I Heart Touchdown.

[Jimmy Gough]

Appreciation of the new format. The conundrums look pretty damn hard.

Will there ever be a game with all nines?
Will anyone ever get a perfect touchdown conundrum attack?
Will this become the new most funnest game style of all of them?
Who will be the best at it?????

So many unanswered questions.

There sure should be some epic games from it though.

[Jimmy Gough]

[Charlie Reams]

Glad you like it Thanks to Ben and Sid who had most of the good design ideas.

Opinion amongst the few people I've asked seems to be that the restriction on when you can swap should be lifted. How would people feel about that?

[Matt Morrison]

I thought I'd get shot down by Charlie when I suggested that (well, pointed out the possibility, no more than that), but here is my reasoning:

At the moment it only suits elite players. A normal player like me cannot simultaneously do both things which are required:

• find the best word in normal fashion
• work out if one letter change can produce a 9

Which means that in general you either end up playing as normal and missing out on all the nines, or spending your whole time trying to find a nine when there isn't one there and getting a big zero.

Overall though, wicked idea.

[Ben Wilson]

Will there ever be a game with all nines?
Will anyone ever get a perfect touchdown conundrum attack?
Will this become the new most funnest game style of all of them?
Who will be the best at it?????

Shit yeah. First ever practice 9-rounder on msn yielded a metametamax game so I don't see why there won't be a metametamax 15.

Yes, when they perfect cybernetic anagramming implants. Seriously, I was stunned by how hard today's duel was.

Would like to think so. It certainly has potential.

Paul Howe, he's best at every-friggin-thing.

[Craig Beevers]

Was surprised how well I did in the duel, although a lot of them had Q/J type letters so that helps a lot. Just makes it into a regular goatundrum really.

Bots need some serious balancing though, I nearly got beaten by Prune in a letters attack but they were still absolutely useless in the conundrums. All bar 3 rounds of my letters attack had a 9 available, but I was playing to CSW.

[Charlie Reams]

Will there ever be a game with all nines?

Judging by this, the answer is surely "yes, and soon".

[Ben Wilson]

Bots need some serious balancing though, I nearly got beaten by Prune in a letters attack but they were still absolutely useless in the conundrums. All bar 3 rounds of my letters attack had a 9 available, but I was playing to CSW.

Bots have always been stronger in csw than in ode so that may have a lot to do about it.

[Charlie Reams]

Bots need some serious balancing though, I nearly got beaten by Prune in a letters attack but they were still absolutely useless in the conundrums. All bar 3 rounds of my letters attack had a 9 available, but I was playing to CSW.

Bots have always been stronger in csw than in ode so that may have a lot to do about it.

Craig's right though, the bots are too good at Touch currently. Will try to tweak this today.

[JimBentley]

Bots need some serious balancing though, I nearly got beaten by Prune in a letters attack but they were still absolutely useless in the conundrums. All bar 3 rounds of my letters attack had a 9 available, but I was playing to CSW.

Craig's right though, the bots are too good at Touch currently. Will try to tweak this today.

First, Touchdown is amazing. I'm crap at it, but will definitely perservere; it's not as brutally testing as Goatdown but is still a level on from standard games, it's a nice sort of semi-compromise, if that makes any sense.

Balancing the bots will be quite difficult, though - in the first round of my first game there were 64 nines available (I impressively managed to ignore them all so that I could go for ERECTION) and from a quick look at other games, that sort of thing isn't rare. So, best of luck with that, Charlie!

[Kai Laddiman]

in the first round of my first game there were 64 nines available

Afraid to say I think these guys win here.

[Paul Howe]

I heartily approve

[Paul Howe]

Instead of imposing restrictions on the letters you can swap, it might help to make the letters distribution more severe as there are too many rounds (IMO) with a boatload of 9s.

It's good fun though, and you get to see a boatload of interesting words.

Word of the day: boatload

[Andrew Feist]

Glad you like it Thanks to Ben and Sid who had most of the good design ideas.

Opinion amongst the few people I've asked seems to be that the restriction on when you can swap should be lifted. How would people feel about that?

It's totally my fault for not doing a diff on the help files every night, but I didn't see any notice that this had happened.

[Neil Zussman]

How does the programming on touchundrums work? Does it choose a random letter to replace with a random other letter (ensuring uniqueness of solution) or are there pre-programmed settings? I ask because I have had 2 conundrums where the answer has had only one vowel, and both times the vowel ws the changed letter. Fluke or not? (For the purposes of my question, if something has a one in 81 chance of happening and it happens, it's a fluke)

[Charlie Reams]

How does the programming on touchundrums work? Does it choose a random letter to replace with a random other letter (ensuring uniqueness of solution) or are there pre-programmed settings? I ask because I have had 2 conundrums where the answer has had only one vowel, and both times the vowel ws the changed letter. Fluke or not? (For the purposes of my question, if something has a one in 81 chance of happening and it happens, it's a fluke)

Yes, it picks a random letter and a random replacement. What happened to you is not a 1/81 shot for reasons I'll leave Kirk to explain.

[Neil Zussman]

How does the programming on touchundrums work? Does it choose a random letter to replace with a random other letter (ensuring uniqueness of solution) or are there pre-programmed settings? I ask because I have had 2 conundrums where the answer has had only one vowel, and both times the vowel ws the changed letter. Fluke or not? (For the purposes of my question, if something has a one in 81 chance of happening and it happens, it's a fluke)

Yes, it picks a random letter and a random replacement. What happened to you is not a 1/81 shot for reasons I'll leave Kirk to explain.

Yeah, it's definitely not 1/81 is it? Combinatorics is one of my favourite parts of maths, too. For my own sake, more than anybody else:
There's a 1 in 9 chance of the vowel being picked, and a 21/25 chance of it being changed to a consonant (roughly- some of the possible choices may not give a unique solution, but with so few vowels, let's assume it's negligible). Thus there's a 7/75 chance of it happening once, and a 49/5625 of it happening twice, which is 0.0087111...
I wouldn't be surprised if I've made another stupid error though.

[Kai Laddiman]

How does the programming on touchundrums work? Does it choose a random letter to replace with a random other letter (ensuring uniqueness of solution) or are there pre-programmed settings? I ask because I have had 2 conundrums where the answer has had only one vowel, and both times the vowel ws the changed letter. Fluke or not? (For the purposes of my question, if something has a one in 81 chance of happening and it happens, it's a fluke)

Yes, it picks a random letter and a random replacement. What happened to you is not a 1/81 shot for reasons I'll leave Kirk to explain.

Yeah, it's definitely not 1/81 is it? Combinatorics is one of my favourite parts of maths, too. For my own sake, more than anybody else:
There's a 1 in 9 chance of the vowel being picked, and a 21/25 chance of it being changed to a consonant (roughly- some of the possible choices may not give a unique solution, but with so few vowels, let's assume it's negligible). Thus there's a 7/75 chance of it happening once, and a 49/5625 of it happening twice, which is 0.0087111...
I wouldn't be surprised if I've made another stupid error though.

So it should have happened 21 times (as of now), so the chances of you getting 2 are like 1/123.