:: Eric Shamblen’s Puzzle Blog ::

Truman State: a small public university in Kirksville Missouri.  Home of about 5,850 students, the Bulldogs basketball team, and now an innovative twist on the classic collegiate game of Assassins.

For those of you unfamiliar with Assassins (which would be unsurprising in this modern age of all-too-real campus shootings), the classic format is this:  you are given some other student’s name on a piece of paper.  It may be someone you know, or on a decent sized campus, someone you don’t.  Your mission is to “assassinate” that person by some established method.  When Anthony Edwards played in the 1985 Cold War comedy Gotcha!, players used realistic looking guns with suction-cup darts.  When I played in the mid-nineties, we’d been reduced to rolled-up socks in order to, I don’t know, be more lame.  In any case, once you assissinate your target, then you are given that person’s target and you keep going until someone assissinates you or you’re the last person standing.  Part of the fun is not knowing who all the other players are, how many there are, or who has you as his or her target.  It makes those long walks across campus much more exciting.

So here’s the twist that Associate Provost Marty Eisenberg, senior Max Eisenbraun and junior Cody Sumter came up with: rather than using any physical weapons, make the battle a pure match of wits. Players each submit one not-necessarily-original puzzle, which must have a clear and definite solution. They are then emailed their target’s puzzle; solve it, their target is toast, and they get the next puzzle. If someone solves their puzzle first, they are out of the game.

Although still perhaps not quite as cool as the original, an advantage of Thinking Person’s Assassins is that it can be played not just on a college campus but on a global scale. All you need is someone to organize it, collect the puzzles, and send out the emails. Someone like, perhaps, Puzzle Monster? Stay tuned!

The 17th Annual Jigsaw Puzzle Contest was held at the Winter Carnival in St. Paul, Minnesota last Sunday.  This year, 50 four-person teams paid the $40 entrance fee to participate in the contest, which involves assembling a 500-piece puzzle, usually within 45 minutes.

The prize? $120.  Not worth it, you say.  The contestants say, oh yes it is, and some teams practice for months before the competition.  Want to compete in your own local contest?  Here are some tips from the Minnesotan experts:

• The first important task is to form the border. Before the competition, some teams time their members’ ability to solve the edges, and the fastest person is the designated border solver for the contest. With the border completed, the middle becomes much easier to solve.
• Everyone should be working on their own section of the puzzle, so that they can focus more easily, and so there’s less likelihood of a fight breaking out over two people grabbing for the same piece.
• It’s faster to assemble the puzzle in clusters. Rather than looking at an individual piece and trying another individual piece to match it, look for distinct, recognizable common features (i.e., red pieces, pieces of a person’s face, pieces of a house), and put those pieces together first.
• When you get to a point where you’re about to pull your hair out in frustration, swap places with another teammate. Fresh eyes might be able to see different connections.

The first annual Philadelphia Inquirer National Sudoku Championship was held this past Saturday, October 20.  Hosted by famed crossword editor Will Shortz, the tournament included 857 contestants as young as 6 years old and as old as 87.

Thomas Snyder of Palo Alto, California solved an advanced puzzle in the winning time of seven minutes and nine seconds.  He earned a $10,000 prize and a seat on the six-person U.S. World Sudoku Team, which will be competing next year in Goa, India for the third annual World Sudoku Championship. Snyder is the current world champion, having won the second annual championship held in Prague last spring.