Title: “Don’t Even Try”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is a seven-letter word.
Answer: TIGHTEN
Correct entries: 149

Kind of a tragic meta last week. It started with a beautiful initial idea, but an idea that seems in retrospect fated to not really work out that well, since it required so much from the grid that there was no equally graceful second step via which to extract the answer. Think of it as a movie whose first hour and 45 minutes is excellent but then the director couldn’t find much of an ending to round things out.

That opening idea was: each clue box ending in a certain odd number contained the same letter, with one key exception. So boxes 3, 13, 23, 33, 43, and 53 each contained the letter I; 5, 15, 25, 35, 45, and 55 all had G’s; 7, 17, 27, 37, 47, and 57 were H’s; and 9, 19, 29, 39, 49, and 59 were all T’s. You would think the 1’s might contain the same pattern, but no: boxes 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, 51, and 61 contained seven different letters, but astute meta-solvers noticed two things: 1) the letters therein — E, F, L, M, N, R, and S — were presented in alphabetical order, which was unlikely to happen by chance, and 2) each of those letters completes a five-letter word ending in ?IGHT, the letters formed by the other odd-numbered squares.

So that was Step 1, which I liked a lot, but which I only realized contained a shortcut when I read Joon’s review on Wednesday. Namely: from the title “Don’t Even Try,” which hints at the odd numbers, you could just read the odd-numbered boxes in the grid to get EIGHT, FIGHT, LIGHT, MIGHT, NIGHT, RIGHT, and SIGHT. I’m more than a little embarrassed to say that I hadn’t noticed this possibility; I thought you had to get there via noticing the separate I, G, H, and T boxes first.

When I first tried this theme I used a grid whose highest number was 70, necessitating seven I’s, G’s, H’s and T’s in the grid, plus EFLMNRS. This was too much strain on the grid, however, so I retreated to the grid I wound up using, whose highest number was 61. Going below 61 created a grid that was too wide-open to use (or, at least, I couldn’t find a way to make it work) even with the eased constraints of using six each of IGHT instead of seven each. What I didn’t appreciate at the time was how distracting that 61-box would be to solvers, with its spare S — an S that, unlike the grid’s EFLMNR, doesn’t have an -IGHT to complete it.

We’ll come back to that in a moment, but let’s finish the meta first. The second step, suggested by my prefers-to-remain-anonymous-meta-helper whom I sometimes refer to here as Consigliere, was what we wound up using: As hinted at in the clue at 61-A, there is one clue in the puzzle that starts with each of the seven key letters EFLMNRS. They are, in order of clue number:

19-A: [Eel’s neighbor on a sushi plate, often] = TUNA
43-A: [“Feeling better?” response] I‘M OKAY
5-D: [Legendary pitcher Perry] = GAYLORD
27-D: [Maintain possession of] = HOLD
29-D: [Nominal, as an effort] = TOKEN
40-D: [Rides (on), as a ship] = EMBARKS
54-D: [Sihanouk deposer of 1970] = NOL

The first letters of those spell TIGHTEN, found by 149 solvers.

Back to that stray S in the 61 box, though. On Friday night, with the puzzle already delayed, I received an ominous note from my prefers-to-remain-anonymous test-solver whom I sometimes refer to here as Supertester, that began:

I’m worried about this for a few reasons:

The fact that SIGHT isn’t spelled out is distracting. As you saw, I originally thought the last word was “RIGHTS”. Granted, I eventually got that this was possibly the start of SIGHT and hey, if someone gets the EFLMNR for TIGHTE, the answer will come quickly. But this is a pretty severe inelegance – there’s no obvious reason for SIGHT to not be spelled out. Presumably the actual reason is that constructing a grid with 69 numbered squares that works to include SIGHT was impossible, but that’s not clear to an ordinary solver like me. I’ll be honest – I’m nervous that this flaw is going to get kind of overblown in solver’s reactions to the puzzle also and result in it not getting the usual love.
I would have guessed TIGHTEN from where I was. It’s another IGHT word and it works perfectly with the instructions as written. But a correct guess like that is not satisfying (for either the solver or constructor).
It is hard to notice that there’s only one clue that begins with each of these letters. Really, the solve path is not to *notice* this, but to just think “I wonder if exactly one clue begins with each of these letters” and then go exploring and find that it works. It’s not entirely unfair – the first gimmick is specifically about changing *starting* letters, so it’s not coming out of nowhere to look for clues *starting* that way. But the first gimmick is ALSO just as much about words that all end the same, and the clues don’t use that aspect…

When I get a note on a Week 5 from Supertester that starts with the words “I’m worried,” well, that’s not a good feeling, since I trust his sense of what’s legit in a meta as least as much as I trust my own. Eventually I did score a miracle mini-save, as I wrote him back later:

I cautiously think I might have saved everything…we shall see. I made the clue for 61-A [Devote, as time looking for clues] = SPEND. So that (I hope) deflects the weirdness of the no-IGHT S there, and the last across is the obvious place for a revealer like that so doesn’t seem weird, and “looking” ties into “SIGHT”, and then SIGHT also leads logically to TIGHTEN, but only after the fact. Elegant…I think?!?! Time will tell.

I think that clue to 61-A did help the meta claw its way back to respectability, but I’m not sure I’d include this one in the next book. Although it did get a reasonable rating at Fiend (3.61/5.00) and a pretty perfect number of correct solves for a Week 5 (149), there’s just too much inelegance and head-scratching for solvers for me to feel anything but ambivalent (at best) about it.

And that’s that, as De Niro says at the end of “Casino.” Week 1 awaits.

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is a Major League Baseball team.