XWord Muggles Forum

This is a meta that fell pretty quickly if you did a frequency analysis on the theme answers.

The 43 letters in the theme answers had some interesting and revealing properties.

There were 8 different letters with the following frequencies:

D 10
E 10
L 2
N 2
R 6
S 9
U 3
W 1

The letters T,A,I, and O together amount to about 32% of a random passage in English. I would expect roughly 12 of those characters to be present in the theme answers. There were zero!

I would expect about 2 D’s; there were 10!

I would expect about 5 E’s; there were 10!

R’s and S’s were also way out of line!

Frequency analysis told me that there was nothing random about the theme answers. The letters themselves were crucially important.

From the title I was already contemplating the existence of North, South, East, and West. And there were N,S,E, and W!

What about D,L,R,and U? Also directions? Head slap. Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!

Where to start? The helpful clue told me where there was “a good place to start”.

And off to the races.

This was a very fair meta. It did not require any outside specialized knowledge, and required no guesswork. It was a 100% solid, no ifs, ands, or buts solution.

I noticed 13D and the NSEW immediately, but it was a long while before the UDLR directions smacked me in the head. In my early attempts to get something besides gibberish, I also tried starting with SQUARE ONE of each theme entry. Using just NSEW that starts off promisingly with BIAS. But then devolves into an old MacDonald-ish refrain of vowels. Wow. This puzzle is a marvel of cruciverbalist engineering!

Could somebody please explain how the letters in the path were selected? I figured out the directional situation but MODRSOSEYEGAE(etc) didn't mean anything to me. Thanks.

Martin Blank wrote: ↑Mon May 17, 2021 7:24 am Could somebody please explain how the letters in the path were selected? I figured out the directional situation but MODRSOSEYEGAE(etc) didn't mean anything to me. Thanks.

Explained in detail

But what was the point of the starred clues? Several of them don't even figure into the solution. Were they just distractors?

Even with the "solution" laid out, I'm still not seeing the path as to why the specific letters were selected.

Before finding 13D as the starting “direction,” I spent lots of time trying to find the key in 17A, including looking for HEREs and THEREs and reading through the entire text of One Fish Two Fish looking for hints. And noting that book has a character named Ned (14D)! Not a total waste of time because the book is such a delight, can’t wait to hear our grandkids read it (in a couple of years…).

The plus side to all this ego bruising is, Friday and Saturday grids seem like a breeze by comparison!

I saw the 8 directional letters composing all the starred words early on, but, like others, took 13a to mean starting with square one of each word. Nada. Then we heard through the grapevine to start with M, and my partner drove us home.
Kudos to you solo solvers who crushed this one!

eagle1279 wrote: ↑Mon May 17, 2021 7:43 am Before finding 13D as the starting “direction,” I spent lots of time trying to find the key in 17A, including looking for HEREs and THEREs and reading through the entire text of One Fish Two Fish looking for hints. And noting that book has a character named Ned (14D)! Not a total waste of time because the book is such a delight, can’t wait to hear our grandkids read it (in a couple of years…).

Yes, I was also trying to see if the clue “from there to here, etc” had some meaning! I also thought 52D “ENDS” had something to do with it after I saw 13D a “good place to start”.

KayW wrote: ↑Mon May 17, 2021 7:11 am I noticed 13D and the NSEW immediately, but it was a long while before the UDLR directions smacked me in the head. In my early attempts to get something besides gibberish, I also tried starting with SQUARE ONE of each theme entry. Using just NSEW that starts off promisingly with BIAS. But then devolves into an old MacDonald-ish refrain of vowels. Wow. This puzzle is a marvel of cruciverbalist engineering!

My solving journey almost exactly! In addition to this: I looked at the NSEW letters in each of the starred answers--looked at the adjacent letter in the appropriate direction (so if it was an N I looked at the letter above, E I looked to the right). More gibberish. Then I (finally) figured out the right mechanism and began spelling out the word. As soon as I got to M-E-A-N, I said to my husband--it's going to be MEANDERS. This was a tough one!

