XWord Muggles Forum

lol yeah, I don't even have a starting point so I don't think this is happening

Finally got it this afternoon; no nudges needed... just floating in the pool when, in my head, I tried something that started to bear enough fruit that I got out and put it to paper. This was *so* not a week 3!

Staring at this for a long time, pretty sure I have the first step, but getting stuck on what to do next. Any nudges would be greatly appreciated...

I was both encouraged & infuriated* by the comments regarding "revisiting first attempts" & "if you think you're on the right track, you probably are." They proved to be correct. Thank you!

What a puzzle! What a slog...

Week 3? Pfft! "SHA...!"

This is going to be my Buzzer Beater week (but have backed it up by having submitted a reveal to Matt, via email, J.I.C.).

(*a character flaw of mine, not any posters')


EDIT: Buzzer Beater accomplished.

I didn’t have much time for this on sadly. Seems like a fun one. Is anyone around I could ask a couple questions to about whether I’m on the right track or way off base?

This morning it unfolded right away. I had the right idea early but didn't apply it correctly.

Hector wrote: ↑Tue Jun 22, 2021 11:23 am This morning it unfolded right away. I had the right idea early but didn't apply it correctly.

Same!! I needed a slight nudge to get me there though

I never got it, and Joon didn't either. So someone please enlighten me.

This makes 3 this year I've missed, more than in all of 2020. And I just realized how much of my meta success last year was due to the pandemic leaving me plenty of time and few distractions. I was at the beach when this week's puzzle dropped, and I'm afraid sun/sand/ocean were a bigger draw. And I've got several more fun distractions coming up that I'm sure will also keep me from giving enough attention to metas. Oh well.

BarbaraK wrote: ↑Tue Jun 22, 2021 12:07 pm I never got it, and Joon didn't either. So someone please enlighten me.

This makes 3 this year I've missed, more than in all of 2020. And I just realized how much of my meta success last year was due to the pandemic leaving me plenty of time and few distractions. I was at the beach when this week's puzzle dropped, and I'm afraid sun/sand/ocean were a bigger draw. And I've got several more fun distractions coming up that I'm sure will also keep me from giving enough attention to metas. Oh well.

As someone who boarded the meta-train during the early pandemic days, I totally understand - my patience for slog-metas is very low right now.

Take the top four 8 letter words. Find the corresponding "circle" word inside it and mark the positions of the letters.

Go to the bottom 4 eight letter words. Find the letters in the same positions as the marked letters in the corresponding "top" word and order them in the circled-word order. It spells COD EWO RDO CHO. OCHO is the answer.

I got that so quickly I was certain that I had to find OCHO coded in the grid somewhere and do something to it that might lead me to LOCO for a final answer....

Not in a million years. My WAG was going to be OCHO, but I went with WILD instead, thinking "wild cards" from the crazy eights card game. Actually had OCHO typed into the answer box with 15 minutes to go, but changed it to WILD.

Joe Ross comes in with the final correct entry at 11:59. Hail Mary, or pageantophobia?

I didn’t get it, even with a nudge. The last four 3 letter words were such nonsense to me, I assumed it must be wrong. As with Brian Mac, my guess would have been OCHO, but I got stuck on a call and forgot to submit. Guesses don’t get me as excited as solves anyway.

Sometimes these are so frustrating: I actually had the right answer written down on my paper, but I just didn't put it together. I saw that the four circled words had all their letters in the top four 8-letter words, and tried looking at the corresponding letters in the bottom four 8-letter words and wrote them all out, but I was stuck on looking for the resulting 3-letter words be entries in the puzzle, so I never thought to string together COD EWO RDO and CHO into CODEWORD OCHO. Like BrianMac I thought of OCHO as a WAG (but didn't try submitting it), and still I missed that it was right there on my paper! Grrrrrr.....

Maybe this experience will weaken my resolve to try to do all of these without nudges.

Oh for heavens sake! That was the first thing I tried! Just never thought of stringing them all together.

Hector wrote: ↑Tue Jun 22, 2021 12:26 pm Joe Ross comes in with the final correct entry at 11:59. Hail Mary, or pageantophobia?

Planned:

Joe Ross wrote: ↑Tue Jun 22, 2021 9:09 am
This is going to be my Buzzer Beater week (but have backed it up by having submitted a reveal to Matt, via email, J.I.C.).

EDIT: Buzzer Beater accomplished.

BTW: I know of a "neat trick" which will allow you to post late, but Matt is now editing late entries out. I once posted at 12:05 PM.

Hector wrote: ↑Tue Jun 22, 2021 11:23 am This morning it unfolded right away. I had the right idea early but didn't apply it correctly.

Me too. It took a much-appreciated whack upside the head to get me back into one of my earlier abandoned rabbit holes.

My first approach was to map the patterns in of the circle entries in the top four eight-letter entries to those in the bottom four. But I wasn't entirely sure how they should be mapped - positionally (top-down to top-down as they were). corresponding symmetric enties, or what. And at first pass I couldn't make the resulting letters of any of them go anywhere.

I also tried to find three-word entries in the grid that were contained within the bottom four. But could only find those for three of the four:
WORKED UP/ODE
ROUNDEST/DOS
SHOCKING/NGO
But nothing for RICHMOND, nor could I make those go anywhere.

Then I started trying all kinds of codes with the patterns of the circled letters in the top four. Binary - presumably from there to ASCII or square entries, but nothing there was working either. Morse didn't work any better.

I had just about given up on this when someone kindly redirected my attention to that first approach. And everything fell into place almost immediately after that.

Yeah, glad I didn't burn too much time on this one. I did notice that the circled letters could be found in some of the (presumed) themers, but never did it systematically. Even if I had I doubt I would have figured out the encoding mechanism, and even if I had I very much doubt I would have strung the letters together properly. Oh well. I had fun in Big Sur, so missing a meta seems like a fair trade, especially since I doubt I would have gotten it even with the full time allowed.

I have been trying to figure out why I have had little trouble with metas like this one and MASS IN B MINOR which gave so much trouble to so many solvers, and yet get stymied by some of Matt's puzzles that pretty much everyone else gets. I think for both "Crazy Eights" and "Missing Piece," both involve trigrams that spell out the answer. A trigram is simply a unit of three letters together. There is a particular type of puzzle that appears fairly regularly in the National Puzzler's League newsletter called an Anaquote, in which a quote is broken up into trigrams, and the trigrams are presented to you in alphabetical order. The enumeration of the quote is given, so solving the puzzle involves reordering the trigrams and reading them with the given enumeration. This leads to a lot of practice reading meaningful things in a string of trigrams, which is exactly what COD EWO RDO CHO is, four trigrams in a row. I have been doing Anaquotes for decades, so I guess it is second nature to me now. Here is an example:

ANAQUOTE (3 10 4 2 3 5 6)
DLI FEI INE ING LIV RTH
SNO THE TWO UNE XAM

I don't know if there is anywhere online to find a bunch of Anaquotes to practice with. As to why I struggle with others of Matt's puzzles? Those solving mechanisms must not be second nature to me yet, I guess.

This was a big nope for me. I correctly saw the circled letters in the first four eight-letter words, but never got beyond that. Very much like the treasure map meta, which I got, but didn't see it here.

New streak starts next week! (or maybe in two weeks, with week 4 coming up).

I was stumped at first. Then I remembered to pay attention to the title and noticed the eight 8-letter words. The rest followed logically but slowly.