NG 41

New game 41 is up.


Round 1: G D L E I M R E O

I had GELD, GLIDE, GRIMED, MILDER, regretfully rejected LIEGEDOM (which I had misspelled as LEIGEDOM in any case -- not the first time I have made that error -- so fortunately it did not matter), and REMODEL.

The other sevens are GLORIED / GODLIER.  The uncertain ones are MOLDIER and MODELER -- I've spoken about them before; they are both derived forms of variant spellings, so they are of uncertain validity but a case can be made for them.


Round 2: K E C E N A S C E

I had KNEE, SNAKE, and ENCASE.  A tough mix.

Six is the best again; the other six is SEANCE.


Round 3: Target 328 from 50 25 8 6 4 5

For applying the standard method the offset is 3, so keeping 8 and 5 aside simplifies the problem and I soon had a solution of 328 = 6*50 + 25 + 8 - 5.  Then I switched tacks to use the factor of 8 and the solution 328 = (50 - 5 - 4)*8.


Round 4: S O S E L I N H O

I had LOSES, SOILS, LESIONS, and HOLINESS.  I looked for compound words, but -HOLE was not profitable and there's no such thing as LIONSHOES. *chuckles*

HOLINESS is the only eight.  The other sevens are LIONESS / INSOLES (a connection between lions and shoes after all...) / LOONIES, LOOSENS, and ISOHELS (ISOHEL: "a line drawn on a map, etc., connecting places which receive equal amounts of sunshine").


Round 5: R P T A E A G A B

Gah, another tough mix.  If only that E was a U then RUTABAGA would be there... As it was, I had PART, TAPER, APART, and AGATE.  Several other fives, too, but I did not write them down.

There are some sixes, though, the most common probably being RATBAG; I'd looked at -BAG, too, but not noticed this.  The othes are ABATER and PARGET ("gypsum or plaster stone").


Round 6: Target 948 from 75 9 4 3 1 2

The standard method suggests working from 900 or 975, and in the first case that would require 12*75.  Since the offset of 48 is also divisible by 12 that gives a factorisation of 12*79 and must be the most tempting approach.  My first solution was 948 = (9 + 3)*(75 + 4), and the second gratuitously complicated one was 948 = 3*4*(75 + (9 - 1)/2).


Round 7: T H F E A W L O F

I had HEAT, WHAT, WHEAT, FOLATE, and WAFFLE.  I noticed HEATFLOW and HOTWAFFLE, but was confident they would not be valid.

Indeed, six seems to be the limit.  The others are WEALTH, FOETAL, and LOATHE.


Round 8: Target 859 from 25 10 4 7 10 5

I almost got lost trying to work up from 850 on this one; I wrote down a one-away 860 = ((25 - 5)*4 + 7)*10 - 10 as a result of that, but then realised that I could use 875 to do better: 859 = 7*5*25 - 10 - 10 + 4.  Only just in time, but I got there.

There is one other solution, which also makes the target as 855 + 4.  855 has some findable factors of 5 and 9, with the full factorisation being 5*9*19 (and 9 is the square of three, of course).  It can take some fiddling to find the right way to split these up, but doing so successfully would give 859 = (5*10 + 7)*(25 - 10) + 4.


Round 9: FINNS KILT

I think I got to this by pulling out FLINT, and it was a short step to SKINFLINT; the time taken was 5.1s.