As many Magpie solvers will realise this was a follow-on from Dumber Muzzle in Magpie 99. That was compiled in the spirit of “can it be done?”.  It had a 7×8 grid with 35 clues. The logic started in a corner and meandered round the grid but at any stage had only a few places to expand to. After the grid was completed I thought about a message and came up with one that used 31 letters in a haphazard order. The puzzle turned out to be hard – the start was not so easy – but was much appreciated by solvers who like their puzzles hard. The most common (correct) criticism was that the message would have been improved by adding a “the” to the message; I was aware of this but very nervous of touching what was a delicate logic structure.

My review of the puzzle was that I liked the idea as it was a logic puzzle rather than a number-crunching slog but any second puzzle needed to:-

1.       Have a larger grid. It had been a real struggle to get all 26 letters decided in such a small grid.

2.       Have a starting point in the middle (allowing expansion in lots of directions) which let solvers make some entry quickly and “shouted” to be used.

3.       Have a good quotation to use.

4.       Use only letters in the clues. (Dumber Muzzle had clues like A^3-B^3).

5.       Use repeated letters in clues more to give solvers extra information.

I had not intended to write a second one so soon but one rainy day I was playing with ideas like A^(B^C) when it became clear that there was only one 5 digit answer for this. A quick look in ODQ for a quotation yielded one and it was off and running.

I have not seen any guidelines on compiling numericals so it is a self-taught process. I do not use a computer or spreadsheets, but I do have a calculator that can run (very basic) programs and I have written one that factorises numbers. The most obvious advice is “Do it slowly and triple-check everything – nothing is too easy not to botch” (see later). Most puzzles are done in one of two ways

1.       If the grid is determined or largely determined by the theme, put in bars (anything goes, I think) and clues. Sit down and try to solve it, fiddle with bars and clues, try to solve it, etc.

2.       If the grid is empty, compile it largely in the order that the solver solves it.

In this case it was obviously case 2 and I started at 18 ac in an exercise book, expanded it in a number of ways until about 8 or 10 letters were determined and then used Sympathy to complete a reasonable looking grid. With A=2, B=3 etc at this stage to keep my sanity, the grid proved a comfortable size to determine all the letters and I was confident (correctly) that I could change the letter allocations to fit in the 20 letter quotation, especially as I had left 11d and 25d free.

I do not have a checker; I have approached one or two people but that never worked out. The Magpie editors can probably confirm that there have not been problems with my puzzles and most discussions have been about preambles. But when I sent this off, it had a logical error near the beginning and a clue error near the end. Despite this, Shane still managed to solve it! When reviewing it to remove these errors, I made it a bit easier so you can imagine Shane’s achievement.

Thanks to the many people that have commented on the puzzle. One issue with the puzzle is that the misprints in a lot of the clues had no significance. Even in retrospect I think it was best to have all clues having misprints as solvers might have tried to use the non-misprint clues to get started. It might have been a good idea though to give solvers the correct letters for those clues in some (anagrammed) phrase. I find that each puzzle is a shot in the dark as to how difficult it turns out to be and how it is received; this seems to be especially the case with numericals. I have no intention of doing another puzzle in the near future with misprints.

Finally, for those who enjoy the numerical puzzles in the Listener, do consider a subscription to the Magpie so that you can get twelve of them a year!

Hedgehog

Posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2012 at 8:17 pm under Setting the scene.
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