Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

Damage at the LM Headquarters approximated to cost Millions!

The new club headquarters of Logic Master Germany has taken incredible damage. The club's management has informed the press, that large parts of the puzzle stores were destroyed by water. Since the beginning of this year, new puzzle ideas, but also the majority of puzzles (among others competition puzzles and portal puzzles) were gathered in this high-security facilitys. "The cause of damage is not quite clear," a manager told us, "but probably the water came from the puzzles themselves. Among the collected puzzles are lots of island, aquarium and battleship puzzles which consist in a large part of water."

The damage is approximated to cost millions, because the upcoming championship puzzles (DSM 2015 to 2021 and LM 2015 to 2019), the puzzles for the crossword championships of 2015 and 2018 as well as the WPF rounds up to 2026 were among the destroyed puzzles. Concerning the affected portal puzzles, the loss of puzzles 504-1000 of the famous puzzle author Richard from the Netherlands is one of the most hurting ones.

Our reporter had the opportunity to convince himself of the disaster's dimension. He even took pictures of two affected puzzles: a completely destroyed aquarium (left) and a cave through which parts of the water had obviously been running out (right).

One board member explained our reporter the complex interactions which took place at the damage of these two puzzles together. A Japanese Sums puzzle was affected, as well:

"By the sweeping floods, the aquarium was completely destroyed, not even one of its chambers remained intact. The water has even taken some of the hint numbers and flushed them into a cave puzzle, which happened to be nearby. The hint numbers are therefore illegible. You can hardly see where they have been at the aquarium, and where they are valid for the cave (marked by the red question marks). Apart from that aquarium and cave have maintained their standard rules.

It's worse what had happened to the Japanese Sums puzzle with numbers 0-9. It was flooded by the water of the aquarium, so that its rules are partially softened. Because of that it is possible now, that the sums in each row and column can be separated not only by blackended fields as usual, but also simply by thick lines on the field edges.

As if that wasn't enough, due to the high humidity the puzzle was also infested by a kraken. This kraken consists of a body and several tentacles. The body is formed by the blackened fields of the Japanese Sums. It is connected orthogonally and does not touch the boundary of the puzzle. The tentacles are formed by the separating lines. They start at the body and go, without crossing or branching, to the boundary of the puzzle grid. It is quite possible that different tentacles start at the same point of the body.

And of course the aquarium has left its mark on the puzzle: The outline of the body and the tentacles of the kraken divide the grid exactly into the chambers of the aquarium. "

Needless to say, our reporter would have liked to get an impression of the deformed Japanese Sums by he only got evasive answers from circle of board members. According to our reporter's assumption, kraken infection is considered to be a very embarrassing and also highly infectious disease in the puzzle world. An affected puzzle would never voluntarily expose to the eyes of the public. In the normal case, such a puzzle is hiding at its birthplace and waiting there for the end of the disease. However, recent research suggests that there is no risk of infection for visitors. Moreover, visitations are expected to have a positive effect on the recovery and accelerate disease progression.

In this context it's very interesting, that during the great flood in the Babylonian puzzle store around 1500 BC exactly the same kind of damage was observed. The following drawing of the affected puzzles had been come down to us by contemporary rapporteurs: