Welcome to Phil's Crossword Corner (PCC)! Philip Chow (aka Phil) is an auditor at NYC Dept of Parks and Recreation who makes crossword puzzles for fun in his free time. A new meta puzzle posts every other Saturday weekend on Crosshare.
Phil’s metas will usually include immediate nudges, a great tool for new solvers. You can reach him at pchow13@gmail.com
Please see below for the latest puzzle PCC#31 - "Chain Reaction"
[Level 4] Meta prompt: The answer to the meta is a term used in nuclear physics
Many thanks to FrankieHeck and Abide for test-solving and suggestions for improvement. Shout-out to Joe Ross as always for tech support.
Note: the level is the intended difficulty I had in mind when I designed the puzzle, but may play differently since every solver has their own area of expertise... what one person may find easy, another may find difficult.
Have fun and keep in mind if you're ever lost at sea, google is your best friend (actually, I don't know if you'd get internet service in the middle of the ocean)
-Phil
Hint #1: 16-Across and 24-Down loosely describe the mechanism... the game mentioned in 60-Across is worth looking up... and beware of falling into 8-Down
Hint #2: Study all the clues carefully
Hint #3: Note that there are lots of repeated words... spectrum, gambling, curry... this can't be a coincidence can it?
Hint #4: The last word of a clue would lead you to the first word of another clue - example: 1A Ingredient in a bhindi masala curry leads you to 26-Down Curry favor... then the new last word favor will lead you to a new clue that starts with that word and so on
Hint #5: You will end up with a 21-word chain... take the first letters of the entries in this chain... it's up to you to determine where the chain starts
Solution below - SPOILER ALERT:
Answer explanation: Answer explanation: Hinted by the game "Last Word, First Word" in the clue for IMPROVCLASS, solvers needed to create a word chain in which the last word of a clue would lead you to the first word of another clue... in OKRA, the last word is "curry" which starts the clue for FAWN... in FAWN, the last word is "favor" which starts the clue for POR... and so on... extracting the first letters of the entries starting from OKRA and ending at EEL gives you: OFPUZZLEISANSWERTITLE... note that EEL loops back around to OKRA with the word "ingredient"... If we begin the 21-word chain at the T from TISSUE and add some spaces, we get "Title of puzzle is answer"... and so the answer to the meta is "Chain Reaction" - a term used in nuclear physics
On March 14, we get Pi Day because 3.14 correlates to the first three digits of the mathematical constant... one month later we now have World Quantum Day... April 14 was chosen because "4.14" represents the rounded first three digits of Planck's constant: 4.14×10−15 eV·s
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Last edited by pchow13 on Sat Apr 13, 2024 8:32 pm, edited 6 times in total.
Good puzzle! I needed a couple of hints because I have a couple of other puzzles on the go, and I was feeling lazy!
Check out "The MOAT MEOW Mashup Pack" here. US$10 for 14 metas that don't always abide by the "rules" of the game: asymmetry, 2-letter words, uncrossed letters, who knows. And this time there's a mega-meta!
