XWord Muggles Forum

Haha I didn't have it after all...only got step 1.

What Cindy and streakchaser said, but in color.

KAS5. Knew the Xs were the key early on. Never got close to this solve.

Wow, nowhere close.

APPLE abuts PPEAL, STAGE or TAGES intersect or abut GASTE, and REPASS intersects SPARSE, plus other intersecting anagrams. It was very hard to pry my attention away from that.

I got totally hooked by the fact that GASTE in Gasteyer was an anagram of the crossing STAGE in Stagesets AND REPASS was an anagram of the crossing SPARSE. Then I found crossings EXE and IXI and thought these were all X'es. Too many wild goose chases for me on this one. Clever puzzle though.

Wow, really cool! Never would have gotten it. I did notice the 4 Cs, their arrangement seemed significant. But lots of things seemed significant that turned out not to be :-)

I spent an embarrassing amount of time googling URBY to find out if I was on the right track. Doh! Slapped my head and submitted RUBY. (And BURY was a nice Easter egg).

Captain Kidd was a famous pirate associated with buried treasure. Turns out most pirates never actually buried treasure, but he did. When I learned that fact this week I was scanning the grid for things the treasure could be hiding under (I didn't check the C's though). I thought ISLET was a KEY to finding the answer. Looking under that was NOTRE, then I thought Is Let, Not Re. Replaced all the "RE"s in the grid with "LET"s. That didn't work. Another thought was that "AR" would lead the code. That didn't work. Then I found many pieces of "ATE" and hoped that would lead somewhere. Nope. Then I received the nudge to look at the x's and I was on my way finally.

TMart wrote: ↑Tue Aug 25, 2020 12:51 pm I spent an embarrassing amount of time googling URBY to find out if I was on the right track. Doh! Slapped my head and submitted RUBY. (And BURY was a nice Easter egg).

I also got to URBY and went, wait...what? Then I circled the letters in my grid and saw the clockwise RUBY (and the counterclockwise BURY).

Once in a blue moon you catch lightning in a bottle, and this one was it for me. I think this is the first puzzle I started solving before putting a single letter into the grid. The strange pattern with five 5x5 sets of white squares, and four smaller enclosed areas just leapt off the page at me. And with the treasure hunt/pirates theme, I knew there had to be an X or Xs in the fill to use as a starting point. The fill took me quite a while, but luckily my mind was already trained on the path to finding the treasure, and the rest just kind of fell into place.

Here's how to break a long streak:

Found the X's; circled corresponding letters, spelled out UNDER THE SEAS. Misremembered the meta question to be something like "where the treasure is buried", so I submitted "under the seas". When I didn't make the board I found the problem in 10 seconds.

The idea of using the Xs as a "stencil" occurred to me pretty early on, and by luck I stumbled upon UND by placing the shape at 1-Across. Once I had UND, I figured that we were going to get an instruction that started with UNDER..., so I knew I was looking for the same pattern with E and R in the top two diagonal spots. There it is at Square 9 - ERT. That gave me UNDER T..., so kept scanning until I found HEO at Square 40. This one really threw me for a loop and I spent a lot of time trying to complete UNDER THE O... until eventually, I just started trying every square until I found HES at Square 49. From there it was easy to find EAS and complete the puzzle by following the instruction to find RUBY places under the "seas."

I really loved the puzzle, but have one issue / question:

I totally missed that the pattern starts in the corner of each quadrant. I said I found the UND trigram "by luck" because I thought, "hey, 1-Across, why not?" Or "maybe it's going to be a path to the treasure and "U are here?" The point is it was basically a guess. But once I had UND, my path to the solution was based on completing the instruction, not based on the locations of the pattern in the corners of the quadrants. The instruction reveals itself so elegantly - in grid order, three letters at a time with just enough to go on to find the next three letters - that I thought this must be the path. But then you hit HEO in the middle, which I originally thought was a flaw since with this method, you have to basically drive right past it and ignore it. But I guess if the intended method of finding the phrase is by matching the pattern with each of the quadrants, then you don't have to drive past HEO, so I guess it's not a flaw?

It just seems to me that starting at 1-Across and completing the phrase would be a much more common route to the solution, so most solvers would encounter that HEO.

