XWord Muggles Forum

Count this as another one where I am very glad I didn't bang my head against the wall for the entire weekend. Not a chance I would have got this one in a year.

Hopefully, I'll get off the boat sometime before Isaac retires.

hashbrown wrote: ↑Mon Aug 10, 2020 7:14 am As a British muggle and relatively new meta solver, I always have to try a bit harder when it comes to the grids - and on rare occasion turn to Mr. G when desperate and completely clueless for a particular entry. I do feel that knowing the UK Monopoly board rendered this much harder as three of the squares have different starting words: Reading Railroad and Short Line Railroad become Kings Cross and Liverpool Street Stations, and Luxury Tax is Super Tax. Electric Company and Free Parking remain unchanged, and curiously Park Place becomes Park Lane! This is my first time having a bash at the NYT Weekly but you can usually find me trying the MGW and PGW CC's:)

Heh, not having a monopoly board nearby i had to google image search one, and the first one that popped up was a UK version which was deeply confusing.

I don’t get all the hate for this one, I found it to be the easiest one of the last month and a half or so.

34-D
Congratulations Solvers!

Doesn’t help when your first four decades were spent in England... totally different Monopoly board. Almost glad my power was out!

I was uncomfortable with the title tie in until I hit upon the idea that if the “I” in IT was considered as a Roman Numeral we were being told to move beyond one tile or one title. That may not have been the constructor’s intent but it tidied things up for me.

We've played Monopoly a handful of times in the last 20 years, but we almost always used the Lord of the Rings Monopoly (bad memories of younger son getting the One Ring stuck on his finger) or Alpaca-opoly (when younger son was going through a llama phase). Maybe that's why it took me so long to see the properties there. But I have no problem with the puzzle or its title/answer.

Edited to add: it was the dice clue and PLAY that finally got me wondering if "move" referred to game play, and I think that is what got the neural pathways ready to make the Monopoly connection. Even after Step 1 there was a lag of over a couple hours, as I made an 11x11 template of a monopoly board to overlay the grid, starting where the two ITs met...but crazy stuff like that makes me appreciate getting the answer all the more.

My goofiest rabbit hole: wondering whether "IT" in the title referred to the Stephen King book, I searched for THE STAND, CARRIE, etc. in the grid. Nothing, of course. The way I hit upon the Monopoly theme was by trying to find words that would form phrases with the first and second words of the theme answers, and eventually LUXURY TAX sparked some synapses. Thank goodness!

1. If the title had been "Advance One Space," how much more crowded would the shore have been? My guess -- a lot.

2. I have a dim memory, somewhere around the time that I stumbled upon this WSJ contest, of a Matt Gaffney puzzle that also used the Monopoly board. IIRC, it involved not the names of properties but the pictures (faucet, light bulb, ring, cop, etc.). Or is this just some dream I had and should discuss with my doctor (a meta-physician, of course)?

yourpalsal wrote: ↑Mon Aug 10, 2020 12:20 am If Monopoly is unfamiliar to a person, then I agree - I don’t see how you get the meta. Maybe if you google the six words together, but it doesn’t seem very promising.

I just tried it. Ifyou Google the six initial words, the Wikipedia entry on Monopoly comes up on the first page. But if you enter all twelve in order (LUXURY LINER PARK CITY READING, etc.) you wind up with Covid.

Bird Lives wrote: ↑Mon Aug 10, 2020 8:04 am 1. If the title had been "Advance One Space," how much more crowded would the shore have been? My guess -- a lot.

2. I have a dim memory, somewhere around the time that I stumbled upon this WSJ contest, of a Matt Gaffney puzzle that also used the Monopoly board. IIRC, it involved not the names of properties but the pictures (faucet, light bulb, ring, cop, etc.). Or is this just some dream I had and should discuss with my doctor (a meta-physician, of course)?

1. Judging from the comments so far a lot of Muggles got hung up on the "IT." I know I did for a while!
2. I recall something like that, too! I think I took a temporary detour involving the game pieces (the iron, the shoe, the Scottie dog, etc.).

Your memory is accurate Jay-Bird. Here is the prior WSJ Monopoly meta https://crosswordfiend.com/2015/11/22/w ... r-20-2015/

Schmeel wrote: ↑Mon Aug 10, 2020 5:34 am
When we got home I took out the game and he does indeed remember the layout of the Monopoly board down the to the last Chance and Community Chest. He went through all 40 without a hem or a haw. I was impressed.

WOW! You have raised him well, Schmeel! Impressive indeed!

ReB wrote: ↑Fri Aug 07, 2020 10:32 pm

Scott Medvetz wrote: ↑Fri Aug 07, 2020 3:55 pm OK, the mechanism has been found. I have an answer but I'm sharing others' trepidation about how well it fits the puzzle and theme. But I'll be submitting it unless I see something a bit more elegant.

Same feeling here. The first step I'm 100% sure of, and I found a not overly complex second-step mechanism requiring knowledge of the first step that seems to fit the title and which generates a plausible 6-letter word solution - but I don't quite have that 100% satisfaction, more in the 90% range. On the other hand I've run out of alternative ideas/words that would maintain the integrity of a meta puzzle.

I also will submit this word as my solution unless something knocks [more than] my socks [which are already] off before the deadline. Count me as standing with one foot on shore and one foot still in the air.

I feel really lucky this week that my intuition connected with the right circuits. That's the only way I made it ashore this week.

