LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Title: “Animal Instinct”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is the animal you must become to solve this puzzle.
Answer: BEAVER, found by 534 solvers

Pretty goofy meta, but you’ve gotta let me go goofy once in a while. I of course knew that beavers created dams, but I didn’t know until recently that *only* beavers build dams. I guess I thought there were other more obscure species that found dam-building to be advantageous, but nope; just them…and of course I thought “meta idea!” upon learning this. The idea of the solvers building the DAM with those interlocking letters seemed hilarious so I began sketching out the plan.

Started with a 15×15 grid, but quickly realized that there are too few DAM words to support such a large structure, so finally whittled it down to the 10×10 that wound up working. A lot of compromises in the grid (even the joonmeister didn’t know the Korean word BUDAM at 17-Down) but there was an interesting and possibly unique backsolve feature that I liked: once you saw the existence and then shape of the DAM you were building, you could plunk all those letters in right down the SE-NW axis. So that helped alot.

Mikey G says:

Leave it!

Eckless says it was:

Dam nice!

In the interest of keeping this blog professional, that will be the only “dam(n)” pun I run today. There were many more.

TeaJenny exults:

So eager to solve this week’s puzzle!

And finally, dk letter says:

Solved this one while proudly wearing my BEAVER ring (the beaver is the MIT mascot, nature’s engineers!)

I did not know that, but I like it!

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is one of this grid’s five-letter entries.

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