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LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
Title: “Three-on-Three Matchup”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is one of the entries in this grid.
Answer: HOLE at 52-Down
Correct entries: 115 overall, of which 17(!) were solo solves
MGWCC #734 was the puzzle I mentioned in my Zoom talk last summer (did anyone YouTube this talk? Let me know if so and I’ll link it here — it was very fun!). Solver Al Sisti asked if I had a Melvillean “white whale” idea that I liked a lot but could just never get to work. I said I did indeed and described what turned out to be MGWCC #734 in general terms without giving anything away.
The whale finally surfaced last week, and in the one spot in the grid not weighed down by theme content I managed to squeeze in both AHAB and THAR as a wink and nod to that convo. I believe this meta took me more time than any other in this series by a significant margin; my guess is 30 hours.
The first in a subtle series of hints is one you might have noticed before filling in a single letter: “Three-on-Three Matchup” is our title, and the black squares in the grid exhibit an unusual property: they appear only in 3×1 rectangles, of which there are a dozen. Curious!
But now what? Second insight: there are also exactly twelve 3-letter entries in the grid. This combined with the title, suggests overlaying these two sets of 3 x 1 x 12 units.
And how to do so? In standard meta-solving left to right/top-to-bottom format, write each three-letter grid entry into its corresponding three-square black rectangle. So the first three-letter entry is TEN at 1-A, which you write into the top-leftmost black rectangle, the one right next to TEN. The next three-letter entry is HOE, which you then write into the second black-square rectangle, which is the one between the RES of RESIDUALS and the EAT of EAT IN.
When you’re done, those 36 letters, read in the same left-to-right, top-to-bottom format, spell out THE ONE ENTRY IN COLUMN ONE THAT’S AN EAR PART, leading to contest answer HOLE.
In a twist I did not anticipate, a number of solvers reported following steps 1 and 2 above correctly, but then couldn’t make sense of the 36 letters they’d written into those black squares. They were looking for ways for those letters to interact with the surrounding letters in the grid instead of simply (?!) reading those 36 off in order. This final trap bumped the difficulty level of this one up even further.
Did I land the white whale? Sort of. That one bogus entry going down the center was necessary to make it all work, and you really can’t just make up an entry like that to get a meta to work. To be honest, I would ding any puzzle that did this a full star at Fiend and I won’t do it again. But I just had to get this puzzle out there so I could stop thinking about it. Every month I thought, do I revisit this…? Now am I at peace!
GUEST CONSTRUCTOR MONTH, WEEK 1:
First up for GCM Summer 2022 is Richard D. Allen. You may know Richard already from the metas (and non-metas) he writes at his site Lexicon Devil. Richard describes himself as “a puzzle constructor, lawyer, writer, parent, spouse and cat owner in North Carolina.”
Works for me — let’s see what he’s got in store for Week 1…
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest answer is a nine-letter word.
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.