Signmaker Game 2 [Round 2, deadline 9-1]

[mith]

This will work almost the same as the original, with a few minor changes.

Instead of having each player in turn post a sentence for the rest to work on, to speed things up a bit, the game will be two rounds:

In round 1, I will provide 4 short sentences. You will have one week to submit their sentences. Each is to be treated seperately (i.e. you can't run two of them together to try to get a longer string).

For round 2, each player will send their own starting sentence. Each starting sentence must be 10 words or more, and 30 letters or more. Once I have recieved all starting sentences, I will post them together in this thread. You will again have one week to submit sentences, for all the sentences other than yours.

Each sentence, whether starting or submissions for a round, must be a single, grammatically correct sentence, containing a subject and predicate, using only English words (no proper nouns or abbreviations). If you feel a word is questionable enough that I might want to look it up, please provide an online source that has it (dictionary.com, m-w.com, or the scrabble dictionary would be preferable, or something of that quality). If you don't, and I can't find it, I'll have to email you about it, and that's a big hassle. (Note: if I do a mith-round, some of my sentences may be shorter than 40 letters, as they may be easier to find long strings in)

The original sentence(s) will be posted in this thread. Each player will submit a sentence which contains strings from the original sentence. A string is 3 or more adjacent letters which remain adjacent and in the same order in the submitted sentence. Each string in the submission must remain in the same position relative to the other strings, as well. Letters from the original sentence can only be used in one string.

Example:

Original Sentence: The cat in the hat swung a bat at that mat.

Player 1: The cat in the hat swung a bat at that mat.
Hector ate a cucumber. (this sentence is not legal because "Hector" is a proper noun.)

Player 2: The cat in the hat swung a bat at that mat.
Gab about the tin. (this sentence is not legal because the string "gab" appears before "tin" in the submitted sentence, but appears after in the original.)

Player 3: The cat in the hat swung a bat at that mat.
Heck, she can gab at a tall matron. (legal sentence)

The string must also be broken (spaced) differently that in the original sentence in at least one place, and may not contain or form part the same word (or root word; for example, if "light" is in the original, that string may not appear as "lighter" (though lighter could appear elsewhere in the sentence)) as in the original sentence.

Player 4: The cat in the hat swung a bat at that mat.
He catches the ball. (this sentence is not legal because the spacing of "hecat" is the same in each sentence: "he cat".)

Player 5: The cat in the hat swung a bat at that mat.
The cab is late. (this sentence is not legal because the word "the" is used in both strings.)

Scoring:

Each player starts at 0. They are awarded points as follows:

For every legal string, a player receives points equal to the square of the string length.

For every word that is completely contained in a string in the submission, a player receives 10 points.

If a player uses all the letters in the original sentence, the player receives a 25 point bonus.

Player 6: The cat in the hat swung a bat at that mat.
With echoing sounds, the tin man walked, while the scarecrow hung absolutely still.

thec is worth 16, tin is worth 9, plus 10 for the word "tin", and ungab is worth 25. 16 + 9 + 10 + 25 = 60 for the round.

Players:

amb
Bravehat
dethwing
mikegoo
RequiemEternam
Lucky Wizard



[This message has been edited by mith (edited 08-26-2002 02:05 AM).]

[Amb]

[mith]

Sure, we can do it that way. Just means I have to come up with sentences earlier!

[BraveHat]

Can't wait! By the way, mith. You're a much better legislator

[This message has been edited by BraveHat (edited 08-11-2002 03:12 AM).]

[Amb]

BUMP

* really want some competitors *

[dethwing]

I'll give it a shot.

[BraveHat]

w00t!

[mikegoo]

I'm game

[mith]

I'll ask Luna if she wants to play tomorrow, and I'll wait a bit to see if Zag wants to play again. I'll have to come up with some good sentences anyway.

[Zag]

Hi all,

I am not going to play this one, because I am about to leave for a 2-week vacation, with no CPU access. If it is a success, I'll jump into the next one. But thanks for waiting for me.

Oh yeah, and rescore that last game to show that I was, in fact, the winner.

Zag

[mith]

And, as I forgot, Luna will also be away.

Guess I'll wait another couple days to see if anyone else is interested, and if not, we'll go with 4.

