Galley

How to Play Galley

Galley is a typesetting puzzle about a job that used to be done by hand. You are the printer's apprentice at the Hollis Gap Courier, a weekly newspaper in a frontier town, and the editor hands you the copy for the week. You do not type it. You pick pieces of lead type, called sorts, out of the compartments of a wooden case, line them up in a composing stick one letter at a time, and fill each line to an exact measure with thin, medium and thick spaces. The case never holds enough of every letter, so the story you set depends on the letters you have left.

Every line comes in two to four wordings that say the same news, for example a bridge that gives way, falls or collapses. Pick a wording, then take its sorts in order: tap the compartments, type on a keyboard, or use Set word and Set line to take the rest of a word or a line at once. That shortcut has a price: 1 coin for Set word and 3 for Set line in an edition, 15 and 40 points in the daily column, and nothing in free setting. A finished word gets a medium space by default, and you can change that in Settings. Then justify the line. Thin, medium and thick spaces are 2, 4 and 6 points, a gap may hold one to three of them, and the line only locks when its width equals the measure, every gap is between 2 and 10 points, and no two gaps differ by more than 4 points. The ruler under the stick shows the running width and the spread between your gaps, and pressing Lock names the rule you have not met.

The first edition has four columns of four lines, set at 14 picas. Later editions grow to eight lines a column at up to 22 picas, and the case grows with them, but so does the paper. When all the lines of a column are locked, the column goes to the press for 10 seconds and its type waits in the heap; Distribute sorts it back into the case in 6 seconds. Put all four columns through the press and ring the bell before the deadline, which tightens every edition from 38 seconds a line to 24. Editions 4 and 8 are milestones, the election special and the anniversary issue: their first column opens with a lead story one or two picas wider than the column, and printing one with all four columns rings the bell three times and pins its front page to the wall under a red rule.

Tips and Strategy

• Turn a sort when you must. Out of n with u to spare? Set a u upside down in its place, the way printers did. It fits the measure exactly, but the line loses its evenly-set credit and a reader writes in about it when the edition prints, so rewording is often the better choice when the case allows it.
• Read the column plan first. It adds up the letters your chosen wordings need and tells you which ones the case will run short of, before you have set a single sort. Pick the wordings that spread the letters out.
• Read the dot on each wording and the line under the row. A green dot means the wording suits the measure, amber means its gaps would be very wide or very tight, or that it uses more of a letter the column is short of than another wording of the same line does, and red means it cannot be set, or the case lacks letters for it. A line the column plan points at is ringed in red and names its short letter under its number, for example "short c". The line under the row spells out the chosen wording: "gaps of about 4.0 pt" when it suits the measure, and "too long", "too short" or "odd by 1 pt" when it does not. Every space piece is an even number of points, so a line whose letters add up to an odd width can never make an even measure. Another face fixes that.
• Even gaps pay. A line whose gaps differ by 2 points or less, with no turned sort in it, counts as evenly set, and every two evenly set lines add a reader to the paper. In the daily column each one is worth 40 points.
• Do not hoard the thin spaces. A gap of 6 points can be one thick space, a medium and a thin, or three thin spaces. When thick spaces run low, build the gap from smaller pieces.
• Use the second press when you are ahead. With one press you cannot start the next column until the first is on the press and sorted back. A second press lets you set the next column while the first one runs.
• Retries are a choice. If the bell rings first, the paper prints with the columns you finished. The first retry is free and later ones cost 15 coin.

What Makes Galley Different

Word games usually ask what the word is. Galley asks whether the word fits. The words are given, so the puzzle is the fit: a limited case that forces you to rewrite the headline, a ruler that must read exactly the measure, and gaps that have to be even. The wordings of a line are fixed alternates written for the paper, so there is no free text to guess and nothing to look up in a dictionary.

The shop pays for supply, never for answers. Extra type cases add 20 percent to every compartment, two more faces change the widths of the letters, a second press lets you start the next column while the first is on the press, and the apprentice distributes the type for you. Nothing you buy sets a line.

A Short History of Setting Type by Hand

Movable metal type reached Europe in the fifteenth century, and for the next four hundred years every page of every book and newspaper was assembled by a compositor who took sorts from a case and placed them in a composing stick. The capital letters were kept in the upper case and the small letters in the lower case, which is where the names come from. Lines were justified by adding spaces of different thickness between the words until the line was tight in the stick, and a pica, the unit of line length, is 12 points. In the 1880s the Linotype machine began to cast whole lines of metal from a keyboard and slowly ended the hand-set newspaper, but the words justify, upper case and lower case are still with us.