XWord Muggles Forum

Hey all,

I'm doing Enigmarch for the second time this year. It's a social media challenge to create a new puzzle a day based on that day's prompt.

I ran out of time in February to do a monthly meta contest puzzle, so hopefully this will serve as a little substitute.

I anticipate that a lot of mine will be mini-metas of the sort I occasionally post on Crosshare, though I want to push myself to branch out a bit (if you look at the #enigmarch hashtag on Twitter, you'll see a lot of participants are part of the escape room world, and it's fascinating to me the speed with which they can put together visually-oriented puzzles).

I'm going to post them all in this thread. I think I got to Day 17 last year, though I make no promises about how far I'll get.

Here's Day 1 (yesterday): KEY. I forgot to click the "hide meta reveal until future date" option, so you can see the answer immediately if you want.

https://crosshare.org/crosswords/ujIcNe ... -day-1-key

Day 2

http://www.lexicondevil.live/2023/03/pu ... birds.html

Day 3!

This one's a proper meta that I think Muggles will enjoy.

https://crosshare.org/crosswords/fhNx3R ... day-3-wind

Hats off to Hector and LauraM for cracking Day 3!

I've turned off the meta reveal function on the last two so the answers will remain hidden for a week (Crosshare's default setting).

Day 4 - another midi meta.

Only benchen71 has solved this one so far.

https://crosshare.org/crosswords/tEjtT3 ... ay-4-light

Hector has solved Day 4.

Day 5 - GEM - another meta!

Sledge and benchen71 are already on the leaderboard.

https://crosshare.org/crosswords/4MVtC3 ... -day-5-gem

Day 5 leaderboard:

Sledge
benchen71
Laura M
whimsy
Hector
Mr Tex

Day 4 leaderboard:

benchen71
Hector
Laura M

Day 6 is a crushword spiral. Read the info - you need to be able to enter rebuses for this one. In my browser (Safari) you have to hit Escape and the first letter of the rebus entry to get the rebus popup to stay open, which may not be true in other browsers. No meta, but this will keep you busy for a minute, I suspect.

https://crosswordnexus.com/solve/?puzzl ... fa199e.jpz

Day 7 ARROW is a mini meta.

I'll be interested to see who gets this one. You probably need to have been alive in the 1980s, which most muggles were.

Did I mention I'm happy to give hints for any of the metas whose answers aren't visible yet?

https://crosshare.org/crosswords/XiraYJ ... ay-7-arrow

Day 7 leaderboard:

Mr Tex solved at 11:04 on 3/7/2023
sledge solved at 11:12 on 3/7/2023
Meg solved at 13:18 on 3/7/2023
Hector solved at 19:13 on 3/7/2023
Laura M solved at 1:47 on 3/8/2023

Day 8 CURSE is my attempt at an escape-room-style puzzle.

Answer checker:

https://www.callingit.in/1/#mcPBnOkaqHh ... 1cGJvYXJk-

Let me know if you got it.

Hector, BrennerTJ and Laura M have submitted correct Day 7 answers through various channels.

What happened with Day 9? I wrote a puzzle that wound up having a big error in it. I thought about posting it with the prompt "see if you can guess what the answer was supposed to be!" but it just didn't seem like that would actually be fun for anyone.

So what I'm going to do is take the prompts for Days 9, 10, and/or 11 and see if I can combine them into a multi-part puzzle. Tune in on Saturday for another update.

I'll update this to include Days 9 - 14, which I put on Twitter but not here.

For now, probably the last #enigmarch I'll be able to manage. This will double as this months Meta Challenge. Answers due a week from today via Crosshare.

No one's gotten this yet. Hint: you probably need to have spent some time in a casino to get it

Enigmarch day 22: DICE

https://crosshare.org/crosswords/fIcpHj ... ay-22-dice

Correct answers on Day 22 so far from

Alex Boisvert
Sanne Budd
benchen71

Twitter thread of days 9-14 is here:



None of these are crosswords but they all work in a way that's similar to how xw metas work. They range from very hard (days 9-11) to pretty easy (days 13-14).

Anyone who wants to solve these can DM me and I'll post a running list of correct answerers.

And please do try to solve them - one irony of Enigmarch is that I wanted to get away from just making a mini-meta crossword for every prompt, but Crosshare is the only means I know of for a constructor to post a puzzle of any sort and see how many solvers attempted it and a list of correct answerers.