"Tie Game" August 18, 2023

[VanVeen]

I really like the post-mortem discussions on these puzzles. They show how often dumb luck play into finding the solution.

For this one, I luckily focused on the "four" part of the hints and not the "game" part. I first looked at clues with only four words. There were only five or six of them but their answers didn't provide anything useful. Then I thought maybe it's 4-letter words, and noticed there were only four in the grid. It actually seemed too perfect and I checked and rechecked just to be positive that's all there were.

But if I'd fixated on the word "game," I'd probably never would have seen the true path.

Pretty cool construction to come up with a grid with only four 4-letter answers.

[DrTom]

Wow, the Muggles got a nice nod on Crossword Fiend today. If you don't usually read it, by all means do so on this occasion. I am not certain, since it just says "posted by Conrad" but the "Conrad" they have in their list of people is Eric Conrad and Eric is a "Muggle". Thanks Eric, I think the Muggles are a lovely bunch of people as well!

[Andrew Bradburn]

My contest answer is OPTION. Taking the four answers which include the title word GAME in their clues, CONNECT FOUR games by noting that OLE can be CUT OUT of WORDLE. Another GAME in the grid is PIT. Just as OLE is to WORDLE, so PIT is to OPTION, another GAME found in the clue for 28 Across.

Oh well, MikeS gets his first point of the year! MikeS: 1, MattG: 1, BethA: 31.

Until Thursday…

I wonder how many people remember the game Pit? I have seen a lot of references to the game Othello, but almost none to Pit, which I saw as well. Haven't played it in probably forty years. I remember it as a very loud game, as people are all talking over each other with trade offers.

Four appearances of the word GAME in the clues?
Four games as entries?
In a puzzle whose central entry is CONNECT FOUR and title is TIE GAME?
If Mike didn't plan this on purpose, his unconscious mind has a devious sense of humor!

[Joe Ross]

Eric @Conrad is a longstanding Muggle since the beginning months of this site & has been writing up the WSJCC for fiend for the last two & a half years, taking over for LauraB. He's a great solver, has excellent taste in music, and I'm lucky he considers me a friend.

[KscX]

My contest answer is OPTION. Taking the four answers which include the title word GAME in their clues, CONNECT FOUR games by noting that OLE can be CUT OUT of WORDLE. Another GAME in the grid is PIT. Just as OLE is to WORDLE, so PIT is to OPTION, another GAME found in the clue for 28 Across.

Oh well, MikeS gets his first point of the year! MikeS: 1, MattG: 1, BethA: 31.

Until Thursday…

I wonder how many people remember the game Pit? I have seen a lot of references to the game Othello, but almost none to Pit, which I saw as well. Haven't played it in probably forty years. I remember it as a very loud game, as people are all talking over each other with trade offers.

Four appearances of the word GAME in the clues?
Four games as entries?
In a puzzle whose central entry is CONNECT FOUR and title is TIE GAME?
If Mike didn't plan this on purpose, his unconscious mind has a devious sense of humor!

THE MARKET IS ….. OPEN!!!

[michaelm]

Another one I don't think I've seen mentioned are the four across / down connections near the four corners: (F)AST /(T)AST, (T)ENT / (T)ENT, LIZ / LIZ, and DOC /DOC. That chewed up a good part of my Thursday evening!

Apologies, just saw some discussions above of these and similar intersections. RTFM (Muggles)...

[Janet]

Another week on the Love Boat for me! I was focused on a tie game with 4 letters, not Othello!

[BarbaraK]

I expected to not do any serious meta solving until I got home from the beach on Friday, but of course I took a look on my phone Thursday evening. My first thought was to create a chain of games and pick up the letters where they "tie" together. Othello, Wordle, Connect Four, and ... is Ellery a game? Or maybe Toad? According to google, yes, kind of, maybe, or at least part of the name of a game. Seems games are like band names in that most any word you can think of has been part of the name of some obscure game somewhere, but I can't imagine that Mike would use stuff like that. Moving on...

Next I noticed the 4 "game" clues and knew that had to be the starting point. Also saw that 3 of them intersected and the fourth could be "tie"d to the others by CHARLIZE - the word that connects the four. Yup, no doubt, that's the mechanism. I'll bet there are other words that also appear in 4 clues and connect the same way. Also think the others will be more common words that are harder to find, so I'm not going to try to do that on my phone, I'll wait til I get home.

Which I did, and sure enough, I found 3 others!! Yes, 4 words with 4 occurrences each! This must be it.
"Game": CONNECTFOUR OLE CUTOUT WORDLE
"With": WAIVES CONNECTFOUR ELLERY WORDLE
"And": PEP ELENA CONNECTFOUR CHARLIZE
"The": FRESH INSEASON RULED SHANE
Now, to highlight them and see how they all connect ---- uh oh, they don't. One of the sets never touch; in one all four connect; the whole set of 16 is all over the place. And the initials don't spell anything (except firs), and nothing else I try makes words in any consistent way.

