The Sphinx's Lair

1:30 AM

@OmegaKrypton and everyone in general - A reminder that a bad post shouldn't be edited for superficial things (like adding spoiler tags or fixing formatting) if that edit is not going to actually make the post worth keeping. Edit to make a post better, but don't bother if your edit won't raise it to a minimal quality because even with the edit it's still not going to be worth keeping - the poster at that point needs to fix it, or else we close/delete it to keep low quality stuff off the site.

If you edit a problematic post from the Review queue, your edit unilaterally marks the post as good and that's probably not what you want to do.

(Case in point: Who / what am I? - was in very low quality queue with votes for deletion. An edit that only applied spoiler tags was applied, and cancelled the VLQ review as a unilateral "Looks ok".)

2:52 AM

got it thanks @Rubio

You more or less said that last time too ;)

Mar 5 at 2:01, by Omega Krypton

ok, got it thanks!

lel my classic response

5:07 AM

hey OK

ye

@Rubio

You should put your meta summary in the question, not as an answer (which it isn't)

or comm wiki?

nah

not concerned about the rep. it's ... well ... it's not an answer

puzzling.stackexchange.com/posts/81163/revisions

ok anyway

5:10 AM

yeh that shouldn't have been done either

ok i see done as requested

Danke.

You might actually put somewhere in there that this is a meta puzzle based on the earlier puzzles. I mean, we get it, but the post doesn't actually say that anywhere now that I look at it. :)

that's more up to you tho

good now? @Rubio

lol

Q: Tactical Domino Placement Game

7:51 AM

0

This question is asking for a winning strategy. Alice and Bob take turns to place regular dominoes into a $7\times8$ board. The first player who cannot go loses. Is there a winning strategy for either player?

game game-theory dominoes

strategy game game-theory pencil-and-paper-games dots-and-boxes

8:11 AM

1

Q: Reverse dots and boxes

Alice and Bob are playing a game of reverse dots and boxes. The rules are simple: The players take turns adding one horizontal or vertical line in one free spot on the grid (marked with light gray lines in the below image). Alice goes first. If a move completes a $1\times1$ box, the ...

8:23 AM

@Rubio okay... this is terribly wrong but is my least terribly wrong attempt thus far, so here goes.

FASHIONABLE (=dress, adj.) = FABLE (verb, to tell a story i.e. to tender a lass (sometimes)) outside of the following exposition: ASHION = anag. (oddly) of HAS + 1º (=1st in some European countries) + N (=new)

whew

You were right about one thing: that is indeed wrong :)

no indirect anagrams?

@Rubio XD sorry @msh210

That would be an indirect anagram, and “expo” isn’t actually used in your construction

It is used indirectly: the "ashion" construct is classified as exposition.

(Not that it makes the attempt any better. :))

I mean I guess hehe

8:33 AM

care to give a hint? @Rubio

structure or letter is up to you :) thanks

Structure: The word "expo" features somehow.

Letters: Ther must be eleven of them.

ikr

Well, just trying to emulate helpfulness level 0. :)

:)

(Otherwise known as obnoxiousness level 10.)

8:38 AM

*deep bow*

In this case, helpfulness level 0 would be that the definition part is either st the beginning or the end.

dude

-_-

24h hint: the 3rd letter is an E

thanks

I’m off. Taters

fries

8:47 AM

Ah, wait ...

@Rubio A SHEPHERDESS is a tender of sheep: (E(x)P(o) + H(as)) in SHE + DRESS*

Hm. Too late.

Q: How fast can you “DOCK” the “SHIP”?

9:31 AM

1

You have to reach DOCK from SHIP in the minimum number of tries with the following rules. You are only allowed to change one letter at a time. You have to keep the word length the same. At each step of the way, you must have a legitimate English word. Thus, something like going from "SHIP" to "...

word wordplay no-computers letters word-ladder

11:16 AM

@MOehm indeed.

11:50 AM

@Rubio Where's the indirect anagram?

@OmegaKrypton too, who mentioned it.

ION is in order.

you dont derive what youtake for anag.

take mine for eg

Type or blur literary text (6)

answer is POETRY (anag of type or)

you get what you take for anag directly from the clue

yeah msh's answer had no indirect anagram... the ION was already in order so all that needs anagramming is the HAS -> ASH

if i've understood correctly

oh sorry my fault then :P

sorry @msh210

Further to the earlier discussion of indirect anagrams in UK newspaper cryptics: today I spent a little while on an old Times jumbo cryptic and so far I've found two kinda indirect anagrams in it. What they have in common (along with most of the Guardian ones you'll find by following the link I gave earlier) is that the indirection isn't via a definition.

So one of them had something about "badly made three-D spectacles" or something like that and you had to anagram THREE D OO to get THEODORE. I forget the wording of the other, but it used some word like "repeatedly" to tell you that you had to anagram not just GRAIN (the word in the clue) but GRAIN GRAIN to get ARRAIGNING.

