Nice Guys Really Do Finish Last (And That’s Okay With Me)
According to one theory, the human attraction to puzzles is a remnant from the days when the very survival of our species depended on keen problem-solving abilities. That may be, but I’m beginning to have my doubts, after the large chunk of yesterday I spent participating in The Haystack, a nine-hour competitive puzzle that uses the island of Manhattan as a playing board.
It was remarkable on several counts. The puzzles were very well made, and the organizers made ingenious use of the city, sending us from Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem to the Columbia campus, Times Square, Battery Park City and finally Chinatown. Even more impressively, no one seems to make any money from it. The Haystack is fun for its own sake—highly organized, extremely taxing fun, for participants and organizers both. There was no admission fee, and the grand prize, the Golden Needle, was made from free parts acquired at a hardware store.
My team, Unafraid, Laser-Honed Belfry Rejecter (I still have no idea how the name was derived, except that anagramming my name is what made us laser-honed), consisted of four longtime members of the National Puzzlers’ League—veteran solvers for whom puzzles are a way of life. Plus me. We were by no means the only team approaching middle age, yet it seemed as if most of the players were, like the organizers, significantly younger (in their 20s and 30s), naturally fun-loving, hip and consistently attractive. On the surface it was a handful of teams competing against each other, but at a deeper level it was us versus the beautiful people.
Beautiful and crafty, I should add. Thanks to an element of the Haystack rules that was lost on our team, the key to winning ultimately had nothing to do with the ability to solve puzzles and had everything to do with strategic thinking. The path to victory was reserved for those solvers who knew which puzzles not to bother with, and, even more importantly, how to make use of Power Plays—sneaky tricks that, at their worst, could be used to force another team to swap its score with you.
Unafraid, Laser-Honed Belfry Rejecter made the fatal error of ignoring these Power Plays and instead plowed into the task of solving as many puzzles as we could. We got off to a terrific start, and after the organizers announced this fact to the other teams, one of them used the information to dump their low score on us and to steal our high point total. At that moment we went from second place to, I’m guessing, last. It knocked the wind out of our sails, about a third of the way through the game, and we never recovered. Some of us took this rather hard, and one of my teammates really let one of the organizers have it. (sorry.)
Then something happened that is very familiar to me. We grabbed the next round of puzzles and starting solving them with gusto, as if we knew there was no way we could compete in this arena—we’re puzzlers, after all, not cutthroat competitors—so why not just enjoy ourselves? I could almost feel our collective blood pressure drop.
Solving puzzles is the most anxiety-reducing activity I know. But is it a vestige of the adaptation from when humans had to eat or be eaten? Given what happened yesterday, I’d be forced to argue just the opposite. It’s what got us eaten. There are people who talk about puzzles as if they were a kind of competition with oneself. Perhaps, but that’s not at all the same as competing against others. The two are opposites, really. Next year, I’ll propose to my teammates that we call ourselves the Ostriches and make a virtue of our tendency to plunge our heads into the sand, even as the Power Players make minced meat of us. I’m told ostrich burgers are quite tasty.
It was remarkable on several counts. The puzzles were very well made, and the organizers made ingenious use of the city, sending us from Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem to the Columbia campus, Times Square, Battery Park City and finally Chinatown. Even more impressively, no one seems to make any money from it. The Haystack is fun for its own sake—highly organized, extremely taxing fun, for participants and organizers both. There was no admission fee, and the grand prize, the Golden Needle, was made from free parts acquired at a hardware store.
My team, Unafraid, Laser-Honed Belfry Rejecter (I still have no idea how the name was derived, except that anagramming my name is what made us laser-honed), consisted of four longtime members of the National Puzzlers’ League—veteran solvers for whom puzzles are a way of life. Plus me. We were by no means the only team approaching middle age, yet it seemed as if most of the players were, like the organizers, significantly younger (in their 20s and 30s), naturally fun-loving, hip and consistently attractive. On the surface it was a handful of teams competing against each other, but at a deeper level it was us versus the beautiful people.
Beautiful and crafty, I should add. Thanks to an element of the Haystack rules that was lost on our team, the key to winning ultimately had nothing to do with the ability to solve puzzles and had everything to do with strategic thinking. The path to victory was reserved for those solvers who knew which puzzles not to bother with, and, even more importantly, how to make use of Power Plays—sneaky tricks that, at their worst, could be used to force another team to swap its score with you.
Unafraid, Laser-Honed Belfry Rejecter made the fatal error of ignoring these Power Plays and instead plowed into the task of solving as many puzzles as we could. We got off to a terrific start, and after the organizers announced this fact to the other teams, one of them used the information to dump their low score on us and to steal our high point total. At that moment we went from second place to, I’m guessing, last. It knocked the wind out of our sails, about a third of the way through the game, and we never recovered. Some of us took this rather hard, and one of my teammates really let one of the organizers have it. (sorry.)
Then something happened that is very familiar to me. We grabbed the next round of puzzles and starting solving them with gusto, as if we knew there was no way we could compete in this arena—we’re puzzlers, after all, not cutthroat competitors—so why not just enjoy ourselves? I could almost feel our collective blood pressure drop.
Solving puzzles is the most anxiety-reducing activity I know. But is it a vestige of the adaptation from when humans had to eat or be eaten? Given what happened yesterday, I’d be forced to argue just the opposite. It’s what got us eaten. There are people who talk about puzzles as if they were a kind of competition with oneself. Perhaps, but that’s not at all the same as competing against others. The two are opposites, really. Next year, I’ll propose to my teammates that we call ourselves the Ostriches and make a virtue of our tendency to plunge our heads into the sand, even as the Power Players make minced meat of us. I’m told ostrich burgers are quite tasty.
posted by DO at 4:59 PM
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