I took a look at the puzzle with my favorite analysis site https://boisvert42.github.io/mechapuzzle/ to see what else there might be 4 of, and this is when I noticed the 4 4-letter entries and saw how they tied together (and remembered thinking Othello must be involved.) So, on shore! Woo hoo!

But what about those 4 sets of 4-time clue words? With game being in the title, that has to mean something. And sure, the others are common words that show up multiple times in all puzzles, but exactly 4 times with exactly 4 words? Come on, the universe just can't work like that. Maybe there's a second path that leads to the same answer? If so, it's too well hidden for me. Or maybe Mike is doing like Pete Muller's MMMM mega-meta and created a deliberate red herring that's so elaborate that it's basically a second meta but leads to an answer like "nope" instead of the real answer? Again, if so, I never found it.

The more time that passes without anyone finding anything else, the more I believe that it really is just the universe messing with my mind. But I still wonder just a teeny tiny bit if Mike Shenk is having a good laugh right now about the clever puzzle he hid right under our noses.

[DBMiller]

As noted in Friday's Zoom, I have taught everyone well. Very much of the same rabbit holes, some took it farther, some I took farther.

The Connect Four game first led me to the 4-E's diagonally in the grid. No other set of letters had four in a row. This led me to search for either "ease" or "freeze (fourease)" in the clues. But alas, neither word was there. The clue for 60A had the word "rEprEsEntativE", with 4-E's. Could that be it? Doesn't seem likely.

There were only two sets of black spaces in the grid that were four blocks long. The letters at either end of those were TRAD. I looked for DART in the clues, but no. I wondered if I had a typo in the answers since TRAD was one letter away from the only 4-letter clue in the grid... TRAP.

Four clues with "game" in them. No help.

Title referred to a TIE game. Looked for possible four in a row blocked by others , such as EOOE and such. Also a dead end.

Tie games... 0-0. Goose EGGS? What about words with OO in the clues? ZOOS, COOK'S, MOOR. (Swing and a near hit!)

Went back to my TRAP idea, and for whatever reason, noticed the four 4-letter answers in the grid and was finally off to the races.

Took awhile to notice the possible confirmation. The meta answer was found in the clue for 36D: "Moor of drama". The answer, OTHELLO, was not only the Moor of Venice, but also a game played with black and white discs, as opposed to Connect Four being played with red and yellow discs. Coinky-dink?

-DB

[FloridaMan81]

Another one I don't think I've seen mentioned are the four across / down connections near the four corners: (F)AST /(T)AST, (T)ENT / (T)ENT, LIZ / LIZ, and DOC /DOC. That chewed up a good part of my Thursday evening!

Apologies, just saw some discussions above of these and similar intersections. RTFM (Muggles)...

Same… this was my primary rabbit hole. Even found “Liz” in Penalize in the clues and figured that had to mean something.

[hoover]

My contest answer is OPTION. Taking the four answers which include the title word GAME in their clues, CONNECT FOUR games by noting that OLE can be CUT OUT of WORDLE. Another GAME in the grid is PIT. Just as OLE is to WORDLE, so PIT is to OPTION, another GAME found in the clue for 28 Across.

Oh well, MikeS gets his first point of the year! MikeS: 1, MattG: 1, BethA: 31.

Until Thursday…

I wonder how many people remember the game Pit? I have seen a lot of references to the game Othello, but almost none to Pit, which I saw as well. Haven't played it in probably forty years. I remember it as a very loud game, as people are all talking over each other with trade offers.

Four appearances of the word GAME in the clues?
Four games as entries?
In a puzzle whose central entry is CONNECT FOUR and title is TIE GAME?
If Mike didn't plan this on purpose, his unconscious mind has a devious sense of humor!

I do. I found PIT, OTHELLO, WORDLE, ARCADE, and CONNECTFOUR. Today I learned there's apparently a game called CUT OUT?!

[Conrad]

Eric @Conrad is a longstanding Muggle since the beginning months of this site & has been writing up the WSJCC for fiend for the last two & a half years, taking over for LauraB. He's a great solver, has excellent taste in music, and I'm lucky he considers me a friend.

Thanks for the kind words, @DrTom and @Joe Ross! I just checked: I've written 143 Crossword Fiend writeups since I started in March 2021.

My first official Fiend writeup (I helped Laura a couple of times under her byline before that) was "We’ll Have Waters All Around" (https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have- ... 1616607262), one of my favorite WSJ "aha" moments.