I was puzzling over the six theme answers and in frustration I suddenly had a flash to try some Free Association with the first words - a novel idea I haven't tried before. So I stated with LUXURY, and TAX popped into my mind, then went with PARK and PLACE popped into mind, and then when I came to READING, I realized that I was free associating Monopoly properties - and the other three answers confirmed that. So that was step one.

It then was evident that generating the answer from the Monopoly properties was going to require some reference to the Monopoly board in order to maintain the necessity of solving step one - and that somehow each property was going to generate a letter - and that the title figured in somewhere too. I fell into a number of rabbit holes with various math permutations and searches related to I-T, but didn't get any words out.

After an overnight break, I finally had the thought that maybe the title suggested that I try moving my "piece" past each property. I started with going past by one property in order of the theme answers and using the first letter of the new property, and despite all improbability (because I could see lots of consonants) an actual word fell into place.

I wasn't fully convinced, because it didn't have the tightness that most other metas have had (it seemed BLOCKS could be a way to characterize the Monopoly street names, but it didn't connect with the title unlike almost all the meta answers I've seen to date). Hence my 90% certainty. But with others expressing similar reservations, I decided I probably was in good company if I was wrong - and nothing else emerged that made more sense.

So I guess I will have to remember free association as a possible method when all else fails...

Solving a puzzle--whether the meta or, in my case this week, just the stinkin' grid--often depends on what you happen to know. I don't happen to know much about artists, so last week, like so many others, was a bust. As boys, though, my brother and I played Monopoly endlessly, so this week I got lucky. But I fully understand the angst today of people who grew up on a different version or didn't play it at all. You feel like you never even had a chance. Welcome to my world.

The best puzzles, it seems to me, are those that depend to a smaller degree on specialized knowledge and to a larger degree on cleverness. But it's never a pure distinction, and I have no idea how to achieve it. So I ride from week to week with Gafney, Shenk & Co. hoping that perhaps this week I won't have to be familiar with Crunk.

DrTom wrote: ↑Mon Aug 10, 2020 1:37 am I when a fellow muggle gave me a head slap

Head slap? That was a gentle encouraging tap, Dr. Tom! Just be glad you didn't PM me a few hours later, after the mower pulley broke and the heavens opened up for the third time this week!

Wow! As has been said, never in a 100 years. I grew up in the fifties and my parents and I did not play Monopoly. We did have a board game called "Big Business," which is somewhat similar to Monopoly. Does anyone else remember this game?

Abide wrote: ↑Mon Aug 10, 2020 8:14 am Your memory is accurate Jay-Bird. Here is the prior WSJ Monopoly meta https://crosswordfiend.com/2015/11/22/w ... r-20-2015/

Thanks. Wendy' remembered it more accurately than I did -- tokens, not pictures. And it was Peter Gordon, not Matt.

Wendy Walker wrote: ↑Mon Aug 10, 2020 8:13 am

Bird Lives wrote: ↑Mon Aug 10, 2020 8:04 am 1. If the title had been "Advance One Space," how much more crowded would the shore have been? My guess -- a lot.

2. I have a dim memory, somewhere around the time that I stumbled upon this WSJ contest, of a Matt Gaffney puzzle that also used the Monopoly board. IIRC, it involved not the names of properties but the pictures (faucet, light bulb, ring, cop, etc.). Or is this just some dream I had and should discuss with my doctor (a meta-physician, of course)?

1. Judging from the comments so far a lot of Muggles got hung up on the "IT." I know I did for a while!
2. I recall something like that, too! I think I took a temporary detour involving the game pieces (the iron, the shoe, the Scottie dog, etc.).

Your powers of recall are greater than mine. It was the pieces, not pictures.
I kept coming back to IT too, even though I quickly realized it was a dead end.

Abide wrote: ↑Mon Aug 10, 2020 12:53 am Huh? "Let's Move Beyond It" not clear enough? In the words of another Joe: "C'mon Man!"

In addition to the streets/blocks of Atlantic City, the entire board of properties represents one large block.

Winner should get this t-shirt https://www.funnyshirts.net/monopoly-i- ... gJZJPD_BwE

No, it wasn't clear enough. Each word in the title could be intepreted a different way. I, like mnay others, was looking for IT in the grid. I looked BEYOND IT - to the right, to the top, to the bottom. I looked for US (because let US).

The issue I had with this meta is that you either have to have memorized the board, or you had to Google it.

In my opinion, the best metas do not require trivial knowledge or knowledge outside the grid. The answer is spelled in the grid, or perhaps in the clues + grid. Anything else (e.g., PHIL SIMMS jersey number?) is a test of trivial knowledge and not crossword ability.

Bird Lives wrote: ↑Mon Aug 10, 2020 8:04 am 1. If the title had been "Advance One Space," how much more crowded would the shore have been? My guess -- a lot.

2. I have a dim memory, somewhere around the time that I stumbled upon this WSJ contest, of a Matt Gaffney puzzle that also used the Monopoly board. IIRC, it involved not the names of properties but the pictures (faucet, light bulb, ring, cop, etc.). Or is this just some dream I had and should discuss with my doctor (a meta-physician, of course)?

1. This sums up my thoughts pretty well. Only thing I would add is if 13D had a clearer indication that it was a hint, like "and a clue to solving this puzzle's meta." That could have made it a little more attainable.

2. I also remember that earlier Monopoly puzzle but not any other details!