An excellent puzzle written by one of the innovators of the meta crossword format. It comes out every Friday at noon and increases in difficulty throughout the month. Available for modest subscription (worth every cent) here: www.xwordcontest.com
oldjudge wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 2:22 pm
I was staring at this one for a while thinking “is this really a week 1”? Fun puzzle though and an unusual week 1 “aha” moment
Yeah I'm stuck too. Usually I see the week 1 mechanism by the end of the grid (or earlier). Is he punking us with week 666?
UPDATE: Unstuck. Hoping to be beamed up soon.
Last edited by Dplass on Fri Mar 05, 2021 2:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
When the meta mechanism has mutiple steps or pieces, sometimes, while you don't have all of the preliminary material, you have enough to prompt a reasonable guess about the final answer, and that guess helps you to see what you had been missing, which in turn confirms your guess.
Last edited by Hector on Fri Mar 05, 2021 2:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I just beamed up, and read the prior comments. Often I'm embarrassed by my struggles when I read many early comments saying how easy it was, but this time I was heartened by the many comments saying that it was harder than expected for a Week 1. I also found it surprisingly difficult, and had to so some backsolving to get some things that are not in my wheelhouse.
(WeThotUWasAToad: "backsolving" is when you can figure out the answer from a partial understanding of the mechanism, and then you fill in the rest of the mechanism via seeing what it must have been in order to produce your answer.)
An example of backsolving using last week’s MGWCC would be finding the languages and recognizing 4 of the 5 native speakers. If that gave you L_NGO, you could feel pretty confident that the Somali speaker was someone whose name started with an I, so you’d just look through the grid at the I names.
Tougher than I was expecting but so good! It was one of those that you sorta think maybe you’re going down a rabbit hole, and then BAM! You’re on shore.
Check out this very cool project by many of your favorite muggles to raise money to fight cancer. You get a fun puzzle bundle and good causes get $. Win-win: Crosswords for Cancer
I had my second vaxx (moderna) yesterday and was feeling pretty good this morning.
Before I started the meta, fatigue, chills, fever hit me. Mild symptoms, but it was just impossible to concentrate. Seems pretty typical, so I ‘m just going to wait til tomorrow to look at this one again.