LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
Title: MGWCC #883 — “Living on Boroughed Time”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is a borough of New York City.
Answer: QUEENS, found by 501 solvers, of which 486 were solo solves.
A true Week 1 of 5! Just an 11×11 grid without any especially long entries…but five of them stood out pretty quickly to solvers:
13-A: [Wearers of shining armor] = KNIGHTS
21-A: [Sells for cash, maybe] = PAWNS
33-A: [Some members of the clergy] = BISHOPS
23-D: [Some Eurasian crows] = ROOKS
10-D: [Tut and Arthur, for two] = KINGS
So we’ve got the plural of five of the six chess pieces, meaning our mystery borough is none other than QUEENS, found by 501 solvers.
Meta-World Peace says:
No doubt we’ll see some real “speed chess” at the top of this week’s leaderboard.
JudiBuzz writes:
Super -cute – my kids were born there and their dad was a chess nerd…
Domini got it:
I thought ROOK was leading to BROOKLYN somehow or that HAsTEN somehow would become HATTEN, with the MAN right nearby (twice), but then it became super obvious that all that was missing was Queens!
And finally, Pair-o-ducks says:
After so many hard puzzles, this week 1 was chess what I needed!
UNFINISHED BUSINESS FROM LAST WEEK:
My apologies for the scattered posting last week. I was actually in New York City for the week (hence that QUEENS meta, though I actually stayed in Brooklyn).
The mysterious reason for my delayed posting was that I met with a few crossword people over the course of my visit, and that day had a meeting with the great Mike Shenk (and WSJ editor Mike Miller, who oversees the crossword (among other things), and who is a NYT-published constructor himself in fact! I was running so late to that meeting that I had to delay the puzzle (getting around in NYC is something I need to get re-used to every time I visit, so I had to leave earlier than was really required).
After lunch I got to walk around Manhattan for an hour with Mike Shenk, which was a Bucket List thing for me. I’ve talked to Mike over Zoom and briefly here and there at ACPTs over the years, but I can’t tell you how cool it was to walk around the city with him and hang out for a while. I also had lunch with the great Peter Gordon in Manhattan and met with a few crossword outlets as well. All in all a very fun week! Although it did delay a few things…
FINALLY, THE ANSWER TO MGWCC 882b:
The answer to the bonus puzzle 882b was CATCH, found by just 21 solvers. Delayed response on that one was also due to traveling. I’m home now and will finally do a full write-up on that one this afternoon. You can see the explanation and answer in this short thread, though:
https://www.xword-muggles.com/viewtopic.php?t=3600
Finally, let’s move on to this week’s challenge…
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This puzzle’s contest answer is a famous American.
Good luck!
–Matt