Title: “A City of Puzzles”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer, which is located in one of the eight U.S. states that begins with the letter N, is a city that often appears in crosswords.
Answer: UTICA, NEW YORK
Correct entries: 293 overall, of which 193 were solo solves, of which 39 were without the hint
For the second month in a row, the “Week 2” puzzle has turned out to be Week 4- or 5-level difficulty. Both times it was due to a single step whose hiddenness I vastly underestimated. I thought I had solved the Week 2 curse in 2021, but it’s rearing its head with a vengeance in 2022 thus far.
Instructions were complicated (see above). Could it be TAOS or RENO? ELKO or ELON? OMAHA or OLEAN? Let’s take a look…
STEP 1: Five cities (or really towns, in some cases) were placed symmetrically in the grid:
15-A: [City near Devil’s Tower National Monument] = SUNDANCE
30-A: [City at the foot of Mount Rainier] = BUCKLEY
48-A: [City east of Tampa that’s named for a tree] = MULBERRY
9-D: [City just north of Hartford] = GRANBY
34-D: [City just northeast of Paducah] = MARION
All very small, and you’ve likely never heard of any of them unless you’re close by to begin with. So must be some very good reason to choose these.
Now what? STEP 2: Let’s see what states these are in, since their states are notably missing from their clues, though you could puzzle them out from just the clues if you were so inclined:
SUNDANCE — WYOMING
BUCKLEY — WASHINGTON
MULBERRY — FLORIDA
GRANBY — CONNECTICUT
MARION — KENTUCKY. A few stumbles on this one, since there just happens to be a Marion, Illinois nearby. But that’s northwest of Paducah, not northeast, plus all the other hints in the clues are in-state, and this one would’ve involved crossing a state line (in fact the Ohio River).
STEP 3: Here’s where it got Week 5 tough when I was expecting it to be Week 2 easyish. As a solver looked at the five city/state pairings above, I thought it would jump off the page that all six city/state combinations use each of the six main vowels (AEIOU and sometimes Y) exactly one time. Or that they are “euryvocalic,” as the self-referencing word for this quality has it.
But evidently it not only does not jump off the page, it hides beneath the page. Very few solvers saw this quickly, and only a few dozen saw it at all without taking the hint I sent out at 3 PM. That hint was a new title, “I Suspect Vowel Play,” which lowered the difficulty level from a Week 5 to about a Week 3.
If you did get Step 3 then you were probably off to the races: STEP 4: you can eliminate 7 of the 8 N-states right off the bat, since they contain one or more disqualifying double-vowels so no need to even look for cities there: NORTH CAROLINA, NORTH DAKOTA, NEBRASKA, NEVADA, NEW HAMPSHIRE, NEW MEXICO, and NEW JERSEY weren’t usable, so that leaves us with a city in good old NEW YORK whose only vowels are an A, an I, and a U, and which often appears in crosswords.
That would be UTICA, NEW YORK, which has appeared 48 times in the Shortz Era at the NYT, most recently this past Monday. Which I didn’t plan…or did I? (raised eyebrow emoji)
Anyway, apologies for the misgauging of the difficulty there. The hint allowed many solvers to course-correct, however, and we’ll see if I can overcome the Week 2 Curse in March (spoiler alert: I CAN!).
GUEST CONSTRUCTOR PUZZLE:
Today’s Week 3 is by guest constructor Matthew Stock. Matthew (he/him) is a math educator and puzzle maker in St. Louis, Mo. His first published crossword ran in late 2019, and his work has since appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, and the AV Club, among other venues. He started solving and constructing metas last year.
Matthew loves helping new folks get started in crossword constructing — if you’re interested in talking to him about puzzles, you can find him on Twitter (@1MatthewStock) or at his website, www.happylittlepuzzles.com.
Thanks, Matthew! Let’s see what he’s got for Week 3…
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest answer is an animal.