"Just A Step More" - October 23, 2020

[Bob cruise director]

20201023 WSJCC Just a Step More.gif

That is the longest explanation that I can remember

[Joe Ross]

That is the longest explanation that I can remember

It's difficult to accurately describe the works of a fine Swiss watch in a sentence or two.

[Dplass]

Lol never in a million years.

[mitchel674]

Kudos to those of you who puzzled this one out! I stared at the grid and couldn't even make the first leap.

[John77]

I picked out the wrong words from the theme answers (having a mental block for proper names): eerie, chine, earth, ape, pen or nine(s), lust, luster or stere. And proceeded to go nowhere.

Then noticed 3 ores and 2 apes. Also no help.

Finally fixated on the scattered clusters of s,t,a,i,and r, and submitted STAIR, which made sense in regards the Puzzle title and contest clue.

Well played, Mr Gaffney. Just pray that Pluto doesn't get reclassified as a planet.

[TPS]

Lol never in a million years.

The irony for me is that if I had been “trying” to solve this puzzle I don’t think I would have. I feel like this was a puzzle that the more you looked the harder it was to see but I guess that describes a lot of these puzzles - it certainly described my experience last week.

[Colin]

My wife’s birthday weekend, so we did the grid together on Friday, then I was MIA for the meta and thus stuck on board. Reading the solution today, pretty pleased not to have spent much time as I would never have solved it... at least three steps too far for me!

[zacmoretz]

Good lord...

[Georgeall]

I submitted SCENE, and thought you'd like to see how I got it:

Using the number in parenthesis, shift the letters of the word by that number of spaces, e.g., CHEERIEST shifts five spaces and becomes IESTCHEER, and INDOCHINE shifts seven spaces and becomes OCHINEIND. Now take the five shifted words and stack them like this:

Following the puzzle title of "Just a Step More," look for a stairstep arrangement of a word, reading top to bottom. SCENE popped out:

Once the rabbit grabs you, it doesn't let go.

[Wendy Walker]

That is the longest explanation that I can remember

Even without the "icing on the cake" of TASTE in the title and the anagram + 1 (neither of which I spotted), the explanation STILL would have been lengthy! I was wondering all weekend how they'd manage to explain the strategies needed.
WLW.

[Meg]

I thought the title was odd. Now I see why. Totally missed TASTE.

[eagle1279]

FYI, one of my favorite comics explains that there were actually more than seven Dwarves:

https://www.gocomics.com/speedbump/2010/05/25

[JoeS]

Spent a lot of time on this one. But I was convinced that Indochina countries were a set: aSIAM in upper right, and LAgOS in lower left block, and APE was a set (8 extant species) with nAPE MEN IN LOWER right. So I had two possibilities for the word made fromm six extra letters, either ANGLES or ANGELS. Several 5 letter angels and few know them, so I went with ANGLES, then had to choose right or acute. There are no acute angles in the grid, only crosses formed by intersections of vertical and horizontal, so submitted RIGHT. It was fun. And satisfies criteria for a correct entry (maybe) but it was not RIGHT.

[BarbaraK]

And the first step was like the puzzle from 10-28-16, THREE OF A KIND (numbers indicated sets).

And I ended a streak with that one too. You'd think I'd remember.

Kas 4 - I should have got this. Maybe if it shows up again in 2024...

[Tom Wilson]

On many of these, I either stop short of the preferred route or go waaaaaaay too far down the wrong road. The latter was the case this week, as I understood the process ... but wrongly determined that the solution would be found in relevant words of the parenthetically numbered length. So ... Doc gave way to Bashful, Penn led to Princeton, lust to avarice, etc. I also misread "Earth" as "heart," and pigheadedly tried to reclassify the eight-letter "pancreas" as a germane body part. Needless to say, I ended up with a jumble that would only serve a set of obscure Scandinavian villages. Congrats to all whose vision was clearer than mine!

[Bird Lives]

I don't know whether it was Matt or Autofill that came up with ENZYMES hiding Sneezy + M, but for me it was the high point of the puzzle.

[ImOnToo]

I got hung up on the first letters of the categories which anagram to D-PLUS (dwarfs, planets, lakes, universities, sins). And I thought it was too coincidental that the clue for 20-across was so similar to the puzzle title (overlap of “more”) and the answer to 20-Across was PLUS, which was so similar to my anagram. It seemed to indicate to me that I should start with the second letter of those words (i.e., “a step” over from the first letter). The second letter of those categories anagrams to “in-law.” Obviously that is hyphenated, which made me hesitate for a long while, but i was running out of time and it seemed to fit the “part of a set” criteria enough so I went with it. Congrats to all who got the right answer to this tough one.

"In-law" was one that I toyed with for a while, myself.

[HeadinHome]

Never ever would have gotten this one, I’m afraid. I was completely fixated on the idea of stairs. I first circled the indicated letter of each theme answer (5th letter of CHEERIEST, etc) and got RIHER. Surely we are just one step away from that being RISER, as in a set of stairs. How can I get from H to S? And look at the black spaces .. 6 sets of diagonals that look like stair steps. And SS pairs all around them that look like those diagonals or like treads.. a word which also has 5 letters and is part of a set of stairs. But what about that stupid H??
I did see ERIE, H/EAR/T, and LUSTER at some point but I’m not enough of a Gaffney veteran to think of using the number clue the way it was intended. Plus, the stairs! Has to be the stairs!!
Well done to you clever muggles. “I’m not worthy!”

[Bob cruise director]

Never ever would have gotten this one, I’m afraid. I was completely fixated on the idea of stairs. I first circled the indicated letter of each theme answer (5th letter of CHEERIEST, etc) and got RIHER. Surely we are just one step away from that being RISER, as in a set of stairs. How can I get from H to S? And look at the black spaces .. 6 sets of diagonals that look like stair steps. And SS pairs all around them that look like those diagonals or like treads.. a word which also has 5 letters and is part of a set of stairs. But what about that stupid H??
I did see ERIE, H/EAR/T, and LUSTER at some point but I’m not enough of a Gaffney veteran to think of using the number clue the way it was intended. Plus, the stairs! Has to be the stairs!!
Well done to you clever muggles. “I’m not worthy!”

I fought those six "stair" steps and the aisle between the sets all weekend. It took over two days before I stopped fixating on that and fixated on the individual words buried in the long answers (typical for Gaffney) and associated them with the numbers (I still think of the number of planets as 9 as I learned them long before Pluto got defrocked). At that point, I sensed a Gaffney technique of having another of the set buried with an additional letter. And then the slog of looking through 5 Great Lakes, 7 dwarfs, 8 planets, 8 Ivies and 7 deadly sins to find which ones were in the grid.

I finally had to put a spreadsheet together to keep from getting confused

[Bob cruise director]

FWIW Someone asked about the maximum number on the ship yesterday. Our final count was 66 on the ship. On May 8, 2020 we had 73 on the ship. The contest was Build Your Brand with the answer Adobe by Matt Gaffney.

However what I have found is that for these hard ones, the participation either as measured by submissions to the WSJ or by the total of ship + shore tends to be low so setting records for minimums is more of a measure of how much people bailed and enjoyed the fall foliage