The Daily Worker Placement

Friday, March 29, 2024

Halfway Day Contest Answers and Winner

by | published Thursday, July 8, 2021

Acrostics are beastly puzzles to set–harder in some ways than cryptics because with cryptics you can often finesse your way out of a tight corner but acrostics box you in with letter distribution. I wish I could have made all the clues boardgame-related (or even boardgame-adjacent) but that just wasn’t possible. I also want to credit this year’s game The Initiative with giving me the idea of how to encode the second layer of the riddle in a way that would make it harder to skip to a solution without solving the entire puzzle.

The answers to the clues were as follows:

  • A. Haunt the House (shout out to Kids Table Board Games!)
  • B. Klondike
  • C. Reach
  • D. Vengeance
  • E. Othello
  • F. WhatsApp
  • G. Vendetta
  • H. Hot Potato
  • I. Quedlinburg
  • J. Zeitgeist
  • K. Shelley
  • L. Iota
  • M. Vented
  • N. Hopscotch
  • O. Dew
  • P. Rashly
  • Q. Maze
  • R. Mallets
  • S. Villainous
  • T. Islet
  • U. Nucleus
  • V. Nyet
  • W. Reef
  • X. Ruefully

Entering all those letters into the grid resulted in the following message:

Once you’ve answered all the questions take the initial letters of the answers, reflect them using the atbash cipher and you’ll have the ultimate clue you’ll need to solve the puzzle. Good luck and happy solving!

The initial letters of the answers were “hkrvowvhqzsivhdrmmvinnrr”, which when decoded and parsed spelled out “Spiel Des Jahres Winner MMII”. Thus the answer to the contest was Bill Payne’s 2002 SdJ winner Villa Paletti–still in print and still fun!

We had twelve correct entries–the first arriving a mere two hours after the puzzle went live!–and using my online random number generator our winner is Matt H, from Whitby, ON. He’ll be receiving a copy of dV Giochi’s Deckscape: Mystery of Eldorado. Congrats to our other correct entrants, and never fear, I’m already thinking of ideas for the Non-Denominational Holiday contest in December!

Author

  • David W.

    David is the Managing Editor of the DWP. He learned chess at the age of five and has been playing tabletop games ever since. His collection currently consists of about 600 games, which take up way too much space. His game "Odd Lots" won the inaugural TABS Game Design Contest in 2008. He is currently Managing Editor of The Daily Worker Placement. All in all he's pretty smug about his knowledge of games and game design.

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