Does anyone have any good tips for solving those "What is a XXX Word™?" puzzles? I've had a look at several of them in the past but never really got a handle on how to attack them, and my attempt to create one that wouldn't get solved within 5 minutes has failed.
@Randal'Thor Hm, not sure if there are any tips that would work in general.
I always try to figure out if the name could mean anything in terms of: letter distribution, letter shape, and sounds.
If I notice that all the words of a certain type have similar letters, I'll check to see if there are any letters that only / never appear in Name Word™s.
@IAmInPLS Yep, I think the best places to visit would be Vienna, Salzburg and, of course, Hallstadt. I also remember a travel.SE post about visiting these locations in a 7 day time limit, but I can't find it right now.
@Mithrandir Now 50% are from britain :P I guess one could say that my stats are flawed, because there were way too little people asked. But I say they have no clue about my concept :P
@Deusovi Perhaps I should go through all the previous Word™ puzzles and see what kinds of word properties have been used so far. Might make an interesting study.
@Randal'Thor Unfortunately, far more voters in this part of the country voted the other way. I don't have a lot of luck with elections or with referendums -- always going the way I didn't vote.
Because the older people can screw the country and then leave us younger folk to worry about the future maybe they think the EU is some new-fangled nonsense and they were fine without it back in the old days?
@MariaDeleva You didn't have to make that post a CW ... the basic idea was yours, so it's OK to have the post in your name and credit those who helped you in the comments.
@Randal'Thor Yeah.. I thought that was a river and then couldn't make it fit with the last line... And Maybe a meta post must be present on when to make a community wiki??
An answer should be made community wiki only when it's such a collaborative effort that no single person wants to take full credit for it.
If many different people have contributed comparable amounts of input to an answer, making it community wiki is a way to ensure that the collaborative effort...
@Randal'Thor, I think this answer is a result of collaborative effort - that is why I made it CW. :) And it is OK for me, I am not here for the rep points anyway. :)
I see that the same thing has happened to AJ and me: posted two different answers as different answers and been asked "why post a 2nd answer rather than edit your 1st?". Perhaps guidance in meta on when to post a 2nd answer and when to edit your 1st?
My rule was actually that it contained the scrambled word, the amount of extra letters was irrelevant. I made it only 1 extra to make the puzzle a little easier because I felt that if I were to use longer words it would've made the puzzle much harder
I also didn't use any shades that have the word green in them (save for green of course)
@Will Damn, I tried to pick words which wouldn't make it too obvious, avoiding things like 'CAB' and 'STUPID' and 'DEFINITE'. Apparently I failed :-( — rand al'thor14 hours ago
I thought of it a while ago, i just never implemented it. Although I first thought of it because of the Ruddy words and I thought they might contain anagrams of the word red in different languages.
@RosieF My opinion (not that it's necessarily site policy or anything) is that you should always post a separate answer unless you're only slightly modifying your original answer. If you're going from "wildcat" to "jaguar", it's probably fine to just edit the existing answer, but if you're going from "wildcat" to "skateboard", then definitely post it as a new answer.
If you don't think your original answer applies, you can always delete it, but significant edits to existing answers just confuse people.
Yes, "tangram" specifically means the specific thing it does, but I think it's a reasonable tag for this sort of thing. What else could we use? dissection-puzzle or something, perhaps?
yeah, sorry, vague specific numbers.
incidentally, strongly agree with GPR about editing an existing answer versus making a new one.
... though, hmm, suppose you have an answer of the rather discursive sort I keep perpetrating where you show your thinking, and suppose you realise that at some point fairly late on you took a wrong turning. I think you should then edit the existing answer even if the final answer ends up being quite different, because most of what you've written still applies.
Well, this night, while I was battling some food poisoning, I was thinking of making something similar, although a bit different for a puzzle - when I finish it, I will post it :)
@GarethMcCaughan Pretty sure I've been told off in the past for double-answering riddles. (Not 'told off' in an official modly sense, just by other users who accused me of grubbing for rep or something.)
@GentlePurpleRain We already have a dissection tag, but that seems to be about a different kind of puzzle: cutting up a given shape into pieces, rather than trying to assemble given pieces into a shape.
From the link I posted: "A dissection puzzle, also called a transformation puzzle or Richter Puzzle,[1] is a tiling puzzle where a set of pieces can be assembled in different ways to produce two or more distinct geometric shapes. "
@GentlePurpleRain I thought similarly. So would you agree that it was OK for my two guesses as to the Shakespeare play here to be different answers, and likewise AJ's answers to this riddle?
Yeah, some people will tell you off for double-answering riddles. But people may tell you off for almost anything. Why, just the other day I got one of my answers proposed for deletion just because it was very partial and consisted mostly of statistics that might help other answerers! :-)
Well, once I answered a question tagged cipher, that was actually an anagram and said what the anagram could be and it was downvoted. So I deleted it. :)
@MariaDeleva There are some senses in which it's still 'your' answer. You can get badges from it, bounties on it, and notifications from comments on it. Just not rep.
