Puzzle 612: Totally Awesum 23

A while back, I was commissioned to write puzzles for Kakuro Conquest, thanks to my impressive haggling skills and talking the other person up from "hey, promote this site". I even promoted them in a volume of Grant's Review Corner, praising their solving interface for its simplicity. As much as I would love to see my puzzles playable in said interface, so far this hasn't happened. In a couple of weeks, if Kakuro Conquest shows no sign of life (including replying to the message I sent via their contact form), I will release the puzzles on this blog so they don't go to waste (and so this blog has something happening on it). The puzzle below is not one of those puzzles, but I do believe it's representative of the quality you can expect.

Edit: I have now reached out to Perfomant Design via Kakuro Conquest's contact form, the e-mail address on their site, and their Twitter account, in the best good faith effort which I can muster to give them a chance to stop me from using these puzzles without their permission. I also reached out to Kareem Ahmed, who contacted me on behalf on Performant in 2011 back when he worked closely with them, and paid me to write the puzzles in the first place. If I am getting myself into hot water, I have at the very least done everything I can think of to test the temperature safely.

Rules of Totally Awesum

Grant's Review Corner: Volume 8

First, an update on the previous edition of Grant's Review Corner: the puzzles I was paid to write for Kakuro Conquest have not appeared yet in almost two years. If I don't get any signs of life from the site's operators soon, expect these puzzles to be released slowly on this blog. Some of these puzzles I've written are, in my not-so-humble opinion, very good illustrations of what an artisan can do with handmade Kakuro puzzles, and absolutely need to be seen.

As longtime fans already know, updates on this blog have been more sparse due to the fact that I'd rather focus my efforts on writing puzzles for Grandmaster Puzzles and getting paid for it. However, I got an e-mail recently from someone who wants me to review their upcoming smartphone app in exchange for promoting my blog. I have to admit that this is sorely tempting, given that not only have I broadened the focus of this blog's posts to allow for said blog not to be completely dead, but if I rearrange the sidebar, I could promote Grandmaster Puzzles very heavily and direct incoming traffic there (or better yet, make arrangements with the app's publisher to promote Grandmaster Puzzles directly). Ultimately, I feel that I must entertain these kinds of offers very sparingly, as I do not want to become a forum for people to bribe me into publicizing them (they can do that on JayIsGames or something), but somehow, I don't feel like I can dismiss this one right off the bat.

Here is the text of the e-mail I got:

Grant,

We would like to feature your blog in our upcoming iPhone app, Word Morph, a turn-based social word puzzle game.

Two of our office's most recent apps gained hundreds of thousands of users within the first few days (each), and millions within weeks. We're now up to about 5 million users. We are highly motivated to duplicate this same success with Word Morph.
You will, of course, benefit most from cross-promotion after we have a substantial user base. And in return, we would appreciate a review of our app. On our side, we would benefit most from promotion upon launch, so here is what we are proposing:
Featured Blog

• The blogger chooses a day (up to 6 months from initial launch) to be featured in our Morph of the Day.
• The blogger may, depending on availability, change the day that you choose to be featured (e.g. you might have a new post that you'd like to get an extra boost of traffic to, etc.).
• The blogger may review (and even contribute to) the Morph of the Day description and picture, and verify the link's destination. 

App Mentions/Reviews
We're pretty open to ideas of how bloggers do stuff to plug Word Morph at launch. So far, we've come up with a couple ways:

• The blogger can share about us on social media.
• The blogger can do a review/shout out in a blog post (around launch).

So we aren't asking a lot, and depending on how the game takes off, the return could be big. We really hope to work with you and mutually benefit from doing so.
Please let me know if you're interested.
Thanks.

First, as a disclaimer, I must admit that experience has taught me that it's very hard for me to be enamored by the "asynchronous casual turn-based game" genre. This is just my personality; to me, it feels like far less of a grind to play a game in a single session than asynchronously over multiple ones. When I join an asynchronous game, I am committing myself to incorporating that game into my daily routine rather than just paying attention to it during a single session and then I'm no longer under any obligation to said game. Nonetheless, I will try to judge these various asynchronous casual games on whether I think they succeed at what they set out to do, and not on my own personal bias against the genre.

As an iPhone and iPad owner, it is difficult to avoid asynchronous casual games. In fact, a long time ago, I was considering writing a review of the then-new game Letterpress, which ultimately disappointed me greatly when I realized that playing with good strategy turns a game with interesting ideas into a tedious chore where my opponent Jeffrey Harris resigned rather than allow the game to continue. As we discovered on our second play, the last move advantage is so huge that in the endgame, a player who can't find a word using all of the unused letters will prefer to use none of them than to use one of them and let the opponent use up the rest and end the game. Thus, the game never felt like it was heading towards any conclusion; we just had to keep taking turns finding words among the letters we'd already used until a player's response is so weak that the opponent can afford to use one of the unused letters and still be too far ahead for the other player to catch up. Tennis is only interesting to watch because it is fast-paced; if it were slowed down to where a rally takes a few days to complete, it would be a boring grind to watch and to play. Such a game needs to be played in real time, with a 30-second time limit per word, rather than asynchronously, and ultimately, I can't help but root against the game's success.