Well I never was too good at following directions. This puzzle did me in. Feel defeated that I couldn't get it even after a nudge from Wendy. I did enjoy reading One Fish Two Fish again and searching for "funny things everywhere"...like "gag". Even knowing the mechanism I came up with nonsense. Now that I see the explanation I feel like an idiot. Amazingly tricky for me. Great job to those who cracked it.

Still dont see it.

Ooof. We tried following NSEW and got nowhere. We pondered "maybe it's directionals (up/down) instead"... ugh. We even noticed the unusual only same 8 letters being used, but somehow got stuck on DERSU since the others were rarer.

There's always next week.

Did anyone else notice that, apart from the 7 entries, there were 7 other words that only included NSEW UDLR letters?

DRESDEN ---> ESSEN intrigued me but I couldn't come up with pairings for any of the other 6.



Once I noticed the Square One clue again everything fell into place. What a tricky rabbit hole.

This mechanism might have been more familiar to those who have been doing the WSJ metas for a while. Previous puzzles using the path-through-the-grid mechanism are 10-18-19, 7-13-18, and 10-23-15. There may be more.

I didn't look at the puzzle until yesterday afternoon - fortunately didn't spend too much time on it because it was a terrible puzzle. I've spent 15 minutes this morning with the answer trying to make it work and still can't.

Well this puzzle certainly brought out all the possibilities. I initially thought that it was entirely different because I mistook the " in 36A "Surely you can't think I did it" to be an asterisk. It made little sense except that I needed 8 letters and that was the 8th word. Wow, never saw any of the big boys use a three letter theme word, but....

After I noticed it was a quotation mark and looked at the REAL words I saw the NSEW and, since I have been trained by some of the best (Joe, Oldjudge, and all the others who have held my hand over the past few years) I immediately latched onto the Square 1 reference. That was frustrating because of course it went nowhere. Then I had flirtations with "no black squares", "start over with each word", and all of the various rabbit holes I have seen mentioned.

Finally I looked and saw that the OTHER letters in the theme words were UDLR - OF COURSE!!! From there I made my life considerably easier by thinking, "OK, so what would be the most logical thing - I have a starting letter and 7 sets of directions, I must have to begin there and "follow directions" to the next letter and so forth...". Here is where Joe's spreadsheet REALLY was a lifesaver. Rather than try to do it on paper (something that was yielding odd words) I took the directions and wrote them on a separate piece of paper. I then put my cursor in Square 1, highlighted it a nice blue and used the CURSOR key to move. After each stopping point I highlighted the square and by the time I got to MEAN I knew where it had to lead. I suppose it would have been really special had it ended up in the bottom right, but that would have been SUPERNATURALLY AMAZING given all of the constraints this puzzle's construction must have imposed. So I'll settle for AWESOME and delight in the fact that for this week at least, I was one of the people who solved it. This goes right up there with ADOBE on my "META RED LETTA DAYS".

TPS wrote: ↑Mon May 17, 2021 8:24 am I didn't look at the puzzle until yesterday afternoon - fortunately didn't spend too much time on it because it was a terrible puzzle. I've spent 15 minutes this morning with the answer trying to make it work and still can't.

TERRIBLE puzzle? TERRIBLE puzzle? C'mon TPS, it was a beautiful puzzle that had to take great planning and many hours to construct. It gave you everything you needed to solve it, it had a clue to the starting point and, if you analyze it logically, a set of theme answers that SCREAMED directions (as the puzzle title implies). The word it yields fits perfectly and makes inherent sense.

So, yes, it was a challenging puzzle, but just because one doesn't have the ability to do it doesn't make it terrible. I cannot paint but I don't look at Monet's Nymphéas and say, "I couldn't do that they must be ugly!"

The puzzle was superb.

Abide wrote: ↑Mon May 17, 2021 12:24 am If you don’t see the signaling clue at 13-D, it’s impossible. IMO that clue should have read more like “Square____(good place to begin following directions)”

Mike's done this before. On the RICHARD III puzzle, once I figured out what to do, I didn't know where to begin. After looking at the grid for what seemed like hours, I saw the word START sitting right there toward the bottom. Duh. Lesson learned. When he uses the word "start," listen up.

I don’t think you’re being honest if you call that only 3 1/2 stars. I think there is some “solver’s bias” in the rating system... 5+ for me.