Crossword puzzles
I kind of like solving crossword puzzles, but I'm not very good at it. There's this magazine that does a yearly competition here, though, and it was always kinda a family thing to participate in, ever since I was little. I remember my mom and aunts working together on those puzzles, and when I started to learn how to look up words in books, I helped with the search, too. Back then, it was often a case of "reading the dictionary" to look for words that fit the clues and the letters we had available, but all of this is of course different now that there are sites that allow searching by word structure/available letters.
Either way, when I started actively participating in the competition myself, it was because there used to be a few coded crosswords (as in that thing in which every letter is substituted with a number, and the task is mainly to find out which numbers correspond to which letters) in the competition each year. Mom was never much into those, so we used to get the finished version via one of my aunts instead. Then, one year when I was in my teens, aunt called and was frustrated because she couldn't get started on the coded crossword of that year, and so I decided to have a look at it and see if I could figure it out. As it turned out, I solved it before aunt did in that year, and since then I've been doing the coded crosswords every year, even though I only help out with searching out answers for the more "regular" (find synonyms to clues) kind of puzzle.
So... I just finished the coded crossword for this year's competition. There used to be like three or four such puzzles every year, but nowadays there's only one - everything else for the competition is the regular kind instead.
I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it this year, because I felt like it took me so long to find the first words. Then, of course, once you have the most common letters in place, coded crosswords get progressively easier, because more and more letters are "known" and correct as you go along.
The word I found that finally got me on track to solve the puzzle? KNOCKOUT. (This is actually a very helpful word in this type of puzzle, because the letter C is very uncommon in Norwegian, so if you get it, you can basically "check" that it's logically correct if there are very few other instances of its number in the puzzle. Also, getting vowels in place also helps a lot, and this one gave both O and U.)
Either way, it's done now. There's one more week of the competition left, so we'll see how much of it we'll be able to finish.
Also, before you ask - no, we're not good enough to win anything, but you can get a sort of certificate if you manage to solve the first few rounds - nowadays only two puzzles in each round, but used to be three when I was younger, I think. In the old days, "solving" a round meant having all the words of all the puzzles correct, but nowadays you only need a few specific letters in each puzzle to be correct. Either way, getting the certificate used to be a goal for many years, but the closest we ever got under the old system was getting a letter from the organisers with a "thank you for cleverly solving almost everything correctly, but you had a few misspellings, hence we cannot award a certificate this year". (A couple of the misspellings from that year are still kinda legendary in our family. Let's say, I'll never misspell the Finnish town of LAHTI ever again.) After the system was changed, we got the certificate a few times, but it's not quite as impressive as if we had managed under the stricter rules.
Either way, everyone who gets the certificate then gets sent a set of harder puzzles that need to be solved in a very short time, and then a champion is determined from that. We never truly cared about this part, though. We still try only for the certificate, and we have no hopes or goals beyond that.
Either way, the coded crossword is done... and you got a long story around that.
Either way, when I started actively participating in the competition myself, it was because there used to be a few coded crosswords (as in that thing in which every letter is substituted with a number, and the task is mainly to find out which numbers correspond to which letters) in the competition each year. Mom was never much into those, so we used to get the finished version via one of my aunts instead. Then, one year when I was in my teens, aunt called and was frustrated because she couldn't get started on the coded crossword of that year, and so I decided to have a look at it and see if I could figure it out. As it turned out, I solved it before aunt did in that year, and since then I've been doing the coded crosswords every year, even though I only help out with searching out answers for the more "regular" (find synonyms to clues) kind of puzzle.
So... I just finished the coded crossword for this year's competition. There used to be like three or four such puzzles every year, but nowadays there's only one - everything else for the competition is the regular kind instead.
I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it this year, because I felt like it took me so long to find the first words. Then, of course, once you have the most common letters in place, coded crosswords get progressively easier, because more and more letters are "known" and correct as you go along.
The word I found that finally got me on track to solve the puzzle? KNOCKOUT. (This is actually a very helpful word in this type of puzzle, because the letter C is very uncommon in Norwegian, so if you get it, you can basically "check" that it's logically correct if there are very few other instances of its number in the puzzle. Also, getting vowels in place also helps a lot, and this one gave both O and U.)
Either way, it's done now. There's one more week of the competition left, so we'll see how much of it we'll be able to finish.
Also, before you ask - no, we're not good enough to win anything, but you can get a sort of certificate if you manage to solve the first few rounds - nowadays only two puzzles in each round, but used to be three when I was younger, I think. In the old days, "solving" a round meant having all the words of all the puzzles correct, but nowadays you only need a few specific letters in each puzzle to be correct. Either way, getting the certificate used to be a goal for many years, but the closest we ever got under the old system was getting a letter from the organisers with a "thank you for cleverly solving almost everything correctly, but you had a few misspellings, hence we cannot award a certificate this year". (A couple of the misspellings from that year are still kinda legendary in our family. Let's say, I'll never misspell the Finnish town of LAHTI ever again.) After the system was changed, we got the certificate a few times, but it's not quite as impressive as if we had managed under the stricter rules.
Either way, everyone who gets the certificate then gets sent a set of harder puzzles that need to be solved in a very short time, and then a champion is determined from that. We never truly cared about this part, though. We still try only for the certificate, and we have no hopes or goals beyond that.
Either way, the coded crossword is done... and you got a long story around that.