Edit: joon shed some more light on this at crosswordfiend. I see now the whole middle 5 x 5 section is a "map" to the other 5 x 5 sections (which I was previously calling "quadrants"). Makes more sense now. Even cooler puzzle than I thought (but I still wish HEO wasn't in there)!

joon wrote:ah, okay, here’s something: the three X’s in the central area of the grid. that central area is a 5×5 region of white squares. rather unusually for a grid pattern, there are five such areas, one in each corner in addition to the central block, forming their own X shape. the three X’s in the central area pick out three locations within that 5×5 block: row 1 column 1, row 3 column 3, and row 4 column 2. now we can take a look at what letters are in the corresponding squares of each of the other corner 5×5 blocks. (i’ve circled them in my grid screenshot above.) they spell out UND / ERT / HES / EAS, or UNDER THE SEAS. aha!

Abide wrote: ↑Tue Aug 25, 2020 1:05 pm Here's how to break a long streak:

Found the X's; circled corresponding letters, spelled out UNDER THE SEAS. Misremembered the meta question to be something like "where the treasure is buried", so I submitted "under the seas". When I didn't make the board I found the problem in 10 seconds.

I'm actually surprised you didn't get credit for this; clearly you had the mechanism. Especially since it broke a streak. Did you email him to present it to his "committee"? I've done it before, and he accepts their vote.

I got this (non-solo solve) at the 11th hour due to a kind nudge. And I also took the URBY-BURY-RUBY detour once I was on the right course.

I think the most helpful part about the nudge was, it FINALLY convinced me to abandon a rabbit hole I was stubbornly digging myself further and further into using 39 Down as an indicator clue:

"SNL" alum whose first name appears frequently in crosswords.
The entry is GASTEYER whose first name ANA is indeed missing from this week's grid (tho ASA and ONA are present). I took that to mean that the missing treasure might relate to ANA and other common crosswordese absent from this puzzle. SNL is somewhat common but absent (and tantalizingly close with the less common SML at 21 across. SNL's network of NBC is absent, tho ABC and CBS are present. I could go on. And did. For waaaaay too long.

I did notice the X's early on - and loved the idea of a HEXED PIXIE - but I got so convinced that ANA was going to lead me to the treasure that I ignored them for too long.

Abide wrote: ↑Tue Aug 25, 2020 1:05 pm Here's how to break a long streak:

Found the X's; circled corresponding letters, spelled out UNDER THE SEAS. Misremembered the meta question to be something like "where the treasure is buried", so I submitted "under the seas". When I didn't make the board I found the problem in 10 seconds.

Looks like you are in good company—Peter Gordon missed also.

Al Sisti wrote: ↑Tue Aug 25, 2020 1:34 pm

Abide wrote: ↑Tue Aug 25, 2020 1:05 pm Here's how to break a long streak:

Found the X's; circled corresponding letters, spelled out UNDER THE SEAS. Misremembered the meta question to be something like "where the treasure is buried", so I submitted "under the seas". When I didn't make the board I found the problem in 10 seconds.

I'm actually surprised you didn't get credit for this; clearly you had the mechanism. Especially since it broke a streak. Did you email him to present it to his "committee"? I've done it before, and he accepts their vote.

Agreed. Peter, you ought to find a lawyer who's interested in crossword metas to argue your case.

spotter wrote: ↑Tue Aug 25, 2020 12:53 pm Captain Kidd was a famous pirate associated with buried treasure. Turns out most pirates never actually buried treasure, but he did. When I learned that fact this week I was scanning the grid for things the treasure could be hiding under (I didn't check the C's though). I thought ISLET was a KEY to finding the answer. Looking under that was NOTRE, then I thought Is Let, Not Re. Replaced all the "RE"s in the grid with "LET"s. That didn't work. Another thought was that "AR" would lead the code. That didn't work. Then I found many pieces of "ATE" and hoped that would lead somewhere. Nope. Then I received the nudge to look at the x's and I was on my way finally.

"Pieces of ATE" is the best failed meta mechanism I've heard about!

Well I was never going to get this one in a million years. I’m not even convinced that if I got part one I would’ve gotten to two. Way beyond my skill set.

Matt thought this one might be too easy for a week 3. I wonder what he has in store for us in week 4.

Wow, I wasn’t even close. Broke a nice 10 puzzle streak. Now THAT’S a Royals move

Edit: j/k, they’d never pull a 10 game streak out of their hats

and ... wow, never saw that you needed to use the grid as a stencil.

was obsessed with the variations on SEAS and the fact that LAGOON is embedded in Alex Gordon, so I was looking for various bodies of water in various places, trying to find a way to find the treasure on the "high seas". I wasn't even close to looking "under" them.

and LOL

well, streak of 8 or 9 weeks gone. That's how it works.

Tom