I don't object to this sort of thing (though I don't exactly like it either and would feel a bit bad if I used it in a clue of my own, and "spectacles" -> OO is pretty horrible in its own right). The crucial thing, I think, is that there isn't much open-endedness in the anagram fodder.

the first one sounds pretty hard to get

i mean, it could as well be DDDOO* or DDDSPECTACLES* etc

12:02 PM

@OmegaKrypton no worries

This sort of piecemeal anagram fodder assembly, where some of the words must be abbreviated (left = L; doctor = Dr and so on) is pretty common in my experience.

(And I agree that OO for spectacles is pretty silly.)

12:26 PM

@jafe It couldn't have been those things because it was known to be 8 letters. And of course this was a cryptic clue in a crossword so there were other cross-checking answers to make things clearer if necessary.

With crossed letters to make such clues more solvable I can see how direct commonly seen substitutions to get the anagram fodder is not terribly unfair - though it still feels a bit like cheating to me. Here where we generally don’t have crossed letters to guide us, I think a pretty strict avoidance of their use is only proper.

I agree with that.

4

Q: The joke office

Alice and Bob are supposed to get form A at the joke office. Forms A, B, C, D and E are each at exactly one of the following five switches. Switch 1: Here there are form B. Switch 2: Here there are form C or E. Switch 3: Here there are form D. Switch 4: Here there are form ...

logical-deduction liars

@msh210 Heh. Yeah I didn’t notice either that your anagramming started and ended with HAS. My apologies for unwarrantedly maligning your attempt :)

12:58 PM

@Rubio no worries

it definitely deserved maligning, just not for that particular reason :-)

Hehe

Welp. @MOehm is up next.

Yes, I know.

0

Q: The three greedy pirates

Her eyes lit up as the pirates Sparrow, Barbossa and Turner opened the treasure chest and saw the mountain gold coins. After pirate's tradition, Sparrow first took a coin, then Barbossa two, Turner three, then Sparrow four, Barbossa five, and so on. So were the gold coins split without re...

logical-deduction

1:40 PM

Okay, not great, but here goes:

CCCC: Prepared sheep skin's soft structure has air circulating away from clothing (9)

logical-deduction pattern

1:53 PM

0

Q: pattern recognition riddle

does anybody see in this pattern recognition riddle a reasonable solution? source: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/visual-pattern-recognition-test.921583/

Q: Student calls and shuffling

2:13 PM

0

I have a list $A$ of $n$ positive numbers that denotes the number of times the $i^{th}$ student must be called before he wakes up from sleep. The given list is however shuffled and we don't know which index corresponds to which student. Suppose I need to wake up $x$ children, then I need to find ...

mathematics logical-deduction

Q: Chrysanthemum bejeweled with dew drops

3:13 PM

1

If you squint, you might be able to see letters in the reflections of some of the dew drops. Those will help get you started. In this puzzle, the adventure begins just after 12 o'clock and the direction of movement is always clockwise, but the words alternate between reading inward and rea...

word wordplay word-ladder

3:27 PM

@MOehm P + ARCH + (r/ai)MENT

Sid

@Rubio don't understand the last part. What is (r/ai)MENT?

AIR recirculated to RAI and then removed from RAIMENT

Q: Find Those Chess Notations! #7

0

It's been awhile, so welcome to my series if you haven't seen it before! Number Of Moves: 15 Checkmater: Black Given Game: ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? fxe3 ? ? ? ? ? ? ? dxe4 ? dxe6 ? ? ? ? ? fxe5 ? ? ? fxe2# Cryptic Clue: Death must move to be killed. task: To use retrograde analysis and give an...

chess retrograde-analysis

No particularly good way to compactly notate that so I made something up :)

How is P=soft?

Sid

3:34 PM

musical notation i believe

ah yes

Sid

@Rubio RAIMENT is clothing. Wow. Never knew that.

I saw parchment, but was trying to fit it to PA...NT=clothing and couldn't. :-/

why "has", though?

raiment's a new word for me

It’s a little loose. The “has” seems to be for surface only unless I missed something.

3:42 PM

"has" meaning something like "has, next to it, ..." is pretty common in crosswords.

ah i see

Ah haven’t seen that but that’s cuz I don’t really do them :)

think someone corrected me in a puzzle that "has" should mean "inside"

not 100% sure though

3:57 PM

I think I’ve only seen it so used

(Or similarly to indicate text literally contained in other words)

Deusovi

I probably wouldn't use "has" for concatenation, but I believe I've seen that at least once (likely in a British cryptic)

4:57 PM

@Rubio Yes. Back to you.

(You could have used anagram notation, I guess.)

@jafe Could have been Deusovi. :)I agree that "has" seems to be more natural as an indicator of containment, but I can also veryif Gareth's observation that ii is often used to indicate juxtaposition.

5:15 PM

CCCC: Check the DMG, perhaps, regarding followup to initial charge as a free attack (7)

knowledge enigmatic-puzzle history

9:37 PM

0

Q: One night in Baker Street

The raindrops ran down the windows of 221B Baker Street while Sherlock Holmes played a sad melody upon his violin. The weather and the music reflected his mood, for it had been a trying and vexatious twenty-four hours. It was rare for a problem to stymie him like this, but try as he might to di...

PotatoLatte

10:36 PM

o/