Escape Room Highlight: Hard to choose. I really liked the two rooms I did with my friend Alison at Puzzah! in Denver, CO. That would be “M.A.S.K.” and “Kazam!” if you’re in that neighborhood and looking for recommendations. Ultimately I would play nearly every Puzzah! room, but those would remain my favorites.
Puzzah!’s rooms are designed to be easy to run and easy to reset, which means that while the puzzles are often engaging and sometimes superb, overall the rooms feel a little stripped down. Not so at Rabbit Hole in nearby Louisville, CO, whose two rooms, “Paradox” and “Mystic Temple,” are lavish in their production values, with great puzzles and more than a few “Wow!” moments. “Mystic Temple” in particular has one of the grandest finales I have ever seen in an escape room. I don’t want to be too spoilery, but I will say that “easy to reset” was definitely not one of the company’s considerations when they designed this room.
The local escape room companies were pretty darn happy that a convention of puzzlers had come to town. I myself did six escape rooms, three of them within a couple of hours of my plane landing on the ground. Some of my friends did twice as many, if not more.
One group of NPLers set the record for the fastest escape at, I think, Paradox — a record that stood for perhaps 45 minutes before it was broken by the next group of NPLers. We are, as a whole, pretty good at escape rooms.
Theatrical Highlight: NPL conventions don’t generally have a Theatrical Highlight, but then at no previous NPL convention did I get to experience an event like “The Last Defender.”
I suppose “The Last Defender” would not have been out of place listed among the Escape Room Highlights, since it has many recognizable escape room elements — notably, a countdown timer and a whole lotta puzzles. But “Defender” has grander ambitions. For a start, the event is designed to be played by sixteen people, far more than your average escape room. For another, the first thing that happens is those sixteen people are assigned codenames… and bright orange jumpsuits, which are worn throughout the event. (Until they start getting too hot, at which point certain participants might start to shed them.)
Thus costumed, the sixteen players transform into a team working in missile defense in the middle of the Cold War, circa 1983. The Defenders’ headquarters is filled with machinery, much of which bears striking resemblance to early 80s arcade games. (The soundtrack to the first part of the evening is tinkling 8-bit arcade music.) The sixteen players, broken up into an assortment of subcommittees (Intelligence, Technology, etc.) get to work maintaining our country’s stockpile of nuclear missiles and keeping tabs on the Russkies, who may or may not be about to attack.
“Defender” takes place in a sprawling complex of rooms, and ultimately you and your team will need to explore every inch in your quest to avert a nuclear war. With a glorious and wide-ranging assortment of puzzles by Sandor Weisz, there is plenty to do for every one of the team’s sixteen people. (I can hardly imagine achieving victory with less.) The sly and funny satire of rah-rah patriotism in the face of nuclear madness is a bonus.
“The Last Defender” has been extended to September 8. I cannot recommend it highly enough, particularly if you and your friends can buy out the house and defend America as a team. And here’s hoping that large-scale hybrids of theater and puzzles spread to other cities.
Cryptic Highlight: A few years ago the greatly admired puzzle constructor Patrick Berry created a cryptic crossword called “Middle of the Road” that blew solvers’ brains clean out of their skulls. It was the most astonishing construction many of us had ever seen, and it led to a discussion about other cryptics that belonged on the list of Best Cryptics Ever. High on that list was a puzzle by Mark Gottlieb called Color Ado, created for the National Puzzlers’ League’s convention in Denver in 2008. Now that the NPL was back in the neighborhood, it was apparently time for a sequel, and sure enough, Mark came armed with Color Ado 2. You knew before you even glanced at the instructions that you were in for something special: The puzzle’s grid had been printed on a transparency, and solvers supplied with Sharpies of various colors with which to write the answers. Once again, I don’t want to spoil things in case you have the opportunity (somehow) to solve this puzzle, but the payoff is amazing, and reaching the finish line with the help of Jackie, my co-solver, was a pleasure.
Patrick Berry had a cryptic at this convention, too. It was pretty great. No surprise there. Check back: I should be able to provide a link to that one eventually. (Update: Here it is!)
Late-Night Highlight: There’s an official program of puzzles and games at the National Puzzlers’ League convention, and these are always fun — particularly, this year, an interesting trivia variant by Trip Payne and a great wordplay game by Todd McClary. But after the official events are over, nobody goes to sleep. Instead, people break out their home-brewed puzzles and game shows: A half-dozen different Jeopardy! games, often with zany variations; verbal escape rooms a la “Escape This Podcast“; a puzzle game that needed to be solved blindfolded. My favorite unofficial games of the week included “Overtime” by Darren Rigby, in which you and your team work together to solve six different and utterly diabolical puzzle games in ten minutes or less. (We didn’t come close to succeeding at this, but it sure was fun trying.) There was also “The Hardcover Hoodlum,” from Sandor Weisz of “The Last Defender” fame, in which teams had to figure out a wide variety of puzzles using the same set of cleverly designed book covers. And I was delighted and somewhat surprised to hold my own in a pop-culture themed Quiz Bowl presented by Eric Berman.
Highlight of Highlights: The most anticipated official event at any convention of the National Puzzlers’ League is the Saturday-night “extravaganza,” in which teams of solvers race to be the first to complete a suite of varied puzzles. Usually we’re talking about fifteen, maybe twenty puzzles. This year, the constructing team of Rick Rubinstein, Joshua Kosman, and Greg Pliska gave us no less than 40 quick-but-wonderful puzzles. There’s a danger, with such a quantity of puzzles, that solving will become a blur, but many of these puzzles were too special to get lost in a crowd: Among these, there was a “drunken cryptic crossword;” a hilarious puzzle in which every word of a song’s lyrics had been replaced by a rhyme; and an amazing little crossword themed to the Three Little Pigs that had so much going on in the constraints of a 9×9 grid that I had to stop for a little while to stare in wonder. Solving the full suite on a team that included my friends Nancy Coughlin and Patrick Berry was a magnificent way to close out a grand week.
Highlight I Didn’t Get To Actually See: At last year’s convention in Milwaukee, I was given one of the greatest honors of my life: The Maso Award, named for a member of the National Puzzlers’ League who was taken from us far too soon and given each year to an NPLer who “demonstrates the true spirit of the NPL convention.” As such, I was invited to take part in the discussion of who should receive this year’s award. I was excited to be a part of that, but then it turned out that no discussion was necessary: The same person was at the top of everybody’s list. Todd McClary has provided an uncountable number of puzzles and games to the con over the years, and many of these have achieved legendary status. (He once received a standing ovation in the middle of explaining a game’s instructions, because the game’s special twist was just that good.) Add to that his much-needed, much-valued involvement in compiling the events for each year’s convention, and his kind, friendly nature, and honestly, nobody else really comes close.
I was asked if I wanted to announce this year’s Maso Award winner, at the Sunday morning awards ceremony. Of course I would have been delighted to do so, but alas, by that time it was required that I should be on a plane, flying home. Still, I’m delighted to have played even a small role in seeing Todd get the honor he most certainly deserves.
Post-Con Highlights: Sleeping in my own bed. Writing this report. And most of all, anticipating next year’s convention in Toronto, Canada.
