IMPORTANT NOTE: As of February 2020 MGWCC is available only to subscribers at my Patreon page. A subscription costs $3/month.

Title: No-Win Situations
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is an eight-letter word.
Answer: OVERTIME
Correct entries: 652

This one turned out OK, but wasn’t the home run I’d hoped for. No main theme entries, but clusters of certain pairs of letters leapt off the page for most solvers, but perhaps took a little time to fully puzzle out.

The idea was that four 3×3 squares in the grid represent a tie game in tic-tac-toe (sometimes called a cat’s game, though that’s not relevant to the meta), with four of one letter and five of another and no winner. They are illustrated in the solution grid at right, with the 5’s in orange and the 4’s in aqua. Take the 5’s first to get OVER, then the 4’s to get TIME and you’ve got contest answer OVERTIME, fittingly since that’s the result of a tie game in regulation in many sports.

Not as clean as I wanted it to be, since you could tumble to the right answer without fully grokking the tic-tac-toe theme, though not that many solvers actually did so. Also the fill got pretty ratty; in my first version I had, in retrospect extremely optimistically, TIC-TAC-TOE across the center of the grid. Yeah, not gonna happen — in fact, the grid was so stressed by the theme that I couldn’t even work TIC, TAC, *or* TOE in as a reveal entry, much less all three together. But luckily it turned out solvers didn’t need them, as 652 right answers came flooding in, just three fewer than on Week 1.

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is a well-known children’s show.