PUZZLE POTLUCK 3
Solution – Replayability
ANSWER – ARTTHERAPY
by Darren Yin
The first step to solving the puzzle is to read the flavor text and realize that you need to trace a path from the bottom left to the top right on both boards. The key is that you follow the same sequence of directions on both boards, but on the old board, you must step through the "portals." Then, if you take the letters from the new board that correspond to where you stepped through the portals, you get the letters of the answer, ART THERAPY.
The path on the right board:
The path traced out by the same sequence of steps on the left board:
The path on the right board, with the portals on the path highlighted:
Author's Notes
- I already knew that I wanted to use Hasbro's Game of Life somehow in this puzzle, because I had thought that it would fit neatly if both the original puzzle and the snapped puzzle were to incorporate "Game of Life," just interpreted in different ways. Coming up with an actual puzzle was still quite difficult, though, plus there was an added constraint that the puzzle needed to be snapped to become something on which you could execute a generation of Conway's Game of Life.
Originally I had thought of trying to make a logic puzzle, where you have to rederive what happened during a playthrough of the more modern Game of Life board, or perhaps incorporating the career paths somehow and extracting an answer from there. Also, perhaps you'd somehow pair that with a barred crossword to give you a full grid of letters? But all that felt unclean, plus it seemed too involved to serve as a good simple first round puzzle.
Finally, after a couple of fruitless work sessions, I stumbled across the fact that Hasbro's Game of Life had actually looked quite different when it first came out. After seeing that, it was still tricky to come up with a clean, fair mechanic. At this point, we had also already locked in that BLACK BELT would be the mechanic for the snapped puzzle (Reality), which left me with a 15x15 grid to work with. On a whim, I wrote something to determine if there was a sequence of steps on the old board that would stay on the 15x15 grid (new board) and also end up in the top right corner, and luckily enough, I found a valid path.
After that, I took some time generating a 15x15 grid of letters that would fit both the constraints of the Replayability puzzle (Checkered Game of Life path) and the Reality puzzle (Conway's Game of Life generation), as well as being vaguely thematic words (in general I like having more structured fill, even if it can be a bit of a red herring). After that, it was just a few more iterations of test solving and tweaking the flavor text to try to hint away from some of the obvious dead ends.
In general, I do like writing more abstract, non-ISIS puzzles (ISIS is short for Identify, Sort, Index, Solve), even though I myself often find them more painful to solve, since it's often harder to find a foothold into the puzzle (compared to say, a word puzzle with a list of clues). My aim was to have a mechanic that felt both novel and fair. - Best Wrong Answers:
Wrong Answer Submitted by: WHENLIFEGIVESYOULEMONS Ch-Ch-Ch-Changs
Stats
- 370 solves
- 1041 incorrect guesses
- Most common incorrect guess: ROBOT (guessed 56 times)
- First solve: Eggplant Parms in 26 minutes and 20 seconds