@Randal'Thor I always thought you accept so lately because you wanted the question to attract more views, so people think they still have a chance on answering correctly :P
@dcfyj: I hope you don't mind that comment. When I saw the solution I thought the base material was a bit wasted in a "What is a word" type puzzle, because it doesn't make use of the removed letter.
@dcfyj, @MariaDeleva: Yes, there is of course no need to use these letters, but here there is exactly one letter left. It reminded me of this puzzle. So my comment isn't just a list of new viridiscent words.
By all means, please keep solving Labryca. I don't like accepting puzzles because it makes them look like they're over and done with, but it's what I'm expected to do for good answers...
@Randal'Thor Sorry, my above comment was directed to you. Didn't know you could tag people. Or that there was a chat room. By all means, please keep solving.
@A.Mirabeau I just edited my answer to show exactly how far I got, and left you a comment. I solved all the rooms except 35, and put some but not all of them together in the right order, and made a guess about the correspondence between yes/no answers and rooms, but there's no doubt Reibello did better than me.
Neither do I, second-hand car buyers can't be choosers. But its funny which names the carmakers invent for their colours.
@dcfyj: Well, I've got the tools now. :) My Question slate is blank too, so I really should come out of the solviing and criticising woodwork and create a puzzle.
@Randal'Thor I've got some free time. I'm going to write it this weekend, and then do the images probably early next week. I wanted to actually make the DIVA quiz an interactive thing where you could click the yes/no buttons and have it go to the next question automatically, but I don't know how to make clickable image maps.
@A.Mirabeau Sounds good! It was an enjoyable puzzle to attack, because there were lots of parts to it with varying levels of difficulty: some were easy to get right away, others took a bit more work, some were really hard, and some I didn't get at all. If everything had been too easy, the whole thing wouldn't have been as interesting; but if everything had been too hard, it would've been harder to get a handle on it in the first place. It's nice to have a scale like that.
@Randal'Thor Thanks, balance seems to be the toughest thing for me to find when I'm creating puzzles of any kind. The first floor of Labryca was solved within about 10 minutes, for example.
@RosieF I'm not sure about your answers there; the second answer (now deleted) was not a complete answer. Since 95% of the figuring out was the same there, I would probably think that it could be one answer, with two guesses as to the final result, if you weren't sure which was correct. Once the OP confirmed, you could edit out the incorrect guess.
This riddle is so easy that I already have created another one. Just in case.
Anyway, please avoid wild guesses.
For sure I am queer
and out of place
Are you still here?
Go start the chase
But always remember
in the first place
stacks are amazing
but not a maze
I'm in the beginning
as well as ...
To answer this riddle, solve each of the four lines independently and put all the clues together to get a one-word final answer.
Nonsensical abstraction high up in the army;
The woman with the wheel fires the cannon.
She's very fast but only in reverse gear.
Certainly a terrorist, but only ju...
Stop worshipping me!
Away! you flea!
I'll stomp you with my boots,
You know I'll accept any substitutes,
At first, I change you,
Then I begin to arrange you,
And finally I end your precious heartbeat!
Who is yelling at you?
As usual, please explain all steps in deriving an answer :)
What does this rebus, drawn with pretzels, say? (This is what happens when I get bored with pretzels on the table... ;P)
Note: The 'scheduled series' mentioned is this. It still needs to be solved!
Overall picture:
Individual pictures:
Note: That black dot in the second one is not imp...
Two spies meet in the city on 9/16/16. One delivers a message to the other. It says:
Nones
5 4 7.3 9 10 11
12 1
9 4 11 9.4
1.1 11 11 4
They nod at each other in approval and then meet somewhere to continue their conversation over breakfast.
Where do they meet and when?
I'm confused... my profile just said that I gained 3 Rep since I last looked at it, but the only rep I've gotten is upvotes on the question I posted today. (no downvotes on it either).
I mean, Harry Potter isn't great either, IMHO. It's certainly not awful - there's a nice story there, and one or two bits of it are really good - but it doesn't deserve all the hype it gets, as if it's one of the best books ever written.
Well, HP took off because it was a good book at the point when suddenly there were a lot of people who knew how to read, way more than any other point in history.
Okay. Finished one part of diamond2. Sci is betatesting another. Now I need to create math problems :/
Anyone want to start a bounty on this, to help the OP who wants an answer so much they just tried to repost the same question? (I would, but it's not my kind of puzzle, and I can't even tell whether it's good or not.)
@Gareth maybe; he might even make back the rep lost in the bounty just in upvotes on his answer there.
I was told instead of re-asking a question to rather edit my old post to bring the question back into subject. So I'm going to try to reformat it entirely.
The following puzzle is a geocache puzzle that should give coordinates when solved.
Puzzle:
Line 1: ZzZZzzzzzzzzzZzzZzzzzZZZzz
Line 2: ZZ...
Unfortunately I still haven't been able to solve it. But I do really appreciate your random thoughts! I was given a hint that "one line helps you figure out how to parse the other line" and "The coordinates are all in the first line. The second line will help identify where they are." But even with that I'm still pretty lost. — Juan Vazquez30 mins ago