Hall of fame

“Rébuffat points” must have been responsible for the deaths of quite a number of young mountaineers. In his 1973 book The Mont Blanc Massif: The Hundred Finest Routes, Gaston Rébuffat---French Alpinist extraordinaire---made the fatal error of organising his climbs roughly in order of difficulty, from route one to one hundred. Mountaineers are no less competitive creatures than mathematicians, and the deadly game of collecting Rébuffat points was quickly established. You got one point for a gentle traverse of the Clocher Clochetons on the Aiguilles Rouges, the first route in his book, and 100 points for dicing with death on the unrelentingly vertical walls of the Central Pillar of Freney, the last route in the book. If you got back alive, you could casually drop into conversation that you had “had a good season”. If you were lucky, someone would ask how many Rébuffat points you had collected, and you could brag that you had collected x points in that particular year, giving you y points in total. It was difficult to know whether to go for broke on a few hard routes or tick off many easy ones.

So it is with Puzzle Points.

“The four-star puzzles are just so much harder than the one-star puzzles,” I said to my friend Tet. “It would seem unfair to give just four times as many points.”
“Then square the number of stars before adding,” said Tet.

And so the Deadly Game of Puzzle Point collecting was born.

The distribution of questions in the book (including optional questions for which solutions are given) is: 35 ★, 40 ★★, 28 ★★★, and 10 ★★★★. That makes 113 questions in total, and a potential 607 Puzzle Points if we sum the squares of the number of stars.

“What’s the point of points if you can’t brag about them?” said Tet.

And so the Puzzle Hall of Fame was born. By keeping track of your progress with the ticklists and scoresheet in hte book, you can calculate your Puzzle Points and your honorary title.

 < 35  Puzzle Points: Aspirant Puzzlist
35 ≤  Puzzle Points < 195: Novice Puzzlist
195 ≤  Puzzle Points < 447: Expert Puzzlist
447 ≤  Puzzle Points < 607: Puzzle Master
607  Puzzle Points: Puzzle Overlord

You can enter and update your points in the Hall of Fame on this website, by logging into your profile.

Like all adventures, these puzzles are much more fun when they are shared. Hopefully you already have someone to share your puzzling with, but the Puzzle Forum tab allows you to share your ideas with an even wider audience, and---more importantly---to learn from others. From time to time I will also post new questions on the website.

Finally, good luck. And I hope you enjoy the adventure, wherever it takes you.

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