IF YOU ARE STILL TRYING TO SOLVE AND DON'T WANT THAT SPOILED, DO NOT VIEW THIS POST
Pardon my prematurity but I am going to be travelling when this reveal should have been posted (Tuesday) and I knew it would be long and very hard to do on a phone. So, since I can compartmentalize the topic, I thought I'd do it now and people can look or not look as they wish.
This is one of those “slow roll” kind of constructions. I got the idea from a NYT Connections puzzle that had entries like INK, LACK, RANGE and I said, “Oh there is a meta in there”. So I started and came up with the KITTEN. Because I could not find appropriately sized words it had to be asymmetric, so I had to add the ()’s with numbers so that people might identify what the theme answers were and their order.
I sent that out to be tested and everyone said, “fun but way too easy”. OK, back to the drawing board. The PERSIAN was the next iteration where I was able to find entries that had the first two letters of a word that contained the last remaining letters of a color, so STC and SCREAM gave me CREAM. The difficulty there was finding the three letter intros AND making sure there were no other words with those two first letters (harder than I thought actually).
When I had it all ready I sent out the version which you would eventually see as the PUMA, and the solvers liked it but said it was too hard to see the “trick”, so I changed the asterisks to the three letter piece (the PERSIAN) and, to my main tester, that was the “baby bear”.
But what to do with all the others, oh heck just use them and, while I was at it, have one where NONE of the entries have a designator and see if people will notice things like IMBONY and IME, or the rarely seem HILUM and HIP. There was even an Easter egg for regular MEOW solvers because it had a last-week tie in. I had BOINK and BOP (for PINK) and interestingly enough I had almost used BOINK instead of BONK in the “My Pop Quiz Burst!” where the OP word was BOP. (and I also had COP in that puzzle!)
The Kitten version was the most straightforward, there were 6 words, each with a parenthetical number. Add one letter to each of those words to get a color, then put those added letters in parenthetical numeric order.
The “trick” to the PERSIAN-LION versions was seeing that one of the entries was a part of another word, and that no other words in the grid started with those letters. If you “canceled out” the common letters you were left with a color, and the first letters of those colors spelled out COPPER, a colorful word for Police. In the PERSIAN and PUMA you had a “nudge” in that one of those parts was identified for each entry, in the LION you just had to be observant of that fact.
All in all it seemed to be well accepted and interestingly it was almost equal between the Lion and the Kitten for most solved version. There was one minor “nit” that was, correctly, mentioned. It appears I had assigned “Nephew” status to Swee-Pea RE: Popeye. Turns out he probably was not a nephew, but what he was exactly is not clear. Some say he was a foundling on Olive Oyl’s doorstep, another version has him as a royal baby, and yet another as the ward of Popeye and/or Olive Oyl. There are even some who speculate it was Olive’s baby, but of course that brings into play a whole MESS of other questions. So let’s just go with the “ward” thing and try to forgive my lineage lapse.
