puzzles, oh my
Apr. 2nd, 2006 10:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zwolNot so long ago Boing Boing linked to Perplex City, which is a distributed puzzle and collectible card game. They sell cards, each card is a puzzle, and you solve them and enter them on their website, which gets you points in a rather complicated ranking scheme. There's a meta-puzzle going, having to do with the theft of a mysterious MacGuffin called the Receda Cube, and theoretically the more cards you solve the more likely you are to solve the meta-puzzle and win £100,000. In a spirit of inquiry I bought a couple packs of cards at Games of Berkeley when I was visiting the Bay Area last week.
So on the one hand, most of the puzzles are damn cool. They range from simple and classic ("here's a 300mL cup and a 500mL cup, how do you measure out exactly 400mL of water?") to the seriously nasty (the 'Relativity' card requires you to do nontrivial Lorentz contraction calculations and understand the headlight effect). Some of them are annoying, though ("identify the brand name of six cookies, five of which are only sold in the UK"). And the meta-puzzle sounds interesting, and £100,000 is tempting (although I am way behind in that particular race; the game seems to be quite popular already in the UK).
On the other hand, I don't like the collectible card game business model (on principle), and this is a particularly bad example of it: each card has a unique identifier and can only be solved once for points. Thus, cards once solved lose all trading value; in practice, no one will ever trade anything but duplicates. Furthermore, the cards are damn expensive: six for $5 (plus tax), and there are only two locations in the US that sell them (Games of Berkeley, and a store in New York). I could order a "display case" of 216 cards from the UK for about $150 counting shipping and currency conversion, but that's really not much cheaper (70¢ per card versus 83¢).
So I dunno if I'm sticking with the game or not. (Anyone wanna go halvsies on that 216-pack?)
So on the one hand, most of the puzzles are damn cool. They range from simple and classic ("here's a 300mL cup and a 500mL cup, how do you measure out exactly 400mL of water?") to the seriously nasty (the 'Relativity' card requires you to do nontrivial Lorentz contraction calculations and understand the headlight effect). Some of them are annoying, though ("identify the brand name of six cookies, five of which are only sold in the UK"). And the meta-puzzle sounds interesting, and £100,000 is tempting (although I am way behind in that particular race; the game seems to be quite popular already in the UK).
On the other hand, I don't like the collectible card game business model (on principle), and this is a particularly bad example of it: each card has a unique identifier and can only be solved once for points. Thus, cards once solved lose all trading value; in practice, no one will ever trade anything but duplicates. Furthermore, the cards are damn expensive: six for $5 (plus tax), and there are only two locations in the US that sell them (Games of Berkeley, and a store in New York). I could order a "display case" of 216 cards from the UK for about $150 counting shipping and currency conversion, but that's really not much cheaper (70¢ per card versus 83¢).
So I dunno if I'm sticking with the game or not. (Anyone wanna go halvsies on that 216-pack?)
