WANT TO SUBSCRIBE TO MY CROSSWORD CONTEST?: MGWCC is available only to subscribers at my Patreon page. A subscription costs $3/month.
LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
Title: “Word for Word”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is something you’ll be if you get the meta.
Answer: CHAMPION
Correct entries: 147 overall, of which 27(!) were solo solves
This one played much tougher than I expected. Intended path:
Steps 1.0, 1.25, and 1.5: Solvers notice that (1.0) there are exactly 26 one-word clues used in the puzzle AND (1.25) that those clues each begin with a different letter of the alphabet AND (1.5) that those 26 one-word answers also begin with a different letter of the alphabet.
Not by chance of course, so naturally everyone wrote down the alphabet in one column and the answer letters beside it in another:
{Ardor} ZEST
{Brainiac} GENIUS
{Compete} VIE
{Dry} XERIC
{Evil} BAD
{Fourfold} QUADRUPLED
{Gag} JOKE
{Higher} UPPER
{Idle} LAZY
{Just} RIGHT
{Khaki} TAN
{Labor} WORK
{Moniker} NAME
{Nightmare} ORDEAL
{Object} ITEM
{Pic} PHOTO
{Quest} MISSION
{Region} AREA
{Saharan} HOT
{Taxi} CAB
{Urgent} DIRE
{Videotape} FILM
{Wise} SAGE
{Xanthous} YELLOW
{Youth} KID
{Zeal} ENTHUSIASM
A – Z
B – G
C – V
D – X
E – B
F – Q
G – J
H – U
I – L
J – R
K – T
L – W
M – N
N – O
O – I
P – P
Q – M
R – A
S – H
T – C
U – D
V – F
W – S
X – Y
Y – K
Z – E
Clearly on the right track, and now we’ve got a second ordering of the alphabet. But what’s next? Step 2: There was a reveal entry at the last across (124-A:) [Year the crossword puzzle celebrated its 100th anniversary; or, where to find the meta answer] = MMXIII. That’s the year 2013, usually verbalized as “Twenty-thirteen.”
The answer was quick now if you saw it; this was only supposed to be a Week 3 of 5, after all. Go from letters 20 to 13 of the new ordering, and you’ll see they spell contest answer CHAMPION.
1 Z
2 G
3 V
4 X
5 B
6 Q
7 J
8 U
9 L
10 R
11 T
12 W
13 N
14 O
15 I
16 P
17 M
18 A
19 H
20 C
21 D
22 F
23 S
24 Y
25 K
26 E
Unfortunately, this is like a game of hide-and-go-seek-in-the-house where you hide behind the front door. If the seeker notices you as they walk in then it’s over quickly, but if not — then it’s going to be a long period of fruitless room-searching before they finally double back and find you, if they ever do. In this case, solvers looked to past MGWCC’s from 2013 searching for hints that weren’t there.
With only 27 solo solves, can we say this was an unfair meta? I didn’t get many solvers using that word, but many seemed irritated in comments and emails that there wasn’t quite enough of a hint (see in particular this comment and those in response to it). [UPDATE: HunterX, that post’s author, writes to clarify that he didn’t feel the meta was unfair. Apologies for implying he himself felt that way; his comment was just an interesting gateway to that conversation].
One of the criticisms was the putting the year MMXIII in Roman numerals suggested that we were using the year itself, and that breaking the year in half (20-13) was perhaps not quite kosher. The reason I used Roman numerals there, though, was simply that putting 2013 in the grid using Arabic numerals would have been highly awkward.
Should I maybe have not used a crossword reference at all for the hint? My first idea had been a Super Bowl score (note it has to be something where the first number is larger than the second to get the backwards order) but that seemed just random and I thought it’d lead people down crazy football-related rabbit holes. So I stuck with the Wynne reference…which also led people down rabbit holes. Alas and alack…
Another annoyance was that any solver who found the 26 A-Z clues and A-Z answers would have written them down side-by-side, so to see that you’ve had the answer before you the entire time on the page, in your own handwriting, was a head-desk moment for some. But most would have written them down vertically, which is not normally how we read words, so CHAMPION wouldn’t have jumped out as it might have if a solver had, for some odd reason, decided to write the two sets of 26 horizontally.
Anyway, congrats to the 27 CHAMPIONS who got it without help. These metas rest on a knife’s edge, and this one was strangely subtle in ways unintended and undetected by me and in ways that made it hellishly difficult to unravel.
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest answer is a four-letter word.
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.