Three across and four down, oh my
National Puzzlers’ League convention coming to ‘Recouvery’ where participants will try to unravel enigmas inside of conundrums
There’s ComicCon, BronyCon, MerCon and CatCon, so riddle me this. Why can’t there be a PuzCon?
Turns out there is — we’ll get to why it’s not really called that in a moment — and it’s being held July 9 to 12 right here in Vancouver by the National Puzzlers’ League, so you can expect the streets to be overtaken in short order by all manner of intensely focused brainiacs doing crosswords in ink, solving cryptics over cappuccinos, trading trivia secrets, plotting strategy games and finishing Sudoku in less time than it took to write this sentence.
Puzzlers take their hobby seriously, as you might imagine, which may be why the NPL has been around longer than the senior citizen that is Scrabble.
In fact, history has it that the league was founded as a nonprofit on July 4, 1883 by 28 young (mostly male) word puzzlers who gathered in New York to celebrate puzzling under the banner of the Eastern Puzzlers’ League (it was renamed NPL in 1920), which they did by paying a penny each to walk across the new Brooklyn Bridge.
The early 1900s was a golden age for puzzling, a cerebral pursuit that dates back to ancient times, but interest fizzled out until the mid-1970s, when lawyer-to-be and diploma-carrying enigmatologist Will Shortz reintroduced the tradition of an annual NPL convention.
Today, the 600-plus international members of NPL (about two dozen are Canadians) are not only active conventioneers and puzzle enthusiasts, but subscribe to NPL magazine Enigma and spend their considerable math and language acumen creating their own puzzles.
The 2015 NPL convention, being held at the Coast Plaza Hotel in the West End, has attracted 175 registrants (nonmembers are welcome) who will spend four days engaged in formal and informal activities including a hospitality suite where members will offer their own puzzles for others to solve. There will be trivia and strategy games, cryptics and crosswords and, yes, maybe even Scrabble.
Saturday afternoon is reserved for participants in the Flat Competition, which involves a very uncrossword-like puzzle that is delivered in verse form with placeholders for the answer words.
Also on Saturday is The Extravaganza, whereby puzzles of all different types are presented to teams that must solve the answer to each puzzle — answers which form a metapuzzle that, once cracked, reveals the final answer.
Yes, fellow non-puzzlers, the brain does ache.
And if you think William Shatner sets hearts aflutter at a Star Trek convention, then you should know that 62-year-old Shortz, who has been the editor of The New York Times crossword puzzle since 1993 and is host of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, is not only a major star in the puzzle universe and NPL’s official historian, but is also MC of the Vancouver convention.
By the way, the convention nomenclature isn’t anything as pedestrian as PuzCon, but instead incorporates the name of the city where it’s held. In Vancouver in 2002, it was ConCouver. This time, it’s Recouvery.
That way, says Vancouver NPL member and convention co-host Jonathan Berkowitz, cheeky attendees can say they spent their summer in Recouvery. And in case you still don’t get it, he will be presenting a little session at the convention on why the letter “u” is important in the word world.
Berkowitz is 58, a statistician and University of B.C. Sauder School of Business professor, but puzzling is his passion.
He’s one of those kids who never outgrew the puzzle books of youth, but instead graduated to crosswords and then to cryptics, his puzzle of choice today, and not only does he solve them but he constructs them.
Berkowitz became so adept at trivia as a young man that he appeared years ago on Canadian game shows such as Definition (with celebrity partner Howie Mandel), Reach For the Top and Headline Hunters.
Berkowitz is the first to admit that puzzlers are an intense, dedicated and perhaps misunderstood breed.
And even though he can’t read a sign without trying to turn the letters into different words, he insists “I am not an addict. I can control it.”
NPLers like playing around with words so much that most have a nom de plume, rather like their own personal puzzle nickname.
Shortz, for instance, goes by WILLz (get it, a short Z), while Berkowitz is known as Witz (which has all kinds of layered meaning, but also translates to joke in German).
And when you ask him why the norms de plume, why the obsession that apparently isn’t an addiction and why a convention, because the whole thing is all rather puzzling to those of us who are mostly clueless, Witz is quick with the answer.
“It’s important to be able to spend a few days a year with people from your own planet.”