Feb 05, 2011 One Word Wonder Puzzle

Wow, completely guessed it. 2nd

Wow, completely guessed it. 1st

[1] right there with you. 3rd

Enjoyed the solve method. It helps that I'm a bit of an NFL nut (Go Steelers)

[1] Correct. 15th.

Resorted to [1]'s method, but I'll take it!

[1] [2] [3] agreed!
cool!

Has anyone solved it the right way yet?

[1][2][3][5][6][7] Wish that'd work for me. [4] has me worried that I need to know more about football than I do in order to solve it.

[8] It looks like [4] did.

edit: I was right to be concerned. You need some very specific information about the history of "the big game". I called my husband, the lucky guesser, in and that proved to be a sort of post & solve. I finally pulled off the guess that everyone else was making! I never would have gotten it otherwise. But it is an interesting solve method. Just too specific for my taste.

no idea... salt anyone?

You solved this puzzle in 9 minutes and 53 seconds and were the 28th Tanga member to solve it.

Guessed it finally. I did try a few things, but I don't think I would have been able to get it the right way. Why isn't a picture included with the solution?

You solved this puzzle in 11 minutes and 59 seconds and were the 33rd Tanga member to solve it. You earned 78 points for solving this.
GO PACKERS!

[8] Started to...but it was taking too long (I know very little about the sport), so I resorted to [1]'s method.

WOO HOO I guessed too and got it.

1st top 50 EVER!!

You solved this puzzle in 1 minute and 31 seconds and were the 38th Tanga member to solve it. You earned 73 points for solving this.

I guessed as well. Didn't know it off the top of my head, but I guessed on what to look up.

I started to compile huge amounts of data in order to solve this, and then everyone says it is so guessable ... I wish I wouldn't have read the comments, it really took the fun out of it for me!

This wasn't a puzzle. It was a sport-specific trivia challenge or a sport-specific guessing game.

I'm completely lost

Also resorted to [1]'s method. You solved this puzzle in 13 minutes and 20 seconds and were the 58th Tanga member to solve it.

It took 19 minutes and about 19 guesses to guess it. Still 62nd.

I just did it the right way to see what it looked like and it does take a long time. I was on the right track earlier, at least I was using the right data, but I think even if I would have thought of the right method I wouldn't have known it since it just takes so long for the answer to take form.

Got it the correct way after I resorted to calling my husband for his football knowledge. Puzzle must've taken some time to create. I appreciate the effort.

Clue please?

[16] Well, we didn't MAKE you guess. :)

24th, 37th & 60th tonight, not bad. Don't guess I WIN anything for that. Oh well, that'll have to last me for a couple days, don't think I'll be around tomorrow night. GO STEELERS, bring "#7" home!

42 minutes after it went live and still got bonus points? I should get some kind of award for this.

Don't know how people were guessing this one. Not that it's entirely unguessable, but I never would have come up with that myself. And the correct solve method is painful. :(

Almost 17 minutes and one of my guesses took. 57th on this.

Almost an hour, but I still got #94 (#4 and #6 on Crypto and Hyper) so I'm not too upset. It's my first time under 100 on all puzzles.

Thank you!

[27] I wouldn't have been able to guess it straight off, but the Wikipedia article on tonight's theme helped.

[23] - the caption mentions something about winning?

Which of the teams have won the big game? [31]

Count me in with the guessers. Could probably have shaved four or five minutes off my 11 min 33 sec time if I knew how to spell.

[32] In my opinion, that would have been a better title
I tried a few things, and then guessed my way in at 74th

[30] your salt is the only way I got this, as soon as I saw the word in there I knew it was the answer. I don't think I would have ever figured out the correct solve method, I knew the first step right away but wouldn't have thought of the second step as the way to solve this. If it weren't for the comments I probably would have just given up.

[35] I am giving up. I don't like football, I don't know football, and I couldn't glean anything from the Wikipedia article. I don't care for games where you have to have some sort of specific knowledge, so this isn't a fun one for me.

I finally got it ala wild guess.

