April 2, 2023 - "On a Roll" (META)

[DrTom]

This looks ridiculously impossible to construct. Impressive!

edit: Here's Evan's reveal, backstory, and comments. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyl ... word-roll/

Agree - how this was conceived and executed is WELL beyond me,

[DrTom]

I always try to do Evan's puzzles, though perhaps not when they are first published. I remembered that Joe pointed this one out so I went back to it. The initial part was easy enough because of some BIG nudge clues, but the second part took me a lot of time to tumble to. I had thought of the Mx early on but dismissed it as being almost impossible to carry out. Well I am sure it was almost impossible but obviously not impossible. Once again I am in awe of Evan's abilities.

[DrTom]

Thanks @Abide. Here's how the meta came together:

There were three sources of inspiration for this puzzle: Two different meta suites and a video game. Longtime New York Times crossword solvers may remember Patrick Berry’s magnificent “Cross” Words Contest in October 2011, which was one of my first exposures to metas and is among my favorite sets of crosswords ever written. Paolo Pasco’s extremely clever “Remedial Chaos Theory” suite from September 2022 made great use of dice as both a puzzle mechanism and as a storytelling device. Most recently, though, my wife and I have been playing the game “Dicey Dungeons” on Nintendo Switch since the start of 2023. It’s a turn-based battle game where you can activate different abilities depending on the rolls of dice. The game gives you a good progression of difficulty as you proceed through the stages and it doesn’t take itself that seriously, which makes it fun to play without making you feel terribly frustrated if you lose.

All of these things got me thinking about how to incorporate dice into my own puzzle and, for a while, I’d assumed that the way I wanted to do it would be completely impossible. First, every O had to be placed precisely in their proper positions and there couldn’t be any additional O’s on the dice. Second, the target letters of G-A-M-B-L-E had to be the only letters matching the value of each die. And third, all of this had to take place in six different 5×5 clusters of white squares; I get enough headaches trying to accommodate one or two 5×5 sections in a normal grid, let alone six of them in a constrained meta.

I started with the 4 die because it seemed like it would be tough to incorporate four B’s along with four O’s, then I moved to the 6 die. I figured if I can somehow get six E’s to fit around six O’s in this 5×5 space, then the rest should proceed much more easily. Amazingly, I got through the 6 die much faster than I expected, but I was dead wrong about how easily the other dice would proceed. I can’t remember how many times I filled one of the dice more or less cleanly, only to realize that I had three E’s in addition to three M’s on the 3 die, or an extra unique letter in addition to G on the 1 die.

Although it wasn’t necessary, one thing I wish I could have pulled off in this puzzle was to have no O’s anywhere outside of the dice. I got closer to achieving that than I would have expected; there aren’t any stray O’s near the 6 die, and several of the remaining O’s could likely have been removed without too much trouble. The O’s just on the outside of the 1 and 5 dice, however, were basically stuck no matter what I did. So I abandoned that goal and let the PIP and DIE revealers do the work of explaining where to look and what O’s you’d need.

Well I can tell you that it took me much longer to solve than it should because I was convinced you could NOT have done what you did. I tried Numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6, and 11,22,33 and 2 4, 6, 8 and positions on the die, and... FINALLY I said "could it be" and sure enough it was. Superb mechanism and execution of same.

[woozy]

Well, came a week late but fun to solve. Took me a while to see what "and where you need to find the letters matching the value shown there" meant but I that the other bit of the instructions was straight forward. Great fun.

[MarkWoychick]

Finally had time to do this puzzle - another fun one from Evan!

[rjy]

Ditto - late to it after vacation last week, but clever one, Evan.

Been doing all his puzzles for years now, glad to see an exclusive channel for them now!

[ReB]

Heard about this new page and finally remembered yesterday to looking it up. Solved today after a flash of inspiration. Like others, I found the construction quite impressive to accommodate this unique mechanism. Glad Evan figured out how to pull it off.

Good level of difficulty on the grid. Thanks.