W. Eric Martin: One of These Days, Nicolas…

For me, the summer of 2000 will forever be associated with the Binary Arts puzzle game Lunar Lockout and one man’s effort to conquer all forty of its daunting levels. That man was not me.

In 1998, my wife Linda and I hosted our first foreign exchange student, a Japanese teenager named Masatomo. Masatomo reminded me of myself as he was a loner; he didn’t want to associate with his fifteen male classmates who were scattered at other homes and apartments in southeastern Massachusetts. Instead he wanted to hang out with the two of us.

Our Japanese was non-existent, his English just a step above our Japanese, so we struggled to find activities where we could interact. Naturally games turned out to be one of those activities. We played a ton of O’no 99, a card game from the Uno family that’s akin to the recent Amigo title Fettnapf. In O’no 99, you play number cards from your hand onto a central pile, keeping a running total of the cards as you do. Special cards reverse the play order, skip your turn, subtract ten from the total, or force the next player to play twice. Bring the total over 99 and you lose a chip; lose all your chips, and the game ends, giving the victory to the player with the most chips. I managed to explain the game, then Masatomo got to practice counting in English while we played over and over again.

We also played Baloney, aka Bullshit, and after many games with Masatomo, I can only think of the game with his voice attached, specifically a teasing and sing-songy “I don’t think so” whenever he wanted to call us out for trying to play too many cards.

Our next exchange student was a more active boy named Hiroshi, and he didn’t turn out to be interested in boardgames. Instead we spent several nights at the billiards hall, including one team victory over Juliet, the advisor of the student exchange program, and her student. This victory immediately warped into a public relations battle to see who could claim victory the loudest because Juliet refused to admit that she lost. We left each other taunting phone messages, Linda and I mailed her a personalized invitation to another ass-thumping, we placed a classified ad in the paper, she had the students’ going-away cake iced with a message that praised the good effort of Hiroshi and myself in our “defeat.”

By the time our next exchange student arrived, we had purchased our first house, yet Nicolas was far less impressed with our home than we were. His father was an airline pilot, and he had already visited the U.S. a half-dozen times, in addition to traveling to many other countries. Linda and I were old and boring adults who had no place among the French teenagers in his group. When he was around them, we were no better than potted plants.

On his own, though, Nicolas was a suave and interesting person. He had been to far more places than we had, and he was very much an adult in a teenager’s body. While I tried to get him to play games, he was mostly fascinated by one of the many logic puzzles that I owned. After I ran him through the instructions for Lunar Lockout, he blocked out everything else and just worked on the puzzles for hours.

For those unfamiliar with the puzzle, here’s a short description: You are an astronaut who has been stranded outside your spaceship. Travel in space is tough; once you start rocketing in a direction, you won’t stop until you hit something. A bunch of helper robots are floating with you, and if you can figure out how to arrange them, you can create a path to your airlock and fresh, delightful oxygen. Lunar Lockout is played on a 5x5 board, and you can try your hand at a few puzzles at PuzzleWorld.org, which also features new puzzles on a cross-shaped board. (Note that you can’t fling robots into space to get them out of your way. Robots are expensive!)

Anyone familiar with Ricochet Robot or Glik will recognize the rules for figure movement. But whereas Ricochet Robot merely has a solitaire-ish feel, Lunar Lockout is strictly a puzzle for one—aside from kibitzers watching over your shoulder.

Nicolas latched onto Lunar Lockout and kept at each puzzle until he finished it. Want to watch a movie? No, thank you. Should we go drive around to...? Maybe later, thanks. Once he finally solved puzzle #40—something I hadn’t done as the puzzles in the early 30s had tripped me up—he started again at #1. He had spent several days, if not an entire week, solving the puzzles, so he had to resolve most of them. When he finished #40, he started again, now timing himself to try to solve them more quickly. Once Nicolas returned to France, we never heard from again, so I don’t know whether he carried on with the puzzle obsession or whether it was a one-time summer fling.

As for me, I’ve continued my relationship with logic puzzles, both of the pencil-and-paper variety and of the 3D variety, including a handful of new titles from Educational Insights, which has recently started importing puzzles from Belgian publisher Smart, the new publisher of Kris Burm’s GIPF series.

One of the aspects I enjoy most about games is trying to figure out how the game mechanisms work and how I can take advantage of this knowledge to beat others. Logic puzzles give me that same satisfaction, with the added bonus that they actually have a solution!

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