XWord Muggles Forum

Hello, solvers! There's a new contest crossword on Fill Me In. I'll rate this one 2.3 bananas on a scale of 5 bananas. (Bananas has nothing to do with the puzzle, it's just a 1-to-5 scale we made up.)

The puzzle is called "Boom!" and was constructed by me (Brian Cimmet). The solution to the puzzle is a 12-letter word.

The crossword can be downloaded from here. You're welcome to solve, you're even welcome to join in the chatter about the puzzle -- but if you want to be eligible for a prize, you have to listen to the podcast for this week's password. The podcast can be found here (via Apple Podcasts), or just search for it wherever you enjoy podcasts.

Once you've solved the puzzle, submit your answer and this week's password by email to fmi@bemoresmarter.com. You can also contact us with any suggestions, questions, comments, or ideas. Thanks for playing along!

Got it! A slow unraveling of the mechanism. And the is waiting for ice cream.

Pared the plantain. Great puzzle...

I'm sure I have the answer, but not sure I have the entire mechanism.

Banana peeled and split.

That one unpeeled pretty quickly.
Have an answer. (will await the solution posting to see if I have the answer).

Peeled! Nice puzzle! I didn't get the last one though I danced around it, so this felt good.

Boom! I self censored my response.

(No banana split emoji?)

Got it peeled.

Creative. Impressively done.

P+65A.
It took a while but I got it in the end.

Came to this one late. (Dang, I was too busy to exhaustively seek out all metas last week. I'll need to do something about that.)

Split and peeled. (Or vice versa? Which comes first?)

Thank you all for playing along with the contest puzzle from Episode #280. The correct answer was THUNDERCLAPS.

The entire grid was made up of only 12 letters. And the most common (and perhaps only?) 12-letter word that can be made of each of those letters once is THUNDERCLAPS (slightly hinted at by the title).

There's a new puzzle for Episode #282, but I will admit – it is not a crossword. It's a contest puzzle, but of a different sort.