[RequiemEternam]

/in

[mith]

Update to rules (regarding two rounds). See first post.

[Lucky Wizard]

I'm in.

[Amb]

Plumbum perhaps is a metal signmaker puzzle = 16 points.

[mith]

Ok, here are your sentences. Remember to set off the strings somehow so I can tell what you are going for (in the last game, I just capitalized all the string letters; you could put parenthesis around them, or whatever else you can think of). I decided to do 5, since, with 6 players, you will submit 5 in the next round as well.

Round 1

1. Welcome to the Signmaker Game.
2. This sentence talks about itself.
3. Is this quiz what you expected?
4. Roses are red and violets are blue.
5. The last one is easy.

Deadline for submissions is August 22, unless someone has a problem with that day. You can also go ahead and send your sentence for the next round.

[mith]

Oh, remember that my email address has changed. Send to: mtih@typo.net

[Amb]

I think you should make playing "Sign Maker" as a split version of "Signmaker" specifically illegal or we will all do it to pick up 81 points, + bonuses for revealed words.

[mith]

Ok. Consider it done.

[BraveHat]

Yay! Finally, I get to play this thing. I'm so giddy, but in a masculine way.

[mith]

*~watches BH skip around with flowers~*

[BraveHat]

[Amb]

pastrami ne arby? yes u bet, I admitted it.

[Damn All these years and i still can UBB]

[This message has been edited by amb (edited 08-17-2002 05:39 AM).]

[RequiemEternam]

I'm trying really hard to do this right the first time, so if someone could answer a question for me....

In the examples in Reply 0, Player three uses the original word mat in the new word matron. I'd thought that if the string mat was used, it had to be spaced differently than in the original. It seems to me this isn't the case.

Also, can the new string be spaced by punctuation? (e.g. if isnt was a word, would it be different from isn't

Thanks for your advice. I look forward to seeing the other entries crush my feeble attempts.

[mith]

Oops, that first is just an error on my part. As for the second... I'm thinking that it's ok to replace a word with one that is identical but for punctuation (for example, if the string was "said it's good", you could change it's to its, but you would still have to change some other spacing in the sentence (said to s aid, or good to go od, or whatever)), but the whole string can't just differ by punctuation, there has to be a spacing change. Is that agreeable for everyone?

[mith]

Oh, one other thing. In the first game, one of the rulings was that if a completely word from the original sentence was at the beginning or end of a string, it had to either be broken up or attached to the following/next letter in the string. For example, if the original string was:

ab cdefg hij

Then

sab cde fgh ijqp

would not be legal (the ab wouldn't count). This is not the case in this game. As long as the spacing of the string is different and none of the same words are used, you can do that.

[Amb]

In the example of "Roses are red, Violets are blue" I got majorly stuck on the word blue. I ended up submitting as part of the word "BLUish". Would this have been legal? I dropped a letter to do it. I may need to reconsider my entry if that is the case.

[Lucky Wizard]

Sent yesterday.

[mith]

*~bump~*

Reminder, deadline in two days.

[BraveHat]

/sent.

[dethwing]

*didn't notice the 10 word 30 letter requriement*

*goes back to work*

[dethwing]

oh wait, that's round 2. *sends*

[mith]

Ok, 2 entries to go, I'll email them now as a reminder. I also sent legality checks of all entries received. Remember that you must space each string differently than how it appears in the original sentence.

[BraveHat]

edited and re-sent.



[This message has been edited by BraveHat (edited 08-22-2002 01:11 AM).]

[Amb]

Damn I made illegal strings /Re-sent

[mith]

Waiting on RE. I'll give him a little while, there's only two rounds to this game so there's not a huge hurry.

[RequiemEternam]

my apologies; things got a little crazy at work (read: went to 12-hr days for a few days). things are almost back to normal. I'll have mine sent by tonight.

If there are illegal strings, well, that's what I get for being late, right?

[mith]

I still haven't received RE's, or LW's corrections. I'll give you both until tonight sometime.

[mith]

Oops, just now noticed a problem with one of mikegoo's. I'll email him.

[Lucky Wizard]

That's weird. I sent my corrections on Wednesday. Oh well, I just sent corrections again, so it should be OK.