If you haven't solved it yet: check it out before you read my writeup here: https://crosswordfiend.com/2021/03/28/w ... h-26-2021/

[MikeMillerwsj]

The contest answer is MOOR. As suggested by the center Across answer CONNECT FOUR, taking the four four-letter answers in the grid (FAST, TENT, TOAD, DOCK) and connecting them by their end letters, you get the phrase FASTEN TO A DOCK. That phrase is a clue to MOOR, found in the clue for OTHELLO.

The latest in a string of tricky ones! We had 906 entries, with about 57% correct, below our usual level around 75%. Lots of shots in the dark, since solvers could fish in the puzzles' clues for answers. They included SOCCER (20), PLAY (18), GREEN (13), REPRESENTED (11), TRAP (10), NOSE (7), CHENEY (6... possibly because it sounds like CHAIN-E?), and many others.

Congrats to this week's winner: Cindy Nowak!

[Bob cruise director]

Is this our own @Cindy N ? - If so CONGRATULATIONS!!!!! Always great to have a muggle winner.

And as if you needed to be told, we are now in a 4 weeks out of 5 of a challenging stretch of WSJ metas - both for number of submissions and percentage correct.

So if you feel like you are in a slump, do not be discouraged. Think of it as facing Nolan Ryan at his prime and going 1 for 5. Even all-stars would be proud of that.

[The XWord Rabbit]

An embarrassment of riches this week for The XWord Rabbit. Four nominees! A new record!!

The entry to that juicy 34 across clue in the center of Mr. Shenk’s “Tie Game” puzzle was the key to finding it all,
but still vague enough to go astray, as many of you proved.

CONNECT FOUR was intended to lead solvers to the four 4-letter entries in the puzzle: 20A. FAST – 29A. TENT – 39A. TOAD and 51A. DOCK. Connect them consecutively by their end letters and you get “FASTEN TO A DOCK”, a clue to which the first word of 36D was the answer: MOOR.

“Uniqueness of method” is always of critical importance to your Rabbit, so he can’t be as generous in choosing nominees as he would like. Still, so many suffered…

Your Rabbit must give credit (and a nomination) to benchen71 for leading the way, carefully laying out a perfectly logical road map that others soon followed. (Post #245). He found five diagonals containing three out of four identical letters, eventually arriving at THEORY TOILET. Isn’t that lovely?

Before we get to our other nominees a couple of honorable mentions: Bird Lives for finding three rows with four repeated letters in addition to a diagonal line of E’s (Post #256) and Ergcat for following a false lead that led him to believe that “Tie Game” might refer to neckwear (Post #268).

But there were other Muggles who took an entirely fresh – but very wrong - approach:

Much to your Rabbit’s delight femullen started with the two games that intersected CONNECT FOUR in the grid and wound up in La-La Land. (Post #267) Bravo!

We have BarbaraK who took an accounting path, looking for identical words that appeared in four clues and tried to find a connection – except there wasn’t one. (Post #289)

And then there was HunterX who took a geometrical path by noting the four critical clues and tried joining them with straight lines (Post #279). When that proved unsuccessful he tried the same method inside the grid (Post #279) and found a few unrelated four-letter words including “HOHO”.

"HOHO", indeed! In all, it was a great week for your Rabbit! Thanks to all and see you next week.

[Cindy N]

Yep, it is I! It's me! I received the email first thing yesterday morning and promptly replied. Today I received another email to "make sure" since they hadn't gotten my reply. Panic mode! But all resolved now.

[benchen71]

Your Rabbit must give credit (and a nomination) to benchen71 for leading the way, carefully laying out a perfectly logical road map that others soon followed. (Post #245). He found five diagonals containing three out of four identical letters, eventually arriving at THEORY TOILET. Isn’t that lovely?

Yay! I got a nomination!! Thanks, XWord Rabbit!!!

[MikeyG]

Your Rabbit must give credit (and a nomination) to benchen71 for leading the way, carefully laying out a perfectly logical road map that others soon followed. (Post #245). He found five diagonals containing three out of four identical letters, eventually arriving at THEORY TOILET. Isn’t that lovely?

Yay! I got a nomination!! Thanks, XWord Rabbit!!!

After that theory, I'm sure you were flushed!

[MatthewL]

Your Rabbit must give credit (and a nomination) to benchen71 for leading the way, carefully laying out a perfectly logical road map that others soon followed. (Post #245). He found five diagonals containing three out of four identical letters, eventually arriving at THEORY TOILET. Isn’t that lovely?

Yay! I got a nomination!! Thanks, XWord Rabbit!!!

After that theory, I'm sure you were flushed!

You might even say he was bowled over.

[Joe Ross]

Yay! I got a nomination!! Thanks, XWord Rabbit!!! :D

After that theory, I'm sure you were flushed!

You might even say he was bowled over.

He plumb tanked it for the Golden Rabbit Hole Nomination.