April 2, 2023 - "On a Roll" (META)

[Joe Ross]

On a Roll
By Evan Birnholz

The answer to this week's metapuzzle is a six-letter word.

[Schmeel]

I solved it.
I enjoyed filling the grid. Pretty straightforward meta.
Thanks!

[ky-mike]

I enjoyed it as well. Perfect Sunday meta.

[oldjudge]

I was working on a different puzzle last evening and only got to this one a little while ago. I thought it was very well done and, in all honesty, it took me a few minutes to fully understand what was going on. Thanks Evan!

[MatthewL]

Nice puzzle. Didn't get it at first, but eventually saw the path home. Fun.

[whimsy]

Lots of fun! (But what sort of picture am I supposed to be using? )

[Laura M]

Got it! Good one!

[KayW]

Solved. Fun one!



On a roll of "one" with Evan's puzzles.

[boharr]

Another clever puzzle. Thanks Evan.

[hcbirker]

My highlighter got a workout on this one. Thanks Evan!

[Abide]

This looks ridiculously impossible to construct. Impressive!

edit: Here's Evan's reveal, backstory, and comments. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyl ... word-roll/

[hcbirker]

This looks ridiculously impossible to construct. Impressive!

edit: Here's Evan's reveal, backstory, and comments. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyl ... word-roll/

It's behind a paywall Peter.

[ChrisKochmanski]

Fun!

[Joe Ross]

[Abide]

This looks ridiculously impossible to construct. Impressive!

edit: Here's Evan's reveal, backstory, and comments. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyl ... word-roll/

It's behind a paywall Peter.

Maybe Evan can cut and paste…

[ebirnholz]

Thanks, friends. I can post the paragraphs from the blog about how I constructed the puzzle, but before I do, how do I do that trick where I can hide them behind a reveal button or a spoiler tag of some kind? I'm not seeing the option on my desktop.

[Abide]

See below. I misspelled “spoiler” on purpose

[spoiller] Text [/spoiller]

[ebirnholz]

Thanks @Abide. Here's how the meta came together:

There were three sources of inspiration for this puzzle: Two different meta suites and a video game. Longtime New York Times crossword solvers may remember Patrick Berry’s magnificent “Cross” Words Contest in October 2011, which was one of my first exposures to metas and is among my favorite sets of crosswords ever written. Paolo Pasco’s extremely clever “Remedial Chaos Theory” suite from September 2022 made great use of dice as both a puzzle mechanism and as a storytelling device. Most recently, though, my wife and I have been playing the game “Dicey Dungeons” on Nintendo Switch since the start of 2023. It’s a turn-based battle game where you can activate different abilities depending on the rolls of dice. The game gives you a good progression of difficulty as you proceed through the stages and it doesn’t take itself that seriously, which makes it fun to play without making you feel terribly frustrated if you lose.

All of these things got me thinking about how to incorporate dice into my own puzzle and, for a while, I’d assumed that the way I wanted to do it would be completely impossible. First, every O had to be placed precisely in their proper positions and there couldn’t be any additional O’s on the dice. Second, the target letters of G-A-M-B-L-E had to be the only letters matching the value of each die. And third, all of this had to take place in six different 5×5 clusters of white squares; I get enough headaches trying to accommodate one or two 5×5 sections in a normal grid, let alone six of them in a constrained meta.

I started with the 4 die because it seemed like it would be tough to incorporate four B’s along with four O’s, then I moved to the 6 die. I figured if I can somehow get six E’s to fit around six O’s in this 5×5 space, then the rest should proceed much more easily. Amazingly, I got through the 6 die much faster than I expected, but I was dead wrong about how easily the other dice would proceed. I can’t remember how many times I filled one of the dice more or less cleanly, only to realize that I had three E’s in addition to three M’s on the 3 die, or an extra unique letter in addition to G on the 1 die.

Although it wasn’t necessary, one thing I wish I could have pulled off in this puzzle was to have no O’s anywhere outside of the dice. I got closer to achieving that than I would have expected; there aren’t any stray O’s near the 6 die, and several of the remaining O’s could likely have been removed without too much trouble. The O’s just on the outside of the 1 and 5 dice, however, were basically stuck no matter what I did. So I abandoned that goal and let the PIP and DIE revealers do the work of explaining where to look and what O’s you’d need.

[Wendy Walker]

What a fun puzzle! Thanks, Evan. And thanks to the Zoom crowd for mentioning this one.

[DCBilly]

Thanks Evan from a WaPo home delivery subscriber. Beautiful graphic on your explainer - I kind of had the same thing on my printout, but less colorful.