but if it helps to be familiar with various types of puzzles then I don't have that familiarity and am at a disadvantage.
I don't believe that being familiar with various types of puzzles is a help. Fifty percent of the task here is figuring out what the puzzle is about. So don't give up on account of some perceived advantage for others that does not exist.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846)
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King
If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions? Scott Adams