XWord Muggles Forum

The cat is out of the bag ONLY because Boharr ripped that sucker open for me. My follow through was non-existent on this one. Nicely done, Josh!

Had this grid in my back pocket all week, awaiting Saturday. Worth the wait!

Well I'll be darned, another clever Josh puzzle that befuddled me until I got a Creator Nudge. In my defense I THOUGHT about the right mechanism during one of my frustrated attempts, but to my detriment, thinking about it is not doing it.

Great puzzle and once again a prodigious piece of construction.

TB

Geez Louise, off the couch because Josh basically carried me. Rough one for me. Putting it in my memory bank of techniques.

Welp. I’ve read all the nudges and spoilers and still have no idea what we are talking about. ??

Update - thanks to Whimsy and Abide I finally went far enough to get it.

Gorsh - some of you clever muggles got that without nudges? I’m not worthy....

Got the cat out with the nudges. Impressive!

Ohhhh... With all of the spoiler nudges, I see the mechanism, which is something that I tried early on, but I was coming at it from a slightly different angle, so all I got was gibberish.

Yeesh was I dense on this one! I sensed the mechanism right from the beginning, but stubbornly refused to apply it properly.

Thanks to Josh for a fun meta and remarkable construction...

...and for VERY patiently correcting the many wrong ways I tried to apply it. He probably felt a bit like SpongeBob towards the end

Solution:

The title was supposed to get you thinking about knights on a chess board. If you start at the circled squares and hop southeast like a knight, you can spell out some Knights of the Round Table:

Learned helplessness usually keeps me from attempting these, and I did not solve this one.

But with all the talk of solving metas in the bathroom, I'll share my amusement at the TMI in this puzzle when I filled in an M as the second letter to 3D, and then thought that "when he does it" (50A) was in the a.m. Took me far too long to correct that mistake.

My definitely non-nudgeless path while test solving included something along these lines---

"L", "Yeah" -- "A", "Yup" -- "N", "Keep going" -- "C", "Yes!" -- "E", "You got it!" -- "R", "Argghh!"
Because LANCERS was one of the possibilities I'd tucked away in my head when first mulling a solution.
There were in fact 2 ways to get as far as LANCER (singular.)

At that point I wailed to Josh, "But I can't find an S! And that's only one of the circled letters anyhow!"
Whereupon he reminded me of the importance of 35A (and I believe upped the ante to "Very important direction.")

A little example of the back-and=forth of testing.

Originally, I did NOT see the "Very Important direction" as I filled in 35A with the the crossings and never read the clue!
As a result, I was hopping all over the place without rhyme or reason.

Like @whimsy as I was spelunking through the grid LANCERS came to mind as I hopped down from the corner position through LANC..., but as soon it changed to LANCELOT the light bulb went off and the solve was complete.

FrankieHeck wrote: ↑Tue Jun 01, 2021 7:32 am Learned helplessness usually keeps me from attempting these, and I did not solve this one.

But with all the talk of solving metas in the bathroom, I'll share my amusement at the TMI in this puzzle when I filled in an M as the second letter to 3D, and then thought that "when he does it" (50A) was in the a.m. Took me far too long to correct that mistake.

I did the same thing and e-mailed Josh to that effect along with my answer.

knew that the answer would involve knight moves, but once you move from the edge onto the board, there are 8 choices for the next square and from there another 8 and so on. It took me a while, but once I found LANCE, I quickly saw how it had to go.
.
I .

I knew from the beginning that knight moves would be involved, as well the very important direction SE. And even the possible direction-changing DEMON. But I was intent on finding a one-to-one mapping of circled letters to answer letters for the longest time. I finally figured it out last night after several patient corrections from Josh.

This is particularly embarrassing since my name was one of the septad!

And only some of the Knights of the Round Table are found because Sir Robin bravely ran away, away.