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Title: “Black Is the New Black”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is a piece of sports equipment.
Answer: 8-Ball (in pool/billiards)
Correct entries: 366 overall, of which 294 were solo solves

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

NOTE: strange scheduling for the next couple of weeks: today’s puzzle is Week 1 of 4 in May, and next Friday’s puzzle will be the missing Week 5 of 5 in April. Reason being I kept banging my head against this idea that wound up not working (see below) and thus found myself without a Week 5. Rather than do rush a job with a new idea, I decided to go ahead and swap this week’s Week 5 with May’s Week 1. I’m also going to explain below what that idea was, because a) you might find it interesting to see what a didn’t-work-out Week 5 looks like, and b) sharing the idea publicly will prevent me from spending even more time trying (most likely in vain) to make it work.

LAST WEEK’S PUZZLE:

A piece of sports equipment lurked somewhere in last week’s puzzle. No obvious theme entries in the 13×13 grid, but there sure were a lot of black squares, and a lot of certain letters of the alphabet.

Indeed, eagle-eyed solvers noticed that the letters in the world BLACK were quite prominent in the grid, and the puzzle’s title hinted in that direction as well. The key was to blacken every square in the grid with one of those letters in it. When you did so, a pattern emerged, as illustrated in Gridmaster’s T‘s solution graphic above.

Those blackened squares, when added to the black squares already in the grid, formed an 8-ball. I believe this was a unique idea; I can’t recall another puzzle where certain squares get blackened, then, when added to the already-existing black squares, form a relevant pattern. If you know of such a puzzle, please let me know about it (crosswordcontest@gmail.com).

THE WEEK 5 IDEA THAT ATE 9 HOURS OF MY LIFE I’LL NEVER GET BACK:

So I’ve wanted to write The Great American Wordle Crossword ever since the game became popular. The best one I’ve seen is Brendan Quigley’s AVCX here, and this one by me was pretty good as well. But (cue ominous music) I got an idea that I thought would top them all…

It was: solvers are told they’re looking for a five-letter word found in one of the puzzle’s clues. Then there are only three five-letter words in the grid, symmetrically placed at 1-A, the central entry, and the omega-Across. That’s strange and worth looking into, and after a while they’d notice that each of the five entries crossing those 5-letter words was an object of a specific color — either green, yellow, or gray. For example, in one iteration I had something like SAGE (the herb, which is green), EDAM (yellow) and ASH (gray) crossing a five letter word (SEPTA, I think) at 1-A.

The color of the letter would indicate its Wordle status — green (like the S in SAGE) meant the S in the contest answer word was in the first space, E in EDAM meant it was somewhere in the answer word (but not 2nd, and not 1st since SAGE was there), and A was nowhere in the answer word (since ASH is gray).

So you’d get these green-yellow-gray clues on the 15 letters in these three five-letter entries, and then find the one word in one of the clues that would fit using Wordle rules.

Woulda been very nice, but it’s either simply impossible or just beyond my ability. I almost got one of the three regions to work, and if I got one to work, why not the other two as well? But sheesh, there’s a lot going on, so I’m just going to chalk it up to “not meant to be.” Stings a bit, though, since the aha moment would’ve been memorable. But life goes on, and our Week 1 replacement is Wordle-y as well (see instructions below).

I AM THOR:

Well, not really. Deb Amlen and I got name-checked by Drew Barrymore and Natasha Lyonne this week, however.

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is a five-letter word that’s a common first guess in Wordle.

Deadline for this puzzle is 3 PM ET on Wednesday, May 4th.

Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.