1) The mods awarded to the winner of a puzzle will be equivalent to the number of blanks left at the time that the puzzle is solved. In the event of the solve being that the last letter guessed fills in the word, the award will be equivalent to the number of blanks that that letter fills.
2) After 13 incorrect LETTER guesses, the puzzle maker has won. In this event, everyone who guessed anything during the puzzle must pay the maker 1 positive mod point, and the maker will start another puzzle.
3) Incorrect solves carry no penalty, unless they are so outlandish and numerous as to qualify as spam.
4) Puzzles will be a minimum length of 2 letters.
5) All puzzles will be in English, using only letters. Numbers, symbols, and other non-letter characters are prohibited. All puzzles must also be REAL WORDS or readily recognizable phrases. Use your common sense. If you don’t have any, ask someone if you can borrow theirs.
6) Neg-modding will absolutely not be tolerated for any reason or accepted as the award for a puzzle.
7) A single person may guess ONE letter and ONE complete solve at a time. This means that once a person has used both of their guesses, they will not be allowed to guess again until the puzzle maker has updated the puzzle.
8) Edited posts will not be accepted as answers. Single letter guesses may be edited in the event that someone guesses the same letter as that post slightly before it. If someone beats you to a solve by seconds and you would like to change your solve in the desperate hope that your alternative will beat your first guess, you must make another post. Double posting penalties will be waived for this circumstance.
9) When guessing and “L†or an “i†ALWAYS put the “L†in upper-case and the “i†in lower case. Failure to do so may result in your guess being ignored.
10) If a puzzle involves an apostrophe, comma, hyphen, or other such punctuation, it MUST be inserted in its proper place by the puzzle maker from the start of the puzzle and onwards.
11) In the event of a puzzle maker being offline, they will have 24 hours to return before a new puzzle is started. No new puzzles will start before 24 hours have passed. If the necessity for a new puzzle arises, the old puzzle maker should pay the new puzzle maker the number of mods that the new puzzle maker gives to whomever solves his/her puzzle.
12) If you have solved a puzzle, but know that for some reason that you will not be able to make a new one and stay to the end of it in a timely fashion, you may ask for someone else to make the new puzzle. In this event, you must pay whomever volunteers to make the new puzzle, all of the mods that you won from the previous puzzle, but no less than 4 mods in any case. If nobody volunteers, you are still obligated to make a new puzzle.
13) If the puzzle maker should make an error that obviously affects the solving of the puzzle, their current puzzle is thrown out and they must make a new one. This includes, but is not limited to, the repeated exclusion of a necessary blank or inclusion of an unnecessary one (accidentally ((or purposefully, I suppose)) having too few or too many blanks for the greater part of the puzzle), the instance of putting a wrong letter right, or right letter wrong, etc. This list is not exhaustive and it is left to the thread moderators to decide in what cases a restart is warranted. In general, if an error is caught early enough, it is usually not a problem, but if it is a repeated error, it may call for a restart.
GENERAL FORMAT
The accepted form for a given puzzle is as follows:
SPORTS
_ _ _ _ _ _ ~ _ _ _ _
WL: 0/13 WG:
These are guidelines, but every puzzle must contain a category, the blanks (using underscores separated by spaces) corresponding to the letters of the puzzle, a place designated for the display of incorrect letter guesses, and a separate place designated for the display of wrong solves. Puzzles that are more than one word must have the words separated with the tilde (~). *NOTE* - The copy/paste function is useful for the puzzle maker to avoid repetitive typing.
HOW TO PLAY
In Hangman, one person thinks of a word or phrase, and the rest of the players try to guess it. The puzzle maker (the person thinking of the word) thinks of a category for their puzzle, and displays the category and blanks equal to the number of letters in their puzzle. The rest of the players then try to guess what the word is by guessing letters to fill in the blanks until one of them can guess the entire puzzle. When a player gets the puzzle, they are awarded mods, and it is then their turn to be the puzzle maker.
EXAMPLE
Let’s say that someone decided to do the phrase, “Soccer Ball.†Their puzzle would look like this:
SPORTS EQUIPMENT
_ _ _ _ _ _ ~ _ _ _ _
WL: 0/13 WG:
Now, let’s say that four people who are trying to solve the puzzle. One guessed E, one guessed A, one guessed T, and the other guessed the phrase, “Sports Shoe.†The updated puzzle would then look like this:
SPORTS EQUIPMENT
_ _ _ _ E _ ~ _ A _ _
WL: T 1/13 WG: Sports Shoe
Any questions or clarifications about these rules or this game may be directed at the thread moderators, who will be CalvnNHobbes, Crunchjaw, and StrangerCoug. If they are not around, ask an experienced player. Have fun.
