Saturday, April 03, 2010

Things That Don't Work for Puzzle 4 of Ring 9 of The Puzzle Boat

  1. Trying to make each occurrence of each number be the same letter.
  2. Trying to take all the letters that a number "stands for" and making words out of them.
  3. Taking the dart scores mod 26 to get a letter of the alphabet.
  4. Taking the dart scores mod the number of letters in the answer to index into the answer words.
  5. Taking the first numbers of the dart scores as an index into the answer words.
  6. Trying to use the dart scores in a real game of 301.
  7. Using the values from the dartboard as cryptogram replacements for the letters they represent (e.g., in word 1, E=19, so change E to R (letter 19)). I was so proud of myself for seeing this possibility, until I did it and got REAREAR AOOAEO SASAG etc.
  8. Same as 7 above, except just looking at the crostic.
  9. Using the binary form of the scores to see which letters in the answers are "on".
  10. Using the values in the dartboard to move forward that many letters (e.g., in word 1, E=19, so move E forward 19 spaces to X).
  11. Trying to find patterns in the letter patterns themselves. (It's possible this may still work, if I didn't get the right mechanism for getting a pattern out of the patterns.) (I think I'm more confused now after typing that sentence.)
  12. Trying to do something with the highest numbers (whether as a end-acrostic, or an ordering, or 1=A).
A nice round dozen ideas, all of which gain nothing. Either I hit my peak about two months ago and will never solve a puzzle again, or these traitors are tough. (A desperation Google search showed that the answers for these puzzles are actually out there on the internet. So far I have been good and not looked. I have a little bit of willpower, so here's hoping it stays that way.)