NPL Con (Motreal)
Aug. 16th, 2023 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fauxkloreThis years National Puzzlers’ League convention was in Montreal in mid-July. In accordance with NPL practice, I will prefer to people by their noms instead of their real names.
I flew up on Wednesday. Air Canada was mildly annoying because they sent me four reminders to check in on-line after their system wouldn’t let me do that. It turned out that I just needed to show them my passport at the airport, which took about 10 seconds. Also, the flight was on a CRJ 900, which is my least favorite airplane, but it’s a short flight, so it was okay. I got through immigration and customs and found the kiosk to buy the bus ticket to get downtown. I didn’t notice that the particular bus I got on terminated at the Lionel-Groulx metro station, instead of continuing all the way to Rue Mansfield. It was easy enough to take the metro three stops to Bonaventure. Getting to the hotel was more complicated. I foolishly followed the Place Bonaventure sign, which did eventually get me to the Hotel Bonaventure, but was less than direct and went through some of the bleakest parts of the underground walkway system.
The hotel was nice, but kind of weird. The entrance is on the 10th floor of a building and, from there, there are a lot of short staircases, e.g. three or four very shallow steps. My room was fine, though the door was a bit sticky and the window had a less than awe-inspiring view. It had a very comfortable bed and lots of hot water, which are the important things.
The first event of con was the happy hour (apparently called a cine-a-sept in the Quebecois dialect). There was a cash bar and heavy hors d’oeuvres. But the point was mingling. I eventually ended up having dinner with a group of people at the hotel restaurant. The food was okay (or, at least, the lentil curry I got was. But the service was glacial.
But the real reason for going to con is puzzles and games. On Wednesday night, I played Cute Mage’s game “Ms. Puzzles Stabs the Consequences Button.” This involved guessing the most common wrong answer (and avoiding the right answer) to a number of multiple-choice trivia questions, which triggered a series of mini games, which could result in certain players becoming ghosts. For example, as a result of one of those, I couldn’t choose answer B through the rest of the game. The whole thing was very entertaining and well worth staying up for.
On Thursday, Eddy led several of us on a walking tour of the Mile End and Outremont neighborhoods. I’d describe this as the Montreal equivalent of Brooklyn and you may interpret that however you please. The main reason for going there in my opinion was following in the footsteps of the web series Yid Life Crisis. Many of us ate at Wilensky’s, where you can get a special (a salami and bologna sandwich on a toasted roll.) The most famous Montreal food is, of course, their version of a bagel and we went to both Fairmount and St-Viateur along the way. I preferred the former, largely because they had a lot of roasted sesame seed flavor. (But I still prefer real, i.e. New York, bagels. And bialies are even better.) There were also a couple of bakeries and a place that sold gnocchi and an ice cream place, though I only tasted a couple of flavors at the latter because we were going to stop at a sorbet place at the end of the route. However, we’d eaten enough by that point, however, that we skipped that stop. There were also several bookstores along the way, but those are goo dangerous for me to go into. Anyway, it was a mostly pleasant walk, despite some weather (a downpour early on, heat later).
Back at the hotel, I took a nap. And got awakened by a tornado alert on my phone. I had also signed up for a group to go out to dinner and managed to miss that. Several of us tried to go to a nearby food court, but were thwarted by flooding. I ended up walking over to a different food court (in the train station), where I got a tasty banh mi sandwich.
The official program started Thursday night. True / False Wordplay by Willz was fairly amusing, though he made a few mistakes. Stock Footage by Spelvin involved forming words in various categories but the values of the letters kept changing, making it more challenging. Take Two by WXYZ involved making words out of bigrams spread out on the table. There were two teams at each table, which complicated the point system. All of these games were fun. After hours, I played a music and film trivia game by Many Pink Hats (including Canadian content rounds!), Noam's Jeopardy! game (aka Fauxklore demonstrates her extreme confidence in wrong answers) which is always excellent, and Bracketball by Murdoch.
