and living on the East Coast makes it hard to stay up after 10 PM for me sometimes.

Looking at some of the issues and posts both here and on BGG it appears that people are confused about the X's.

The X's (and the non-X letters) are just place holders for the three answers from the previous puzzles. Just swap out the letters on the stone with the previous answers and then apply the cipher.

The Non-X letters are the ones you want.

Also [5] Tahnan you were the first to solve the puzzle since it was me that was first, only to check to see if the puzzle was working correctly.

So everyone reduce their place to solve by one.

Okay, I have the first part- i think. But I cannot figure out the numeral bit. i keep getting iuxrygx

GREAT CAESAR'S GHOST! That was rough! Fair. But rough. It's 9am central and I was (subtracting one) 132nd.

[34] gahndalph you're close. Shift the alphabet the other way.

[17] Dragongirl The answer to your question is "yes".

I used "uncover" because of the historical/archaeological nature of the three puzzles (we are a bunch of archaeologists at the New York State Museum), but I could have easily used "discover" or "determine" like you said.

That word is not really important to solving the puzzle. It's not some kind of hidden clue.

And [25] normally I would agree with you. I like nice neat stand alone puzzles too. It's just when I saw what Arnott did with his set of puzzle I liked it and wanted to try a similar set of puzzles. It's just too bad we had two sets of puzzles like that right next to one another.

And [26] & [31] I agree it's not really a metapuzzle and it wasn't planned to be. Using the answers from the other three puzzle was really just an excuse to tie the puzzles (one done by each of us) together so they'd be published together.

Lastly [7] randomcyn I just found out that Shiggins answered the puzzle after a half hour last night and he was 3rd, so that makes you actually 3rd not 4th who solved the puzzle. So everyone else should reduce their solve ranking by two now.

I never realized that the past few puzzles were sent to us encoded.

I don't even know which three puzzles we're supposed to be looking at.

[39] JasonLP
The three One Word Wonders (not warmups) that preceeded this one...
https://secure.tanga.com/puzzles/1003-5-25-2007
https://secure.tanga.com/puzzles/1002-5-26-2007
https://secure.tanga.com/puzzles/1001-5-27-2007

Woo-hoo! Attika rocks!

Sorry, but I can't say that I liked this one. Solved it with salt from BBG but it doesn't seem to be methodical. More a random type of process.

[40]
That's what I thought, but:
a) They are from different authors, and
b) How can I tell just from looking which are the warm-ups and which are the main puzzles?

Anyway, I solved from major salt from BGG, but there's one step that I had to do that doesn't make any sense, nor are there any clues that I had to do it in order to solve the puzzle.

[43] JasonLP
I guess it is confusing if you hadn't been doing the puzzles all along - especially when the authors ganged together to make the puzzles.

And,once the puzzles go into the archive there is no way to really know which were "warmups" and which were "wonders". There is no pattern to the entries in the archive to differentiate them.

What was the step you didn't understand?
GM me at pbleadfoot over at BGG