Finally got a chance to look at the Flower Game from September Forum

[Blueprint LSAT]

If you spend time talking about the LSAT online you probably remember the uproar concerning the games section from this September. In the end, a lot of people ended up doing better than they thought, but at the time people were pretty upset, particularly about the flower game.

I finally got a chance to look at the game and I figured I would share my thoughts.

I tutor students in games all the time, and a lot of the time my first look at a game is when I'm explaining it to a student who has had trouble with it. While some games are truly out there, most can be tackled with familiar tools if you ask yourself the right questions. The trouble with September 19 seemed to be that they lumped a lot of medium-high difficulty games together so there wasn't really any time to recover if you didn't execute perfectly. For people shooting for the mid-high 170's that execution has to be there, even when the games get a bit weird.

I tend to agree with the view that these were just a lot of hard but not insanely hard games thrown together, the flower game included. This made time tight and punished mistakes.

The Flower Game has aspects in common with games they have released before. We call them Profiling Games at Blueprint. Before you get into the restrictions, any flower could be in any or all of the arrangements. It is a lot like October 2001, Game 2 or October 2005, Game 3.

You have a five arrangements of four flowers each.
S ___ ___ ___ ___
T ___ ___ ___ ___
U ___ ___ ___ ___
W ___ ___ ___ ___
Z ___ ___ ___ ___

Each arrangement has to repeat one type of flower and exclude one type of flower.
Going through the rules gives you some of the flowers for each arrangement and allows you to deduce a few others. In this game type it is often better to make your deductions rule-by-rule rather than waiting until you have been through all of them.

It is particularly helpful to realize that the fifth rule regarding Z's arrangement means that U's repeated flower must be H (totally gets you the first question in seconds if you spot it) and that W must have Lilies (because you have two spots left after you account for the two Gardenias, and three flowers to fill them with H, L, and R, but you can't use both H and R without violating the rule so you must use H and L or R and L)

It is possible to break the game down into two scenarios based on the final rule, since only T and Z have room in their arrangements for two Lilies. If you put them in T then Z must have two Gardenias since it can also not repeat H or R and it must repeat something. If you put them in Z then T must have two gardenias because it can't repeat H, L or R.

This is a cursory explanation and I know there are plenty of other explanations out there already. Mostly I'm just jotting down my first impressions. Feel free to ask if you want to discuss any of the game or the rest of the section in more detail.