I had one more bit of tourism I needed to do and the weather on Friday morning was nice enough to allow me to take a walk based on having googled Montreal sites associated with Leonard Cohen, aka the Crown Prince of Chronic Depression. The highlight of that was this mural:
When I got back to the hotel, I spent much of the day working on two of the three con cryptic crosswords. I did Becoming Canadian by Elfman with Katze (a new NPL member) and Summer Hockey by McMongol with Sue++. Both were fun and I think our teamwork was good on both of them. I think Nimbus and I started the third con cryptic (O Montreal! by Rasa) on Saturday morning, but got stuck. I won’t explain further, but something about Friday night’s dinner led me to the breakthrough we needed and we finished the puzzle on Saturday before dinner. I will say that I found that puzzle particularly satisfying. I’ve said this before, but I might as well repeat it. The reason I love cryptic crosswords (and many other types of puzzles) is the aha moment, when I catch on to what the constructor was doing.
As for Friday’s official program, Green Team Wins by Squonk and Janders was silly and amusing. Tough Choices by Fraz was a clever trivia game in which you had to choose whether to go for hard or easy questions in each category. (Do not ever doubt me on Broadway musicals. Feel free to doubt me on pretty much anything else, however.) The best of the games that evening, however, was Exquisite Wordle by CuteMage. I will not attempt to explain it, however. Just trust me.
Saturday afternoon’s paper and puzzle competitions were Virtual Trigrams by Bluff (which I came close to finishing) and Time Test by Willz (which I made good progress on but still failed to complete). I skipped doing the flat competition because I needed rest. Or maybe that’s when Nimbus and I were working on Rasa’s cryptic. The downside of writing this over a month after con is that my memory is fuzzier than usual.
The Saturday night extravaganza was shorter than it had been in some previous years and my team finished it fairly efficiently. I liked having an extravaganza that took only a few hours.
I know I played Cazique and Saxifrage’s Jeopardy game some time over the weekend, as well as Dart’s Only Connect game, but I have no idea when I did either of those. As usual, there were a couple of other unofficial program games I’d have liked to have played but didn’t get a chance to. C’est la vie.
Overall, I had a good time. Noam was an excellent con host and things appeared to go pretty smoothly.
I had a reasonably smooth trip home. My flight was delayed about 20 minutes, but I got upgraded, which makes up for a lot. And Montreal is a short trip.
Next year’s con will be in Dallas. And 2025 will be in Minneapolis. If anyone is interested in seeing what the NPL con is like, feel free to ask me for more info. Or just go to con.puzzlers.org
I flew up on Wednesday. Air Canada was mildly annoying because they sent me four reminders to check in on-line after their system wouldn’t let me do that. It turned out that I just needed to show them my passport at the airport, which took about 10 seconds. Also, the flight was on a CRJ 900, which is my least favorite airplane, but it’s a short flight, so it was okay. I got through immigration and customs and found the kiosk to buy the bus ticket to get downtown. I didn’t notice that the particular bus I got on terminated at the Lionel-Groulx metro station, instead of continuing all the way to Rue Mansfield. It was easy enough to take the metro three stops to Bonaventure. Getting to the hotel was more complicated. I foolishly followed the Place Bonaventure sign, which did eventually get me to the Hotel Bonaventure, but was less than direct and went through some of the bleakest parts of the underground walkway system.
The hotel was nice, but kind of weird. The entrance is on the 10th floor of a building and, from there, there are a lot of short staircases, e.g. three or four very shallow steps. My room was fine, though the door was a bit sticky and the window had a less than awe-inspiring view. It had a very comfortable bed and lots of hot water, which are the important things.
The first event of con was the happy hour (apparently called a cine-a-sept in the Quebecois dialect). There was a cash bar and heavy hors d’oeuvres. But the point was mingling. I eventually ended up having dinner with a group of people at the hotel restaurant. The food was okay (or, at least, the lentil curry I got was. But the service was glacial.
But the real reason for going to con is puzzles and games. On Wednesday night, I played Cute Mage’s game “Ms. Puzzles Stabs the Consequences Button.” This involved guessing the most common wrong answer (and avoiding the right answer) to a number of multiple-choice trivia questions, which triggered a series of mini games, which could result in certain players becoming ghosts. For example, as a result of one of those, I couldn’t choose answer B through the rest of the game. The whole thing was very entertaining and well worth staying up for.
On Thursday, Eddy led several of us on a walking tour of the Mile End and Outremont neighborhoods. I’d describe this as the Montreal equivalent of Brooklyn and you may interpret that however you please. The main reason for going there in my opinion was following in the footsteps of the web series Yid Life Crisis. Many of us ate at Wilensky’s, where you can get a special (a salami and bologna sandwich on a toasted roll.) The most famous Montreal food is, of course, their version of a bagel and we went to both Fairmount and St-Viateur along the way. I preferred the former, largely because they had a lot of roasted sesame seed flavor. (But I still prefer real, i.e. New York, bagels. And bialies are even better.) There were also a couple of bakeries and a place that sold gnocchi and an ice cream place, though I only tasted a couple of flavors at the latter because we were going to stop at a sorbet place at the end of the route. However, we’d eaten enough by that point, however, that we skipped that stop. There were also several bookstores along the way, but those are goo dangerous for me to go into. Anyway, it was a mostly pleasant walk, despite some weather (a downpour early on, heat later).
Back at the hotel, I took a nap. And got awakened by a tornado alert on my phone. I had also signed up for a group to go out to dinner and managed to miss that. Several of us tried to go to a nearby food court, but were thwarted by flooding. I ended up walking over to a different food court (in the train station), where I got a tasty banh mi sandwich.
The official program started Thursday night. True / False Wordplay by Willz was fairly amusing, though he made a few mistakes. Stock Footage by Spelvin involved forming words in various categories but the values of the letters kept changing, making it more challenging. Take Two by WXYZ involved making words out of bigrams spread out on the table. There were two teams at each table, which complicated the point system. All of these games were fun. After hours, I played a music and film trivia game by Many Pink Hats (including Canadian content rounds!), Noam's Jeopardy! game (aka Fauxklore demonstrates her extreme confidence in wrong answers) which is always excellent, and Bracketball by Murdoch.
I had one more bit of tourism I needed to do and the weather on Friday morning was nice enough to allow me to take a walk based on having googled Montreal sites associated with Leonard Cohen, aka the Crown Prince of Chronic Depression. The highlight of that was this mural:
When I got back to the hotel, I spent much of the day working on two of the three con cryptic crosswords. I did Becoming Canadian by Elfman with Katze (a new NPL member) and Summer Hockey by McMongol with Sue++. Both were fun and I think our teamwork was good on both of them. I think Nimbus and I started the third con cryptic (O Montreal! by Rasa) on Saturday morning, but got stuck. I won’t explain further, but something about Friday night’s dinner led me to the breakthrough we needed and we finished the puzzle on Saturday before dinner. I will say that I found that puzzle particularly satisfying. I’ve said this before, but I might as well repeat it. The reason I love cryptic crosswords (and many other types of puzzles) is the aha moment, when I catch on to what the constructor was doing.
As for Friday’s official program, Green Team Wins by Squonk and Janders was silly and amusing. Tough Choices by Fraz was a clever trivia game in which you had to choose whether to go for hard or easy questions in each category. (Do not ever doubt me on Broadway musicals. Feel free to doubt me on pretty much anything else, however.) The best of the games that evening, however, was Exquisite Wordle by CuteMage. I will not attempt to explain it, however. Just trust me.
Saturday afternoon’s paper and puzzle competitions were Virtual Trigrams by Bluff (which I came close to finishing) and Time Test by Willz (which I made good progress on but still failed to complete). I skipped doing the flat competition because I needed rest. Or maybe that’s when Nimbus and I were working on Rasa’s cryptic. The downside of writing this over a month after con is that my memory is fuzzier than usual.
The Saturday night extravaganza was shorter than it had been in some previous years and my team finished it fairly efficiently. I liked having an extravaganza that took only a few hours.
I know I played Cazique and Saxifrage’s Jeopardy game some time over the weekend, as well as Dart’s Only Connect game, but I have no idea when I did either of those. As usual, there were a couple of other unofficial program games I’d have liked to have played but didn’t get a chance to. C’est la vie.
Overall, I had a good time. Noam was an excellent con host and things appeared to go pretty smoothly.
I had a reasonably smooth trip home. My flight was delayed about 20 minutes, but I got upgraded, which makes up for a lot. And Montreal is a short trip.
Next year’s con will be in Dallas. And 2025 will be in Minneapolis. If anyone is interested in seeing what the NPL con is like, feel free to ask me for more info. Or just go to con.puzzlers.org
no subject
Date: 2023-08-17 11:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-17 11:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-17 06:03 pm (UTC)That is some event! Very cerebral way to take a vacation. Glad you had fun.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-17 07:57 pm (UTC)