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LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Title: “Crazy Eights”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is a four-letter word that’s encoded somewhere in the grid.
Answer: OCHO
Correct entries: 228 overall, of which 142 were solo

Tricky one, closer to a Week 4 than a Week 3. Intended solving path:

1) Notice that there are eight 8-letter entries, noteworthy because of the title (and they’re the longest entries in the grid)

2) Notice that they’re all isograms, i.e. they don’t repeat any letters. The great majority of 8-letter words are not isograms, so that all of them are here is noteworthy.

3) Notice that if you pair the top entries with their bottom counterparts, they become a 16-letter isogram. So BEST PLAY and RICHMOND use 16 unique letters, as do SANCTIFY/WORKED UP, BACKFLIP/ROUNDEST, and PREADULT/SHOCKING. This suggests pairing the entries in this way, and allows for the upcoming code.

4) Notice that the three letters of each circled entry in the middle row can also be found in its corresponing entry in the top of the grid: SLY in BEST PLAY, TSA in SANCTIFY, BFA in BACKFLIP, and ARE in PREADULT.

5) Plot each of those three-letter entries from the 8-letter word in the top half of the grid to its corresponding 8-letter word in the bottom half:

the SLY in BEST PLAY maps to the COD of RICHMOND
the TSA in SANCTIFY maps to the EWO of WORKED UP
the BFA in BACKFLIP maps to the RDO of ROUNDEST
The ARE in PREADULT maps to the CHO of SHOCKING

Write those out and you’ve got CODE WORD OCHO, making OCHO our fitting contest answer for an 8-based meta.

Tyler Hinman avoid a stumble at the finish line:

Got the last bit and then damn near typed ECHO in here.

CrimsonHoo writes:

My blind spot around not writing things out horizontally blocked me for a while. Like with MASSINBMINOR.

He means this meta, where a number of solvers had the answer written out vertically in trigrams on their paper but missed it anyway:

MAS
SIN
BMI
NOR

Which is tricky for the eye to put together.

And finally, David Stein says:

Four letters couldn’t be UTOPIA. I was going to guess EDEN if I couldn’t figure it out.

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s 16-letter contest answer is what you must do to get the meta.

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