XWord Muggles Forum

Thank the good lord. I waited up to make sure I had it after the weekend of puzzling. Cheers to all!

Susan Goldberg wrote: ↑Mon Jun 28, 2021 12:01 am Thank the good lord. I waited up to make sure I had it after the weekend of puzzling. Cheers to all!

My relief as well after the last couple of weeks.

I am officially not going crazy.

Gimme that mug!

Well, good!

I figured LADDER was significant and played around with transforming the words but never figured out all the steps, especially the missing ones. KAS 5 for me. Congrats to all the solvers. I don't know how you page one folks did this so quickly!

I never even notice LADDER until it was mentioned tonight - Gosh am I dumb! Oh well, an 11:50+ Sunday solve is as good as a 4:01 Friday as far as winning the mug...Oh, and I'll take that mug now please.

Bob cruise director wrote: ↑Sun Jun 27, 2021 9:40 pm Good Luck to all winning the mug

And Matt Gaffney is looking forward to the Zoom call on Tuesday

*Shakes fist at Gaffney*

This morning I finally realized that the 8-word answer could be 2 4-letter words and that's when I went back to my very first note from Thursday night where I had 3 columns of the "ladder" that didn't connect (and hence I had given up on that path). Then the light bulb went on. Hope everyone has a great week!

Did anybody else try to make a word search out of the 4-letter words due to ARRAY being in the puzzle? That was one of many rabbit holes for me. Also detracting was the fact that several answers are included in other answers (STY, LATHES, EMIT, ORO, OLE, EARP).

Classic Patrick Berry puzzle. Love it!

I was on the path, but didn't get there. Just saw the answer, and I thought I'd like to share this:

I saw the word-ladder and saw that there were three chains and so the only possible thing was to fill in the missing links to get WILD and FIRE. And so WILDFIRE could be an eighth-letter phrase. But I couldn't see any reason that *should* be the final answer (other than fires are hot which didn't seem enough). So I submitted but my confidence was only 56%.

And when other people described their thought processes, they didn't match mine at all.

Another 11th hour solution for me mostly because I was busy with other matters this weekend and never found time until about a half hour ago to fiddle with what seemed like the obvious mechanism from the start: a word chain puzzle. Didn’t know they were called ladders but that was a nice touch. Took about 10 minutes to find the two missing words once I started playing with it. I know I will never make the first page since I enjoy the tactile experience of solving the grid the old fashioned way so I am content to announce my arrival on shore on the last.

Solved the puzzle grid Friday in bed
And a word chain was there in my head
But ‘twas not til tonight
That I let it ignite
And like wildfire the answer just spread

CopperRiver wrote: ↑Mon Jun 28, 2021 12:16 am This morning I finally realized that the 8-word answer could be 2 4-letter words and that's when I went back to my very first note from Thursday night where I had 3 columns of the "ladder" that didn't connect (and hence I had given up on that path). Then the light bulb went on. Hope everyone has a great week!

Did anybody else try to make a word search out of the 4-letter words due to ARRAY being in the puzzle? That was one of many rabbit holes for me. Also detracting was the fact that several answers are included in other answers (STY, LATHES, EMIT, ORO, OLE, EARP).

I had almost the same journey to discovery except that I had FIRE and WILD but it occurred to me that maybe the "disconnected" third column wasn't disconnected at all, just out of place. When I could make it all into one ladder I felt MUCH better about my FIRE and WILD (My ladder went the other way and I saw nothing that would suggest it go one way or another, there is perhaps that information but I didn't see it). However, it was a clean mechanism, I got two four letter words that could be combined and it was a "HOT" reference. Besides with everyone complaining about an earworm I felt it had to be it.

I got really distracted by LATHES LOATHES when I was working the ladder because it was SO odd to have either of those words, and especially BOTH of them one letter apart. I spent a lot of time trying to find other "drop a letter" words, but had I done so I would have agonized over the long two word answers. I know Mr. Berry will say "Oh. no that was coincidence" but I'm not buying it

I was already primed for a word ladder since I mentioned finding one in last week's WSJ puzzle:

hoover wrote: ↑Mon Jun 21, 2021 12:44 pm Looking at the answer and how it was obtained ... I had all of the cities correct, and I had gone as far as writing out the body of water that connected each, but didn't get to step 3 of finding their initials in the 3LW. Even if I had, I may not have gotten to the answer because I had Mohawk River connecting Utica and Rome.

Rabbit holes:
- I tried playing with the directions (N, E, NW, NNW, NE) and that went nowhere.
- I found a sort of a word ladder in SCARFS SCARES SCALES SCALP (missing its S)

Well, this goes down as my first defeat of 2021, ending a 27-week streak. I was soooo close, looking for the word ladder and even seeing that FIRE would be a missing link. But I never got the words in quite the right order and never got WILD. I blame the fact that I was traveling and never had enough time to really focus on it. But I did have enough time to feel completely stuck...

I got FIRE first and was completely certain that the answer was going to be FIREWALL, and even tried to shoehorn WALL into the word ladder against all evidence that it just wouldn't fit. I had to let go of that idea in order to see that WILD actually did work. (But FIREWALL still goes better with the title!)

I can't be the only one besides Mr. Berry that sees the MISSING words in the ladder connecting to LINKS in the title.

Apologies if this has already been mentioned, but question to the other online solvers out there...
This week it seemed the Submit button was missing from the online version of the puzzle, so I had to submit via email for the first time. Did I just miss it?

So frustrating. I had the ladder but didn’t think of missing links, so I couldn’t make it work. Loathes/Lathes and Oro/Oreo ate some time. So did Endwise, trying to put the featured entries together like dominoes connected by a single changed letter. A hearty “Well solved!” to the solvers!