The solitary confinement puzzles!

["Benedict" <boycat_oh@...>]

Hi, everyone

Congratulations to all the authors for sending Karol copies of 
your games so that everyone can see them and try them out. I 
have sent feedback to everyone - hopefully authors will take time 
to make changes (if they choose to) and send updated versions 
to Karol in the future.

Thanks again to Karol for all her hard work being the contest 
liaison again, and to her and Dave for getting piecepack.org up 
to date.

It was interesting to me to see which entries were puzzles (which 
I personally defined as perfect information games), some of 
which were always solvable, others only solved sometimes.   

The solitaire format certainly encouraged the entry of puzzles, 
plus I know that many people enjoy solving them, so I thought I 
would list them here.

Entries which I considered to be puzzles: Mathrix (the most 
intellectual of them all); Landlocked; Piecegaps; some of the 
rooms in the Epic Funhouse; Brain Burn; Plans of Action; 
Cardinal's Guards; Skyscrapers, Fuji-san; so roughly half of the 
entries. 

As I mentioned in the feedback to many authors, I found that as 
the judging went on I preferred the entries that were games over 
the puzzles. Of the puzzles I found Cardinal's Guards stood out 
for me.  It is complex enough that I didn't even try to fathom the 
optimal 'solution' to reach the highest score for a given setup, so 
I ended up simply playing it more as a game, and had a great 
time doing so.

Interestingly, Plans of Action is another of the games that could 
well be adapted for 2 (and possibly 3 or 4) players.

Phillip