XWord Muggles Forum

From Will's email

This week's puzzle: Length by Length
Difficulty: Challenging
I had intended to slowly increase the difficulty this week with a "medium" puzzle, but have been informed that this puzzle is actually "challenging". Many thanks to Emma and Dani for helping to make this puzzle much less challenging for you all than it was for them!

The answer to this week's meta is something that can be measured.
(I believe most folks won't need Google this week.)

Crosshare link: https://crosshare.org/crosswords/w5MU3F ... -by-length
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Hello, hello, is anyone out there?

I'm still all boxed up. See the first step, but so far 6 different ways of applying it have just led me to 6 different strings of gibberish.

Have a guess at an answer and tried to back-solve it, but no luck with that yet either.

Out of the box. Challenging indeed.

me. Enjoyed this one a lot. Great job Will!

A nice twisty solve! Thanks, Will!

BarbaraK wrote: ↑Sun Jun 05, 2022 1:02 pm I'm still all boxed up. See the first step, but so far 6 different ways of applying it have just led me to 6 different strings of gibberish.

This is me, too. Frustrating!

I have a meta-question about Pandora's Blocks. If you're solving on Crosshare, do you get only a single attempt at the answer, or can you resubmit if your first try was wrong?

@hoover
As many times as you want on Crosshare!

I got it! That was fun.

Dino me!

Good fun!

Dino me!

Solidly stuck at Step 1. Will look again tonight.

Still no dinos here, either!

As a further question re Crosshare, does anyone know if Will can see all the embarrassingly wrong answers I've submitted hoping one of my many rabbit trails might be correct?

schmidzy wrote: ↑Mon Jun 06, 2022 11:03 am Still no dinos here, either!

As a further question re Crosshare, does anyone know if Will can see all the embarrassingly wrong answers I've submitted hoping one of my many rabbit trails might be correct?

I think he automatically gets the number of submissions but only sees the actual submissions if he requests them. A while back the prompt was a US state capital and he noticed a suspiciously large number of submissions from a couple people, so he checked and saw they were just entering every capital (and told them they would not qualify for the prize that way).

Like others, stuck on step one.

Dino me! But I needed a nudge!

Have lots of great ideas but none of them work.

schmidzy wrote: ↑Mon Jun 06, 2022 11:03 am Still no dinos here, either!

As a further question re Crosshare, does anyone know if Will can see all the embarrassingly wrong answers I've submitted hoping one of my many rabbit trails might be correct?

He'll see how many attempts, but only the last one is visible!

Hi folks!

Yes - Ben is right - I can see everyone's most recent submission and their total number of attempts. The only time I will request the full backlog of submissions from Mike is if someone has sent in 49 answers on a puzzle whose answer is "a state capital" (or the equivalent for some other meta prompt that has limited options). There's no shame in trying different strategies and checking the answer you get from each line of reasoning - that's a great way to improve!!


This one definitely deserves to be upgraded from Challenging -> HARD. The second step is really well disguised. Email me if you need a hint! And congrats to those who have successfully solved!

Got Step 2 after a long series of nudges from @BrennerTJ. That second jump falls into my kryptonite area.