#648 - "Rise and Fall"

[Cindy]

x

[spotter]

Beam me up! Best solving experience to date

[cbarbee002]

I'm absolutely positive I'm on the right track, but just can't find the starting point for the mechanism. :-/

[FrankieHeck]

Beam me up! Best solving experience to date

Many thanks for a fantastic co-solve! Almost looking forward to the next week 5 so we can do that again! Not that it will take a week 5 to stump me

[cbarbee002]

Beam me up! Best solving experience to date

Many thanks for a fantastic co-solve! Almost looking forward to the next week 5 so we can do that again! Not that it will take a week 5 to stump me

Was in your area 2-weeks ago in White Sulphur Springs.

[FrankieHeck]

Beam me up! Best solving experience to date

Many thanks for a fantastic co-solve! Almost looking forward to the next week 5 so we can do that again! Not that it will take a week 5 to stump me

Was in your area 2-weeks ago in White Sulphur Springs.

Nice! Would you believe I've never been there?

[Joe Ross]

[Conrad]

I made a spreadsheet (after my grid became a spaghetti mess).

[tonyrobots]

I am completely in the dark here. Chutes and ladders?

[Conrad]

I am completely in the dark here. Chutes and ladders?

These clues were important:

• 63A BOTTOMLEFT (Starting corner for some board games)

• 93A TEN (Number of even rows and even columns in this grid)

• 1A PARA (Chute lead in)

• 121A STEP (Ladder lead in)

[Joe Ross]

I am completely in the dark here. Chutes and ladders?

ACROSS

1. Chute lead-in - PARA (directly above circled square)

63. Starting corner for some board games - BOTTOM LEFT (Where there is a circled square)

93. Number of even rows and even columns in this grid (intersections of even rows & grids gives 10 x 10 grid, just like Chutes & Ladders)

121. Ladder lead-in - STEP (directly below circled square)

[FrankieHeck]

Spotter and I had the best time working through this on a last-minute Google Meet. He pulled up a spreadsheet and I stuck 100 post-its on my kids' old Chutes and Ladders board. His method ended up working better, lol. We also discovered that one chute started in a different place on my board and on the one he found on Google. (Which then made some comments make sense, so we knew we were on the right track. Still took us a while to land on the right spaces!)

It was so much fun. And as an added bonus, I talked him into re-downloading Pokemon Go.

[Streroto]

Not in a trillion years. This is sooooo amazing. My immense respect to everyone who solved this and especially to anyone who solo solved. Even if someone had nudged me all of those clues I never ever would have gotten this. Week 52!!!!!

[MikeM000]

Also, in the UK isn't it called "Snakes & Ladders"? Nice inclusion of 71 down if so...

This was just an amazing experience to have a week 5 be something that just made perfect and immediate sense, given that I mostly stare blankly at the month-ending puzzles. Board games? 10 rows and 10 columns, starting in the bottom left? This sounds just like Chutes & Ladders!

It likely didn't hurt that Pandora's Blocks did this a couple weeks back with a different game's board. Goes to show the different levels of cognitive function needed for those games - here I ran with it and had it done in 10-15 minutes; on the other one I was all "I 100% believe this is the method and what they're looking for. I'm not spending hours getting the actual answer, so I consider this one solved."

[Bird Lives]

Not me. I quickly got that it was based on Chutes and Ladders, a game I may have played once many years ago. But I would never have gotten to the next step -- converting a 21 x 21 grid to a 10 x 10 board. i wonder how others saw that.

[ok.jb]

Solved!! ...at 12:09 . Would have been my first ever 5/5 month but on the bright side maybe I’ll finally learn a lesson about procrastination?

[DrTom]

To those who did not play hours of Chutes and Ladders (or, nod to my Brit friends, Snakes and Ladders) you were at a distinct disadvantage. I think all of us who have played it recognized the C&L association immediately. One other possible problem is that there are MANY different board layouts and unless you used the actual MB Chutes and Ladders you were going to be in trouble (I think I have found at least 5 different layouts).

