NG 35

New game 35 is now up, as are details for the previous game.


Round 1: N U O I F N N G H

I had NOUN, UNION, wrote down FUNION as a joke, similarly with NOUNING although it's a concept that linguists can relate to, then FUNNING (FUN as a verb: "to act in a joking way", colloquial as expected), and HONING.  It was hard to imagineUNHONING being valid (it isn't), so it was just a question of whether I thought FUNNING was likely to be listed.  I decided to chance it, and that was the right decision.

FUNNING is the only seven, and HONING is the only six.


Round 2: T O S A A S L U T

I had OATS, SLATS, ASSAULT, and rather late in the piece my investigation of OUT- bore fruit with OUTLASTS.

That turns out to be the only eight, and the only other seven is OUTLAST.


Round 3: Target 330 from 25 75 100 2 2 9

I was interested in making this as 325 + 5, but the only obvious 5 was 9 - 2 - 2 which had no tweaking potential.  While messing around with the large-divided-by-small option I saw how to get close, and nearly missed the tweak but then spotted it: 330 = (75/25)*(100 + 9 + 2/2).  Then I realised that 9 - 2*2 was another way to get to 5 that allowed some tweaking, and found the alternative 330 = 2*(100 + 75 - 2) + 9 - 25.

Just as writing this up I noticed that the use of 100/25 instead might have been simpler than my first approach, giving 330 = (100/25)*(75 + 9 - 2) + 2.


Round 4: N A F U R C E P R

I had FAUN, FURNACE, and PRANCER.

There is one other seven: FARCEUR ("a writer or player of farces").


Round 5: R R D T E E O C D

A final C instead for CORRECTED would have been nice.  As it was, I had ERRED, CORDED, and RECORDED.

The sevens are ORDERED, ERECTOR, and DECODER.


Round 6: Target 951 from 75 4 6 8 1 9

The target is 24 away from 13*75, which seems promising but I was not able to get to work.  Switching tacks to work up from 900, I realised that I could tweak my way there and solved it with 951 = (75 + 6 - 1)*(8 + 4) - 9.  After I had finished, I realised that it might have been simpler to think of my approach as 960 - 9.


Round 7: E I I L K M M W T

This started out not great, but OK, and I was prepared to do something with the -LIKE ending.  Then the rest turned out pretty nasty, and although I noted TWI'LEK I could not find anything longer than LIKE.

The next morning I belatedly thought of LIMIT, but Jan meanwhile had done rather well to find the New Zealand colloquial term of MILKIE for a milkman.

The other six here is KILTIE, colloquial for "someone who wears a kilt, especially a member of a Scottish Highland regiment").  The other fives are KILIM ("a type of Middle Eastern rug or other covering without a pile which is not knotted but tapestry-woven") and KELIM (variant spelling of KILIM).


Round 8: Target 182 from 75 5 1 4 2 3

The target is 2*91, which is also 2*7*13.  I used the first version to get the solution 182 = (4*(5 - 1) + 75)*2, then played around with variations of the factorisation until I found the alternative solution 182 = (75/3 + 1)*(5 + 2).


Round 9: NAME BINGO

I was tempted to use ONE BIG MAN as the mix, but I'm not yet at the point of adopting more than two words to make it.  The -ING fragment was clear but it still took me 3.0s to untangle the rest to get BEMOANING.

(In comments, Victor made a good observation that it feels harder to solve a -ING conundrum when there are four vowels than it does when there are three.  It certainly seems plausible to me.)