Letterpress is far from the only asynchronous casual app I've played; I also have experience with the ubiquitous Words With Friends and its younger brother Scramble With Friends. The former is based on Scrabble, a game with deeper strategy than casual players seem to have any notion of. (As proof of this, consider how players reacted when WWF added a "cheat" you can pay for where you can be told the distribution of the unplayed letters; tournament Scrabble players keep track of this during the game on sheets of paper because it's essential to certain strategies, but casual players are more upset that their opponents can pay for this information than that Zynga's charging for information that anybody knowing the letter distribution can work out for oneself for free!) The latter is based around Boggle, with some novel enhancements such as a scoring system with some premium letters which increase the values of words using them, and an algorithm which seems to increase the number of long words in the 4x4 grid versus standard Boggle. Ultimately, I didn't like WWF or SWF enough to justify keeping them on my phone or paying for them, but they execute what they aim for well, and I feel much more inclined to recommend these games to serious gamers than to recommend Letterpress to them. I also played Dice With Buddies, which is essentially asynchronous Yahtzee; for some reason, the freemium element of buying extra die rolls didn't sit well with me, and ultimately I don't find Yahtzee as engaging as Can't Stop or To Court the King (especially when I'm severely behind), so this one was also deleted, and I don't recommend it.

But what about the game Word Morph, which I was asked to review? I found a video in the Google+ profile of the person who e-mailed me:



So, let me get this straight: this game is asynchronous in the same sense as Scramble With Friends, in that you and your opponent play the same game at separate times, but the game itself is in real time (change one word to another as quickly as possible). Already, this has more potential than Letterpress, because the game will end after 6 rounds, instead of being interminable the moment players discover actual good strategy. Believe it or not, I love it when games terminate in a reasonable amount of time, so despite not seeing the app yet, which is unreleased, I must give kudos to the designers for taking this route! And the drag-and-drop interface sounds great in theory, although I must question the Y and the Z sharing a key (do you want to change FED to FEY or FEZ?). So I guess I'd need to play the app to see whether the interface works in practice (which is superlatively important in a game of speed). The game of word ladders has proven to have staying power among casuals, though, so while I'm not sure what someone whose memorized the entire graph of connected 3-, 4-, and 5-letter words would think of this game's staying power, it's probably not an entirely crappy idea.

I might edit this post later today when I have more time to write, but yeah, casual games exist.

Magic FreeCell

Here's an optimization puzzle. I was tempted to make a contest out of it, like the optimization contests Games Magazine has had in the past, but eh, I just want new blog content, and making a contest would require thought about what to actually give away.

Almost everyone is familiar with FreeCell. It is a solitaire card game in which a standard deck of cards is dealt into 8 columns (four of which have 7 cards, and four of which have 6 cards). Here's a layout:

(If this deal doesn't look very random to you, that's because it's not; I got the deal from this video. Note that there is no "What the hell?" card in FreeCell, as surprising as that may be. Also, I got the card graphics from here.)

A move in FreeCell constitutes one of the following actions:

• Moving the bottom card of any column in the tableau to one of four "cells". Each cell can hold only one card.
• Moving the bottom card of any column, or a card in the cells, to the bottom of another column. An empty column can accept any card; otherwise, you can only place a card on top of a card of the opposite color and the next higher rank. (Ranks are, from lowest to highest, A 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 J Q K.)
• Moving the bottom card of any column, or a card in the cells, to the foundations. An Ace can be played to the foundations at any time. Any other card can only be played if the next lowest card of the same suit has been played.

The goal in FreeCell is to move all 52 cards to the foundations.

For this optimization problem, your goal is to win the game using as few cells as possible, and then in as few moves as possible using that number of cells (so 200 moves with 0 cells is better than 100 moves with 1 cell). To make the game more challenging, and to stymie automatic FreeCell solvers as far as I am aware, I am adding one additional constraint: all four cards of a particular rank must be played to the foundations in what magicians call "chased" order (Clubs, Hearts, Spades, Diamonds). Almost any software implementation of FreeCell will automatically play the Ace and Two of Spades and Ace of Diamonds to the foundations after the first move; this is no longer allowed, as the Ace of Spades cannot be played to the foundations without the Ace of Hearts, and the Ace of Diamonds cannot be played to the foundations without the Ace of Spades.

Edit: Here's a solution I found to get the ball rolling. It uses 4 cells and 114 moves. Can you do it using fewer cells, or in fewer moves using 4 cells?

My father's medical bills. (My most serious blog post ever.)

Warning: You are about to read some depressing crap. [Now with an edit at the bottom!]

In 2011, I alluded to the tradition of getting Nikoli books for my birthday. While not also alluded to, I used to also get them every year on Christmas. However, my family is in much more dire financial straits now, to the point that I skipped the Nikoli books on Christmas and have decided that I want nothing more on my birthday than a lunch at Genghis Grill using a birthday coupon I got. The biggest cause of my mother's stress and financial difficulty is currently my father's very recent hip replacement, which has an infection and is stymieing the doctors by refusing to grow a culture so they can know which antibiotic to administer. I even heard that they're thinking of sending him to Fort Worth, which would really throw a wrench in the works. I'll have my mother help me write a much more detailed and maybe even more accurate description of what's going on, but suffice it to say that I'm desperate to help her as much as I can. I've pledged to help her around the house as much as possible on Sundays, and occasionally find it within my heart to help her on other days, but money is really, really, really important right now to pay the medical bills and the other types of bills we have. I'm sorely inclined to seek aid from the Jack Vasel Memorial Fund. I mean, I'm part of the gaming community, kind of, and my father's hip is a personal hardship for the entire family. However, it causes me such grief to beg after my efforts to raise money for the same organization less than a year ago, and really, there are at least a thousand people in the puzzle community who merit more financial aid than me, aren't there?

I am very much considering trying to sell a bunch of crap to help my family out (perhaps an auction Geeklist on BoardGameGeek?). I also plan on redoubling my Grandmaster Puzzles efforts in the hopes that maybe writing puzzles will merit more money. If you want to help out and get almost nothing in return except humble gratitude and maybe a mention on this blog alongside a custom puzzle, contact me at glmathgrant at gmail dot com. You can send me money via PayPal via that address, but for payments above $12 or so, please send the money to ginger dot fikes at gmail dot com, my mother's account, where a smaller portion will be eaten by fees.

I'm sorry if this sob story is a waste of everyone's time, but my mother seriously needs the help.

Edit: I followed through with the auction Geeklist idea, and raised over $100. I have also received generous donations from many people, and I thank you. To avoid overloading my blog with serious posts, all updates on my father's condition will be posted as comments on the auction Geeklist. There are two things I want to say publicly, though.

Number one, I used my birthday money to buy some Nikoli puzzle books for my birthday, because my mother refused to use it for her own purposes. Two out of the eleven books I got, Fresh Shikaku 3 and 4, are already retired. Shikaku puzzles are so easy. :)

Number two, I am going to maintain my wishlist on BoardGameGeek. If you want to give me one of these board games as a gift instead of donating money for my father, you now have that option. I will try to save portions of my Grandmaster Puzzles paychecks to do this, but I'm so reluctant to spend money on myself that my logic puzzle book collection would never have expanded if my mother hadn't been so obstinate that my birthday money needs to be used on myself, and my game collection is currently in the same state where nothing short of "hey Grant, here's a game" or "hey Grant, here's some money, and if you don't buy a game with it, I'll be very sad" will expand it. [Minor edit: my mother is so loath to take my money except when it's necessary that I'm less reluctant to buy my own things. Donations of all kinds are still appreciated.]

Puzzle 611: Room and Reason 41

This puzzle was written for Joe Huber (huber) of BoardGameGeek, who recently won some of my possessions in an auction and paid enough to also have a custom puzzle written for him. Having bought a lot of four copies of my board game Battle of LITS and a lot of all four Game & Watch Gallery games, I can only assume Mr. Huber has an affinity for the number 4 (and who doesn't?). The centerpiece of this puzzle is a 4x4 room with a 4.

Rules of Room and Reason

Puzzle 610: Polyominous 55

This puzzle was written for P. Kellach Waddle (GustavMahler) of BoardGameGeek, who recently won some of my possessions in an auction and paid enough to also have a custom puzzle written for him. Given the eclectic range of his interests (including a major presence in the Austin classical music scene, whose existence I am only now aware of), a single puzzle can't really do him justice; nonetheless, I hope that seeing his initials in this puzzle somehow makes his participation in my auction a little more worthwhile. :)

Rules of Polyominous

Puzzle 609: Tetra Tirma 43

A shout-out to Cy Reb, Jr., who was observant enough to notice that this puzzle was contained in puzzle 608.

There are still a few days left in these auctions I'm holding on BoardGameGeek. You can support my father's medical bills by bidding, and get stuff from it. Of course, if you want less of your money to be eaten by shipping costs and more of it to be eaten by my father's hip replacement, donations are happily accepted.

Rules of Tetra Firma