Commentary: Solitaire hangman at the movies

Ihope you enjoy this puzzle based upon an idea I found in Games magazine. The challenge is to guess the titles of the films made at least in part in Indiana before being “hanged.” The number of words in the title and the release dates appear in parentheses.

To begin, choose any letter of the alphabet you think might be in Title I below. Suppose you pick “E”. Go to the letter chart on page 12 and find the number listed on row E of column I (because you are working on title I). The number is 43. You now look at No. 43 in the position chart and find the number 6. This means the letter “E” occurs in the sixth position and nowhere else in Title I. If a letter occurs more than once in a title, the position chart will show all its locations.

If you find from the position chart that a letter appears in position 0, that letter does not appear in the title. As a penalty for an incorrect guess, you must draw part of a stick figure below the scaffold beside the word blanks. After you draw the head, the body, the arms and the legs-making six incorrect guesses before identifying the title-you are “hanged.” Good luck.

Have a good holiday.