It's been about a year and a half since I posted here. I've been gaming more recently, including attending the World Boardgaming Championships in Lancaster, PA in the first week of August. I've learned plenty of new games and definitely want to post some reviews, but first I think I need to post the solution (or as much as I remember) to Ludiquest 2.
It's probably easiest to go through it line by line (I've added the hints where relevant):
'With Roman count "as 102"' and "Where does c = 100?", "Where does 1000001 = 65 = A?" - Obviously, in roman numberals 102 would be CII. Which would make the part in quotes read "asCII". ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and is common knowledge to anyone who programs.
"You'll read the writing on the wall" - Nothing exciting here...just continuing the sentence to mention that ASCII is how you'll read what I've written. What is written, of course, is
57 76 57 48 57 55 57 57 57 56
If you plug these numbers into a standard ASCII table, they translate to:
9 L 9 0 9 7 9 9 8
"But you will need to change your view", "When does pi = 180?" - The characters don't make much sense as they are. To change your view, turn them upside down. Regarding the hint, in geometry 2 Pi Radians is equal to 360 degrees of a circle. Pi radians would be half a circle, telling you to turn what you have 180 degrees.
If you do so, they will read (roughly):
8 6 6 L 6 0 6 6 7 6
Now, they are beginning to look a little more familiar.
"Before you make the proper call" - Call this number on the phone. This hint reads "where does L = 5?". On a phone keypad is the answer. If you called 866 560-6676, you would get a voicemail which would give you the next hint. I turned off the phone number about a month or two after my last post. I have no idea who might answer now.
I know that at least two people made it this far, since I saw their numbers on the phone statement. There were multiple calls from each - I assume so they could hear the whole message and write down the numbers. However, no one solved the final one-word answer.
The voicemail clue had another little rhyme about "keys" and I read off a long list of numbers with occasional slightly longer pauses. If you were paying attention to the numbers, you definitely would have noticed that they tended to fall into the same range as the numbers from the original post, and were indeed ASCII. The longer pauses were intended to be line breaks. If you translated these using an ASCII table, you would get the following:
1 4 7 * 0 #
1 4 7 * 0 # 9 6 3
1 4 7 * 2 6 9 0
2 5 8 0 1 2 3 * 0 #
3 2 1 4 7 * 0 #
What does this mean? I'm not going to tell you. I'll leave it as a modest challenge for the reader. The answer is only one word and you have one clue remaining: "The last word will be found by location, not by sound" - really more of a warning not to go down the wrong path.
I have no idea if anyone is reading, but my next post will be a game review (and will be within 2 weeks).
- Happy gaming
Thursday, September 3
Wednesday, March 26
Ludiquest 2 - Last chance!
I am posting the Ludiquest puzzle one last time. Whoever sends the proper one-word answer to the correct e-mail address will win a new copy of Vegas Showdown or Hollywood Blockbuster (your choice). The puzzle has several steps and you will learn the e-mail address as you progress through the puzzle. I know at least one person has gotten extremely close to solving it. The hints I've previously revealed are included below the puzzle and I've added a new one. If this isn't solved by Saturday, I'll start revealing steps until someone gets it. Good luck!
With Roman count "as 102" You’ll read the writing on the wall, But you will need to change your view Before you make the proper call.
57 76 57 48 57 55 57 57 57 56
Hints:
Where does c = 100?
Where does 1000001 = 65 = A?
When does pi = 180?
Where does L = 5?
The last word will be found by location, not by sound
Quick Update
I'm impatient to retire the the Ludiquest so someone needs to solve it. I'll do one last post of it and try to link it in new places to get some new eyes to look at it and someone to solve it. If that doesn't work, I'll post pieces of the solution until someone gets it. After this, I won't be posting new Ludiquests unless I can figure out some way to structure them so they wrap up more quickly. Instead, I will post a game review every Monday morning, beginning with Fairy Tale this coming Monday.
Games played this week: The Bucket King, Ra, Shogun, Fairy Tale, St. Peterburg, California, Battlelore (x2). Shogun and BattleLore were both new to me and both were pretty good. I will definitely have to try both of them again. Game count is now at 63.
Games played this week: The Bucket King, Ra, Shogun, Fairy Tale, St. Peterburg, California, Battlelore (x2). Shogun and BattleLore were both new to me and both were pretty good. I will definitely have to try both of them again. Game count is now at 63.
Wednesday, March 12
Game's I've played since Saturday, etc.
It's been a furious few days of boardgaming. I've played Aqueduct, Nottingham (x2), Pit, Fairy Tale (x2), Vegas Showdown, Saga and Tongiaki. This brings me to 55 games for the year.
Inspired by a challenge on Brenda Brathwaite's web site, I was struck by an idea for a card game about assembling adventuring parties and matching their skills to dungeons/quests. Also, yesterday I practically completed a design for a new card-drafting game. When I will have time to develop these, I have no idea.
I did finally complete the newest prototype of Cattle Baron and got the chance to test it. It seemed to be a fair improvement, but I feel like the final few fence placements are anticlimactic since the board is usually too cluttered for them to be useful. I need to experiment with a few possible approaches to fix this.
Inspired by a challenge on Brenda Brathwaite's web site, I was struck by an idea for a card game about assembling adventuring parties and matching their skills to dungeons/quests. Also, yesterday I practically completed a design for a new card-drafting game. When I will have time to develop these, I have no idea.
I did finally complete the newest prototype of Cattle Baron and got the chance to test it. It seemed to be a fair improvement, but I feel like the final few fence placements are anticlimactic since the board is usually too cluttered for them to be useful. I need to experiment with a few possible approaches to fix this.
Thursday, March 6
Oops, has it been a month already?
I’ve been a bad blogger again. It’s been almost a month without a post and that’s no good. Work has been pretty busy, but really it’s just my lack of discipline. I think I’ve put myself in the mindset that I need something “important” enough to write about, but that’s not really the right mentality for a blog. So, I’ve written myself a little list of fun or interesting (hopefully) things that have happened over the last month, and I’ll be making several posts over the next week.
By my count, I’ve only played 10 boardgames since I last posted, so my 2008 game count is woefully behind the pace at 45. I don’t have my list with me, but some of the games I can recall playing recently were California (x3), Starcraft the board game, Mystery of the Abbey, Race for the Galaxy, Ra, and Ticket to Ride.
I now have a fancy video card to go with my new PC and 22” LCD monitor, so I’ve been spending more time on PC games over the last month. I expect to add some PC/video game posts in the future.
Finally, Ludiquest 2 still hasn’t been fully solved and I intend to remedy that in one way or another. I intend to try to get more people to attempt it. If that doesn’t work, I’ll just start revealing how it is solved step by step until someone finds the answer. Still up for grabs is a copy of Vegas Showdown to the winner.
By my count, I’ve only played 10 boardgames since I last posted, so my 2008 game count is woefully behind the pace at 45. I don’t have my list with me, but some of the games I can recall playing recently were California (x3), Starcraft the board game, Mystery of the Abbey, Race for the Galaxy, Ra, and Ticket to Ride.
I now have a fancy video card to go with my new PC and 22” LCD monitor, so I’ve been spending more time on PC games over the last month. I expect to add some PC/video game posts in the future.
Finally, Ludiquest 2 still hasn’t been fully solved and I intend to remedy that in one way or another. I intend to try to get more people to attempt it. If that doesn’t work, I’ll just start revealing how it is solved step by step until someone finds the answer. Still up for grabs is a copy of Vegas Showdown to the winner.
Thursday, February 7
Design: CivDice
Although Cattle Baron is the boardgame design I've made my priority, I have several other game ideas that I hopefully will have time to work on this year. Of these, I am most excited about a design with a working title of CivDice that I came up with around April of last year. I actually went so far as to blog a few entries about it on the Board Game Designer's Forum (where I called it Civilia).
I chose to prioritize Cattle Baron as my goal, because CivDice is much more involved and is going to take a lot of playtesting and tweaking to get right. However, I thought it might be fun to share some of the ideas that make up this design.
After being inspired by this post by Shannon Appelcline on the now-extinct Gone Gaming blog, my goal was to create a boardgame that simulated building a civilization and having your empire compete against those of other players. The primary constraints were that this game would have systems for expanding your empire, advancing your technology, trade, and warfare and be playable in two hours or less. This is a major challenge and I'll be happy if I can even come close.
Not surprisingly, CivDice features lots of dice. I certainly understand that dice have a poor reputation among eurogamers, but I'm hoping I'll be able to use them here without creating a game that rests primarily on luck. I'm of the opinion that by using medium-sized pools of dice, plenty of choices for how to use them and sufficient methods of altering dice rolls, the luck will be cut down to acceptable levels.
Players will roll dice equal to the current population of their civ, and the dice must be spent in order to move, attack, collect resources, or acquire resources, buildings, or advisors. Player's dice will be public knowledge and players will take turns spending them, so the order in which you do things will be important when competing for items.
One of the wrinkles I'm trying to include is to dovetail the dice mechanic neatly into manuevering on the map. The map will be a tiling of equilateral triangles, with cities and units resting at intersecting points. This means that from any location (that is not on the edge of the board), there are six neigboring triangles (some or all of which contain resources) and six adjacent places to move. Of course, there are also six sides on a standard die to make this a perfect way to generate player options.
Other new twists I plan to add involve the technology tree. Other than the default method of eliminating all other players (which will be very difficult in most cases), all victory conditions or means to earn victory points will be acquired through advanced technology upgrades. You won't even know what you need to do to win until you've advanced a bit along the tech tree. I am also planning a simple system for technologies to have general requirements, while not locking players into a set advancement path.
As a side note, I played a few games last night (Fairy Tale, Vegas Showdown, Pillars of the Earth) to bring the game count to 35. Also, I'm planning to make my more durable Cattle Baron prototype this weekend.
I chose to prioritize Cattle Baron as my goal, because CivDice is much more involved and is going to take a lot of playtesting and tweaking to get right. However, I thought it might be fun to share some of the ideas that make up this design.
After being inspired by this post by Shannon Appelcline on the now-extinct Gone Gaming blog, my goal was to create a boardgame that simulated building a civilization and having your empire compete against those of other players. The primary constraints were that this game would have systems for expanding your empire, advancing your technology, trade, and warfare and be playable in two hours or less. This is a major challenge and I'll be happy if I can even come close.
Not surprisingly, CivDice features lots of dice. I certainly understand that dice have a poor reputation among eurogamers, but I'm hoping I'll be able to use them here without creating a game that rests primarily on luck. I'm of the opinion that by using medium-sized pools of dice, plenty of choices for how to use them and sufficient methods of altering dice rolls, the luck will be cut down to acceptable levels.
Players will roll dice equal to the current population of their civ, and the dice must be spent in order to move, attack, collect resources, or acquire resources, buildings, or advisors. Player's dice will be public knowledge and players will take turns spending them, so the order in which you do things will be important when competing for items.
One of the wrinkles I'm trying to include is to dovetail the dice mechanic neatly into manuevering on the map. The map will be a tiling of equilateral triangles, with cities and units resting at intersecting points. This means that from any location (that is not on the edge of the board), there are six neigboring triangles (some or all of which contain resources) and six adjacent places to move. Of course, there are also six sides on a standard die to make this a perfect way to generate player options.
Other new twists I plan to add involve the technology tree. Other than the default method of eliminating all other players (which will be very difficult in most cases), all victory conditions or means to earn victory points will be acquired through advanced technology upgrades. You won't even know what you need to do to win until you've advanced a bit along the tech tree. I am also planning a simple system for technologies to have general requirements, while not locking players into a set advancement path.
As a side note, I played a few games last night (Fairy Tale, Vegas Showdown, Pillars of the Earth) to bring the game count to 35. Also, I'm planning to make my more durable Cattle Baron prototype this weekend.
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