I give up...can't even GUESS it...let alone solve it the "normal" way? GRRRR lol

I'm with you, Kay....not that I didn't enjoy trying, but I'm totally clueless. ...and I tried wikipedia too...and google images, hoping to find that picture with some caption...no luck. I wish this had been tonight's puzzle...so my friends would've all been here and we could've tried to solve it together. Still may try...if I remember...will have a few hours together before this ends, although we may be too entertained...lol

I looked at the puzzle and then went to bed. Looked at it this morning and made a guess. I am the 176th person to get it.

thought of this earlier but chose the last and wrong word!

[17] Oh come, now.

This might not be a *good* puzzle, but it's definitely a puzzle.

For one, this comes with no instructions. So from the get, you have to figure out what the puzzle is. Which already makes it a puzzle.

Figuring out what the line/clue at the top means is also a puzzle. Then figuring out how that line applies to the "grid," is also a puzzle.

Now, just because you might not know this category, nor recognize most of the "elements" in it by sight, well, that means doing some research. Which, in this case, might not be fun for you to do. Or fun for most of you to do. As I said, I'm not claiming this is a good puzzle.

But to say it's not a puzzle is just silly.

And as for trivia: trivia can certianly be a major part of a puzzle. For example:

http://www.tanga.com/puzzles/5005-7-26-2009
http://www.tanga.com/puzzles/5511-11-21-2009
http://www.tanga.com/puzzles/5926-3-18-2010
http://www.tanga.com/puzzles/4869-9-21-2009
http://www.tanga.com/puzzles/3792-9-9-2008
http://www.tanga.com/puzzles/4764-10-3-2009

I would consider all of these to be trivia-based puzzles. Most of them, of course, are probably easier to solve than this football one, but the difficulty level is going to be based on one's own personal knowledge.

Having to look stuff up doesn't necessarily make a puzzle a bad puzzle.

[42] I'm not going to argue your main point because I think you are probably right. But I will say that one big difference between this puzzle and the 6 puzzles you linked is that those are fairly obviously trivia related. You know what you need to look up and then there's a pretty obvious "usual Tanga" step next. (And actually the 1st puzzle is completely self-contained. No trivia necessary although it appears to be otherwise at first glance).

This puzzle, on the other hand, is not obviously a trivia puzzle. Do I actually need to know which team each of those symbols is for? Or am I matching them up somehow - they could have just as easily been letters or symbols? Is the title referring to this year's big game or the big game in general? I mean, there are a lot of different ways to go that may or may not involve me needing to look up the appropriate trivia.

I don't have nearly as much trouble with trivia being required when the puzzle more clearly points to the trivia I need to retrieve. Yes, now that I know the solution, the title seems to fairly clearly point to that, but with all the other possible ways to solve it running around in my head, I don't think I ever would have gone there on my own.

Plus, those other puzzles, as I extract letters, I can tell I'm on the right path. For this one, as [21] pointed out, you don't get any sort of immediate feedback that you are on the right track. For me, that's the main problem with this puzzle. I think it is a very interesting technique. But you have to recognize the symbols, pick the right piece of trivia, mark the symbols that match that trivia, notice that those marked symbols are forming letters, and keep that up until you've spelled a word. And at no step along the way do you get any positive feedback. Letters formed in this manner are notoriously difficult to read (as people learned with my recent rainbow puzzle) too so even if you are doing it right, you might not be able to tell. Just a few too many failure points for me.

I'll cut jetranger some slack though because his puzzles have all been very unique. I'm about 50/50 on whether I liked them but they are all original and I really appreciate that.

OMG, even though I can appreciate the time it took to compile this puzzle I have to say it is not logically within the boundaries of what is a good puzzle. If my printer was not broken and I could have printed this out it would not have taken as long but it is way too vague as to where to go. I left it alone for hours and still "You solved this puzzle in 19 hours, 9 minutes and 20 seconds and were the 208th Tanga member to solve it."

The 242nd Tanga member to solve it! Thank God.............I guessed correctly (after about 20 guesses), instead of solving it. I was not looking forward to the work involved, although his puzzle isn't the only one that I've done that work is involved. [43] thanks explaining this side of JetRangers puzzles.

WOW! Complete and total guess right off the bat and I got it! It's good to be a girl who knows a thing or two about football and the "BIG GAME"

[42] There's trivia, and then there's having to referencing and cross-referencing and use the tiny pictures of things you don't recognize. I think this would be a blast if I liked football, but the time this would take me is not worth three Tanga points. Just not my puzzle.