I was lucky enough to tumble to C&L immediately (helped by the title and 63A) and then to the mechanism for getting a 10x10 board (93A). I was already patting myself on the back and sending a mental shout out to Joe Ross who continues to drill into my head that I have to really read all the clues and determine if they mean anything else.

I found a copy of the C&L board (thankfully the MB one) copied and then put in the letters from the salvaged rows and columns. Then I started going through "mapping" the "shortcuts" and "pitfalls". Here is what I got:

So I went through the letters (shown on the side and got NOTHING! Literally back to square one (a phrase I found out originated with this game!). How could I be so sure and still not have anything??? So I "phoned a friend" and he told me I was on the right track but a little too used to the metas that preceded this one. I mean I could not get LNAIKC etc to spell anything I knew. When he said that I decided to take only the FIRST letter and bang I got a word LAKERFAN. So if that worked why not the other, but that was harder because I started from the top (why not I was coming down) but I finally did see DOCTORWIFE. Dang, that is an odd PAIR? I mean I had expected Hansel & Gretel or, given the up and down theme of the puzzle, Jack and Jill. Who in the world were the famous pair LAKERFAN AND DOCTORWIFE, so before making a premature annunciation I again went to the oracle of Ross and said "What"? He pointed me to what I had always had and was not astute enough to see. I had been far too horizontally oriented where each letter followed and spelled the answer. If I look top to bottom (or bottom to top) it is easy to see LAKER FAN NICHOLSON and DOCTOR WIFE OF JOE BIDEN, voila my Jack and Jill.

I cannot praise this puzzle enough, it is of topical interest (I mean Jill Biden!) hangs together on every front (title hints at mechanism and answer) and must have taken an INCREDIBLE amount of time to construct. I mean imagine that the creator had to build a 10 x 10 grid that would fit the Chutes and Ladders board and "mappings" and then weave it into a much larger grid using those letters only. To any of us who have created even rudimentary METAs (and I did) the constraints of even one dimension are almost maddening. NEVER play Chris King in three dimensional chess, I guarantee he will kick your butt.

So super enjoyable puzzle and solve (assisted solve of course). It makes it no less sweet though, it was my treat on Halloween, even if it was kind of scary.

[TMart]

Once I realized what game we were playing, it fell into place...sort of. I Googled a Chutes and Ladders board, and then created a 10x10 numbered Excel grid and handwrote the intersecting letters in from the even rows and columns of the grid. I started out at the bottom of the ladders and got LAKERS FAN then (for no good reason) I went to the ladder tops and got NICHOLSON. Wasn’t sure what to do next, so I went to the tops of the chutes and started out with EFIW....and almost left that rabbit hole until I realized it was WIFE backwards. So I kept going from the top and got EFIW ROTCOD at the tops of the chutes. Going along the chute bottoms, I unfortunately misread a square and came up with OF JOE BADEN. Who? Luckily, Google is smarter than I am, so “doctor wife of Joe Baden” brought up the correct result. Even more luckily, the first things I tried on the Chutes and Ladders board spelled some real words.

But then - why Jack Nicholson and Jill Biden? It took me a little while to get the whole "Jack and Jill" connection with the "Rise and Fall" title and Chutes and Ladders. Great meta, but an awful lot of work.

[MikeM000]

Over on The Fiend the constructor mentions that long grid answers YELLOWBILE and WHITESNAKE were meant to direct people to the white/yellow board DrTom posted above....

[DrTom]

Over on The Fiend the constructor mentions that long grid answers YELLOWBILE and WHITESNAKE were meant to direct people to the white/yellow board DrTom posted above....

WOW, this META gets better and better. I had NO idea that was part of it, even told someone who asked that it was not. I guess if you got the YELLOW WHITE already you didn't think of that. To be fair though, if you got the Green and White Snakes and Ladders one, that worked too.

Chris King is SCARY good.