LG Game 1 Setup, by LSATHacks
Game Setup
This game combines linear and grouping features. It’s a medium difficulty game, I’d say.
There are three days of the week, and slots for morning and afternoon. I find it most effective to set things up like this:
The first question of the game doesn’t do this; it uses a vertical setup, which I find strange. We are very used to seeing the week left-to-right, on calendars. Why depart from that convention? The diagram I drew also matches the normal way to show linear games on the LSAT.
The game gives three rules, and there aren’t really any way to combine them:
So this will be a rules based game. But, you can still think about restrictions. The third rule is quite restrictive. It’s not just “Q before K and N”. It’s “Q is on an earlier day than K and N”. So we can add some not rules to the diagram:
This leads to a few additional deductions:
- If J is last, it is with K, not Q.
- If R is first, it is with S, not N.
I think these deductions above are too complicated to draw, but it’s helpful to think about what’s restricted.
While reviewing these explanations, I also figured out an additional deduction: Q can’t go on Thursday morning.
Why? If they do, then K and N go after it, on Friday, in either order. We get this diagram:
The problem is that J needs to go in the morning, with Q and N. That can’t happen here.
I’m writing this to give you an example of deduction that’s possible, but that isn’t necessarily important to get upfront. I have solved this game multiple times, but never noticed this before.
However, on the questions, I was easily able to figure this out. So, basically, it’s ok to miss some upfront deductions if you can figure them out on the questions. But, if you’re unable to do that on the questions, then you should spend more time looking for deduction on the setup.
How would you find this one? You should look for the most restricted variable, and see what its limits are. In this case, Q is the most restricted: it is mentioned in two rules. Further, it forces things to happen for both K and N, whereas placing K only forces things to happen for one variable: Q.
So, you could try placing Q, and see what the limits are. It turns out you can only place Q on Wednesday (any time), or on Thursday afternoon.
If Q is must be on a day earlier than both K&N, why does Q goes on Thursday? Shouldn’t there be a Q not law for both Friday and Thursday. So that Q is restricted to only Wednesday.
It is possible for Q to go on Thursday. In this case, on Wednesday, J would be in the morning, and Q would be in the afternoon. K and N would be together on Friday and naturally, S and R would be on Wednesday.
You wrote, “If R is first, it is with S, not Nl.”
I believe the ‘I’ in the end is erroneous and you meant “If R is first, it is with S, not N.”
Yes, that’s correct! Thanks for catching this. The page has been updated.