Go West, Young Puzzler

There’s an old Calvin and Hobbes strip that summarizes childhood thusly: Calvin walks in and says to his dad, “Just so you know, I am the Downhill Tumble and Roll Champ, King of the Toad Finders, Captain of the High Altitude Tree Branch Vista Club, Second Place Finisher in the ‘Round-the-Yard Backward Dash, Premier Burper State Division, Sodbuster and Worm Scout First Order, and Generalissimo of the Mud and Mayhem Society.” When his father says, “Busy day?”, Calvin replies: “About usual. Want to hear what Hobbes is?”

I spent this past week in Seattle, at the annual convention of the National Puzzlers’ League — my one time each year where I get to feel like Calvin, glutting myself not with burping contests but with five glorious days of non-stop trivia and wordplay and cryptic puzzles and hanging out with friends I see far too infrequently. As always, the end of the convention only makes me hungry for the next one to begin. Alas, I’ll have to wait a year for that.

What did I do out there? I stayed up until all hours playing various homemade games. My friend Jeffrey presented his annual Jeopardy! game, which I won for the second year in a row — he is definitely on my trivia wavelength, although perhaps not with his category on Bulgarian Folk Music.

Jeffrey and I were also partners in another NPLer’s wild “Doubles Jeopardy” variant, a game that Alex Trebek would hardly recognize. At one point I had to keep my eyes closed while Jeffrey read a question off an index card; he then had to select a candy bar whose name was the same as the answer. I had to identify this candy bar by feel and by taste, thus finally answering the question. We would have done well in this category if we were the only ones playing. In a game with five others teams, I don’t think I managed to ring in even once. In another category whose answers were all numbers, we had to team up to provide two factors of the answer. In others words: MATH! Jeffrey is a college professor who teaches electrical engineering, and he once appeared on a math-intensive British game show. My ability to add a column of numbers declines precipitously after midnight, which is when we were playing this game. So Jeffrey would ring in quickly for each question, and say a number, which was then followed by me looking blank and panicked. I did get one right, though. It was through sheer, blind guesswork, BUT IT WAS RIGHT. Points on the board!

The “pub trivia” format has also taken root, and I played a couple of fun games of that, too. (Winning both of them, now that I think about it, although this was largely because I was smart enough to get on teams with some very smart people.) NPLers are not content to let trivia be trivia, though, so both games had magnificent, curveball-like, puzzling finales that were a lot of fun. My big moment: Coming up with a live-action Disney movie whose title contains the consecutive letters NOM.

It wasn’t all trivia. A group of us hit the Frank Gehry-designed Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum, two museums for the price of one. The latter was pretty much a hodgepodge of science fiction artifacts — replicas of phasers and spacesuits and androids. Enjoyable, but not very exciting unless you are a True Believer. The music side was much better, with interactive Make Some Music displays and a showstopping history of the electric guitar. I was less bowled over by a special display of the costumes of The Supremes, but all of my friends seemed pretty wowed by this, so let’s count that as a plus, too. And throughout both museums, we solved our way through a little puzzle hunt laid out for us. Because nothing improves a museum like solving puzzles along the way.

There were handouts galore in the form of puzzles from various members. One of my nicer memories of the con was co-solving a tough little anagramming puzzle with several others in a crumpet shop near the Pike Street Market. I presented a crossword variant myself; at the last minute, this was promoted to an official con event, where it seemed to go over pretty well. You’ll be seeing that puzzle in the New York Times a few Sundays from now.

Ken Jennings, famed Jeopardy champion, lives in Seattle, and he came and gave an amiable and funny after-dinner talk. I don’t normally walk up to celebrities and introduce myself, but I figured this time I had an in: Ken blurbed my first book. But, no, my name did nothing more than ring a distant bell, if that, so after sixty seconds of awkwardness I slunk away. Whoops.

Ken stuck around to participate in the con’s main event: An hours-long team-solving “extravaganza” of interlinked puzzles, put together by some of the best and most creative constructors in the organization. Happily, I landed on an excellent team: We worked extremely well together, filling in gaps in each others’ knowledge, assisting each other through the more complicated parts of the event. Usually the Saturday-night extravaganza puts an emphasis on speed, but this time the constructors implemented a points system that forced teams to consider things strategically (and hope for a little dash of luck). I liked this idea, though I suppose I would: My team, while placing 13th overall on speed, wound up as one of the five winning teams because we played the game correctly, if not quickly. I wonder if future extravaganzas could be set up to reward speed on the one hand and strategy on the other, thus pleasing everybody. Not quite sure how that would be done, but I’m pretty sure one genius or another in the NPL could figure it out.

Shortly before the con began, a member of the NPL sent an e-mail to the mailing list, detailing his experience at AnthroCon, a convention for people who like to anthropomorphize animals. I would have guessed this to be a pretty niche group, but it turns out that over 5,000 people attended this event, dressing up in animal costumes and attending discussions on books where the animal is the star of the show. And I thought: 5,000 people for that and only 200 at a puzzle convention? Something is very wrong here.

But right after the con ended, people who didn’t have to run to the airport were all hanging around, and a very silly game was initiated. In “Exquisite Fruit,” players are given an answer that they must clue… but each person can only write down two words of that clue. The paper is then folded, and passed on to the next person, who adds a couple of words without seeing how the clue began, and who then folds the paper again before passing it on to the next person, and so on. And this is how you get clues like “Machine that writes on keyboard that is QWERTY and old machine of keyboard that is writing machine.” And from this, someone has to get the word “typewriter.”

I didn’t play, but sat across the room and watched. Hardly anyone sleeps at the con, so everyone was quite drunk on a combination of adrenaline and exhaustion: It didn’t take much to get these folks laughing hysterically. There were thirty or so people playing at a couple of different tables, and I thought, I know the names (well, the noms, since every NPLer uses a nom de plume) of every one of those people. What’s more, I like every one of those people, and the vast majority of the other people who were here this weekend. Maybe everybody eventually gravitates to the group they were meant to be a part of — birds of a feather and all that — but at that moment I felt extraordinarily lucky that I had found the National Puzzlers’ League, and had become one of the mere 200 people who attend these conventions. I would love it if the kind of puzzles we do attracted a larger audience… but it’s hard to imagine that these conventions would be as special as they are if they attracted 5,000 people. They are just right, right now, and I am already looking forward to taking my family to Providence, RI, in 2011.