The five neighborhoods visited by the bookmobile, listed in order from Monday through Friday, could be

BenMingov on December 12, 2019

Hi Sprozes, unfortunately there is no video explanation available for this game just yet. But let me try to help you out through here and see if we can clear up any difficulties.

This game is an in/out grouping game with a sequencing component. We are told that we ordering the cities visited from Monday - Friday (this is the sequencing component). We also know that there are 6 cities and only 5 will be visited (this is the in/out component).

Our variables are H, L, N, O, P, S (6 total)

1 variable per day, maximum of one time each (no repeats).

The first rule states that H is visited and that it is not on Friday. In other words it cannot be out, and it must be visited between Monday and Thursday.

The second rule states that if O is visited then it is visited immediately before H. This has some interesting consequences.

We would diagram it:

O - > OH (in a block) What this means is that O cannot be Thursday nor Friday because that would force H in Friday (disallowed) or push it off the board entirely, respectively.
NOT OH (in a block) - > NOT O What this means is that if H is Monday, forcing the impossibility of OH (in a block), then there is no O at all.

The third rule is that if L is visited, then it must be visited on Wednesday. Simple conditional rule. Contrapositive, if L is not on Wednesday, then no L at all.
This means that if any other city is visited Wednesday, L is the city that is not visited.

The final rule states that both N and S are visited. However, they cannot be adjacent. We can create two more not representations of the out group, in addition to the "not H". Namely, "not N" and "not S". This only leaves three cities that could be out (L, O, P).

We also have a crossed out block in that of SN/NS.

All in all, our set up should like a typical in/out game with 5 slots in the in group (Monday-Friday) and 1 slot in the out group.

O cannot be 4 or 5, H cannot be 5.
Only L, O, or P can be out.

I hope this was helpful despite it being through text. If you still need more help with visualizing this game, please don't hesitate to say so!

indigobunting on June 22, 2020

I am practicing front loading my games by drawing out scenarios. For this game I ended up drawing 4 scenarios for H being in positions M,T, W, Th. I then drew two sub scenarios for H in T and Th to reflect whether L is in or out. I ended up getting all the questions right but I think the game took me in the 9 to 10 minute range since drawing out 6 scenarios was quite laborious. I am still having trouble deciding when scenarios should be attempted and when its better just to jump into the questions. The first time I did this game I didn't use scenarios and I did not do as well. Do you recommend scenarios for this game? If so, would you have done what I did or employed scenarios in some other way?

BenMingov on June 28, 2020

Hi, thanks for reaching out!

For this game, I would opt to not make any scenarios as I think that showing all 4 scenarios of H in each of its possible days is as you said "laborious". This is the first game in the section, combined with the fact that I didn't think the setup/rules would be too inherently difficult to work through question by question, I would make the decision to react as the questions come, simply to save time on making inferences up front.

However, this is a completely in the moment decision that can shift either way depending on how you feel about the particular setup/rules you encounter. As a general rule of thumb for my own games though, I never do more than 4 scenarios. I find that I would get too worried about timing issues and would rather just tackle the questions head-on.

Eventually you will develop a sense for this and making scenarios will feel right or wrong to you. It is not the case that any one way is typically correct or not, as it is simply whatever helps you keep the information organized in your mind and allows you to move a steady pace.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions.