Own Your Awesome!

Sorry for the long delay in getting this post finished. I had underestimated the impact of an absurd amount of (domestic) travel on my getting things done.


This year’s National Puzzlers’ League convention was in Minneapolis. I planned things so that I stayed on a couple of extra days, enabling me to check off another AAA ballpark - namely, CHS Field, the home of the St. Paul Saints. I'll write about that part of the trip separately, since it will be a bit picture heavy.

The main hotel for the con was the Courtyard by Marriott. However, I reserved too late to get in there so ended up at the overflow hotel, which was the Aloft about a half mile away. It wasn’t a terrible walk, but it wasn’t at all scenic and was remarkably deserted at night. I also found the Aloft substandard as Marriott brands go, largely because of the lack of 24 hour coffee / hot water in the lobby. Lesson learned: I should book the hotel right when registration opens.

Anyway, I flew to MSP on American, which was fine. I took the light rail from the airport to downtown and it was a short, easy walk to the Aloft, though I had a wait before I could check in. Once I did, I walked up to the Courtyard for the con picnic (and to say hello to various people). The picnic was actually an indoor food event, the only thing of which I remember was that there was pizza. I would normally hang out and play games with other NPL people, but I wanted to call into my Book Club meeting so I walked back to the Aloft for the discussion of Long Island by Colm Toibin.

Thursday morning started with getting a breakfast of croissant perdu (i.e. French toast made from a croissant) at Mother Dough Bakery. Then I took the light rail down to the Mall of America, where a group of us were playing The Great Big Game Show. This involved two teams, who competed in a variety of games . For example, we started with having to build the tallest structure out of foam blocks. There were some trivia games, e.g. one called It’s Elementary which was roughly based on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader. I was nervous about representing my team in Drawing in the Dark but, fortunately, I was able to draw a flashlight while blindfolded. Overall, it was fun.

I browsed the mall briefly afterwards and had lunch, before taking the light rail to downtown Minneapolis. I had to get a photo of the Bob Dylan Mural at North 5th Street and Hennepin Ave.



From there, it was a short walk to the Mary Tyler Moore statue.



I returned to the Aloft and rested for a little while before walking over to the Courtyard to meet up with a group for dinner. The Thursday night foodie dinners, organized by Neuromancer, are an NPL con tradition. The group I was with had chosen to go to Mama Safia’s Kitchen, a Somali restaurant. We ordered a bunch of different dishes - basically flatbread and rice with various types of meat (goat, lamb, chicken, beef) and a couple of plates of appetizers (a deep-fried dough called mandazi and sambuza). Everything was very tasty.

The official con program started shortly after we got back to the Courtyard. There were three games on the official program. The first one, Compound Sentences was an ice-breaker in which everyone got a card with a word on it and people had to connect their word with other people’s words to form a sentence. The tricky thing was that some words were a lot harder to use than others. Next up was Jibber Jabble! which was, essentially, a version of a commercial game and was fun to play. The final one, Segues, was a word association game and I have to admit I don’t remember anything specific about it. I know I played some unofficial games until late in the night, but I don’t remember which things I played which nights.

I won’t write in detail about Friday night and Saturday afternoon’s puzzles and games. The most notable thing about Friday night’s official program was that my storytelling friend, Sufian, joined us for the evening. This was a world that was completely new to him, but he seemed to have a good time. And he may have inspired me to work on a story about puzzles. For example, the unforgivable sin in my household when I was growing up was to enter anything into the Sunday New York Times crossword before Mom had given up on finishing it.

I spent part of the day on Friday co-solving con cryptics. I did Slik’s ConCryptic Junction with Nimbus and TMcAy’s Double Play with Needy. Both of those were really enjoyable and I found the latter particularly satisfying because we started out feeling intimidated but, once we got a few answers, things fell into place fairly rapidly. That aha moment is a lot of what I find so satisfying about cryptics.

The Saturday night extravaganza is always a highlight of con. This year’s was called Twin City and was based on the premise that when Romulus founded Rome, Remus founded Reme. Each of those two cities had a suite of puzzles associated with it. There were some particularly fun puzzles among those. One, called Puntheon, was so completely in my wheelhouse that it could have been custom written for me. For example, a dog breed that gets into minor fights at a Catholic service would be a mastiff.

I am also always impressed by the creativity that people put into the games they bring. Silk’s Jeopardy game was high on that scale, with a mixture of trivia questions in unusual categories and various gimmicks involving things like matchbox cars and, well, really you had to play it for yourself to appreciate it. Noam’s Jeopardy game was more normal, but he always has fun categories with interesting trivia. Bonus did a game of Faster, which had been invented by Dart, and has the gimmick that each round has the same answers (with different questions) and decreasing time to get through them. I’m generally useless at Trash by Ember because pop culture is not my forte, but there were a few Broadway-related topics that were involved, which is one of my strong suits.

Of course, the major reason I’ve prioritized the NPL con over other things I could do is the people. I won’t attempt to name names because there are too many to include. I will note that the kindness of NPLers really came to the fore in handling a situation with one person who was having difficulties due to memory issues and how people went out of their way to help him throughout the con.

I’m looking forward to next year in Bloomington, Indiana and 2027 in Philadelphia.