Jennifer and I arrived into Denver this afternoon for the annual convention of the National Puzzlers’ League. We missed a picnic hosted by Mike Selinker (or at least he provided the entertainment). I don’t know exactly what the entertainment consisted of, but I know that it was based loosely on a game of his, Link 26.
Once we got to the hotel, we saw most of the usual suspects lurking in the hotel lobby or elsewhere in or near the hotel. We wandered into the League’s hospitality suite, and Jennifer played a brilliant game that was designed by Darren Rigby called Lexagon. I’ll let those who have actually played it fill in the fine details, but the short version is that you’re given a set of hexagonal tiles that you sorta play onto the playing area domino style where instead of matching numbers, you have to name a word that matches all of the properties described by all of the tiles that are adjacent to your current play.
The last League-member invention that I saw this evening was a really slick laser-etched tile set for Roy Leban‘s Scrabble-ish game “WIM“.
After all of that, Jennifer and I and several other League members went downstairs to the Inverness Hotel‘s Spotted Dog pub for some food and drink.
[Finally, for any of you NPLers who know what Twitter is (or would like to know what Twitter is), go over to http://twitter.com/puzzlers, and follow it for convention dialog and announcements throughout the weekend. I'll start getting the word out on Thursday.]