My personal highlights included:

• Bruce's cameo in Encore! Encore!



• Everything about Unscrambled Cable Porn, a puzzle which proves that you need neither be original (see Seven Days) nor hard to be a great puzzle. You just need to be fun to do. The wit in this puzzle is delightful.



• Backsolving ATTLEBOROMA as the answer to a puzzle. Sometimes it pays to have a list of city names lying around.



• The Metas in rounds III, IV, VI, and IX. In particular, my top highlight of the weekend was remembering from back in my christian days that Breakaway is a Focus on the Family teen magazine.



• I had a good time doing terribly at the golf video game in Going Out Clubbing. Fortunately one of my teammates was actually good at it. I managed to solve the rest of the puzzle though.



• Rewriting the Record Books was the best sports puzzle ever.



• Killing the Audience was worth it just for hearing people dictate to each other the text of the clips to google them.



• Black Bed was a standard hunt puzzle, but people keep going back to it because they're so much fun. This one was a cute one. I wish these sorts of puzzles became a standard puzzle type. I'd be so much happier with the world if newspapers published these puzzles.



• UN-Speakable was two great ideas shoved into a rather unsightly chimera. Still it was quite memorable.

There were a lot of other puzzles that sounded good and which I wish I'd worked on (the various gridless crosswords, for example). The Kingdom of Loathing puzzle went over huge, and, as I said before, the meta-meta was the best meta-meta ever. I'm sure I'll find other gems when I look through what I didn't get to see, but these things above were the things that stood out to me at the time.