Hi T&B;

The difficult part about creating an enjoyable difficult puzzle is giving people a sense as they go along that they are on the “right track.” In other words, cypher-type 5/5 can be just maddening, because you don’t know if you’re even on the right track until you find the key, at which point it all falls into place.

More difficult to create, but more enjoyable to solve, is a puzzle that lets solvers know that incrementally they are on the right track. And for that, a story would work perfectly and is a great idea. I came across a cache a while back that was pretty much a novel, and I’ll try to find it.

Anyway, another component of a D5 puzzle is one that requires ‘special knowledge.’ This is the basis of the rating behind our D5 music puzzles, as was suggested by the reviewer.

Therefore, could you take your ability in story telling, and somehow marry it to your “special knowledge” in birding? Some sort of treking and birding “adventure” that would involve identifcation of species…including pictures…that sort of thing.

Turn it into a nifty PDF “ebook” type thing, and you’d really have something.

Maybe???

Maybe I’m in the minority, but I don’t think spending a lot of time on a “desk puzzle”, regardless of difficulty, makes a geocache good or bad. There is a certain pride in being able to solve a difficult challenge, but really, I believe that this game should be about spending time outdoors with your family and friends, not spending time by yourself working a sudoku or executing internet searches. That said, some of my favorite “desk puzzle” caches were Cheeering Viper, in the Brookfield area and Lateral Thinking, in the Milwaukee area. Both of these took you through a progression of steps for solving the puzzle, and added quite bit of variety in the solving process. I also greatly appreciate caches where one needs to combine deskwork with multiple trips to the field to gather necessary information. Those really get you involved in the “storyline” of the cache, which is necessary to make the experience memorable. Let’s face it. No one will remember working a crossword a year from now. They will remember a cache which engages those finding it.

@Team Deejay wrote:

Maybe I’m in the minority, but I don’t think spending a lot of time on a “desk puzzle”, regardless of difficulty, makes a geocache good or bad. There is a certain pride in being able to solve a difficult challenge, but really, I believe that this game should be about spending time outdoors with your family and friends, not spending time by yourself working a sudoku or executing internet searches. That said, some of my favorite “desk puzzle” caches were Cheeering Viper, in the Brookfield area and Lateral Thinking, in the Milwaukee area. Both of these took you through a progression of steps for solving the puzzle, and added quite bit of variety in the solving process. I also greatly appreciate caches where one needs to combine deskwork with multiple trips to the field to gather necessary information. Those really get you involved in the “storyline” of the cache, which is necessary to make the experience memorable. Let’s face it. No one will remember working a crossword a year from now. They will remember a cache which engages those finding it.

I agree wholeheartedly! Now I know that people who come to town on a long-distance run can and do get frustrated with puzzles that require filed and desk time, occasionally multiple rounds of each. At the same time, there are so many caches in any one area now that one simply has to accept that you might not be able to log every cache in every town you visit. This is one of the hardest realizations for many long-distance number-grabbing cachers to fathom, though most eventually do.

I also know that many traveling caches who revisit this area after finding a good puzzle or two, can’t wait to come back to try some more because the reward of finding them is just that much more enjoyable and memorable.

That, for me, is my ultimate goal. To make memorable caches. I want people to be able to say, of any of my caches, “Hey, do you remember seldom’s such-and-such cache” and the response to be “Oh, cripes, DO I REMEMBER that one”, nine times out of ten. If they remember my caches a year from now, It’s that much more likely they will come bouncing back for more…

Now, I have a couple 5/5’s and they both earn that rating as anyone who’s completed them can attest to. But, I also have an aversion to “read-my-mind” puzzles that are layered with so many herrings that you just find yourself wasting tons of time better spent in the woods with family than sitting at a desk all night trying to decypher someone’s twisted logic. I try to make sure there is a path to solving but difficulty is always in the eye of the beholder. Take FIN is for Finish, z.b., with the italic clues laced in the description which spells out the equation to get the solve, I would have thought it would be easier than it turned out to be and I hate knowing that some just can’t make the leap even after staring at it for hours. That’s the point where you need to pick up the phone and call me or shoot me a PM.

It seems with your interest in “birding,” that a field component would be a natural part of making this a challenging puzzle.

I am having trouble with the concept of spending 3 hours on a pair of puzzles only to have them be very unrealistically hard to find. I will reserve further judgment until I have found said containers. 😕

@marc_54140 wrote:

My belief is that the puzzle is the Difficulty part of the cache. Finding the container should not be difficult, UNLESS the cache page also addresses that specifically!

Oh man, did you serve that up just for me? How nice of you 😈

So, just to pose a hypothetical here. What if I want to place a bison tube, hidden in dense foliage, on an island, with coordinates that put you in the middle of the water so you have to scour a large radius without knowing if you’re in the right spot or not. Would you consider that “not difficult?”

Ace….

@marc_54140 wrote:

My belief is that the puzzle is the Difficulty part of the cache.