Puzzle 69: Word and Variations. Your chance to play “word detective”.

Last Friday’s Freestyle 42 solution

Get the “easier version” PDF here!

Get the “harder version” PDF here!

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Did you ever have one of those “déjà vu” moments where you come up with an idea, but you swear you’ve seen something like that before and yet you just can’t place it or even find it on Google? Anyway… whatever it is, wherever the idea came from, I’ve got what I think is an interesting puzzle for you. The crux of the puzzle is this: I’ve thought of 25 “mystery words”, each one of which has an anagram, a synonym, and a rhyme. I’ve given the anagram, synonym, and rhyme of each of the 25 individual words (not in sequence, of course) and your goal is to figure out each of the 25 mystery words.

There are two versions, an “easier” and a “harder” version. In the “easier” version, 75 words are split off into three columns, with each column arranged in alphabetical order. Using your linguistic logic, pick the one word from each column — one of them is the anagram, one the rhyme, and one the synonym, whose order is for you to determine — that leads to each “mystery word”. In the “harder” version, the same 75 words are all arranged in alphabetical order, not with any particular columnar arrangement. That is, instead of picking one word from each column as in the easier version, you’ll have to find the three words for each “mystery word” somewhere in the list, in no particular order. In both cases, each word listed will be used exactly once. The directions for each will explain in more detail… I just want you to know what you’re getting into before you choose “easier” or “harder”.

I’ll be back with another crossword puzzle, of course, on Tuesday. The answer to  Freestyle Puzzle 43 will appear there too. But I hope this will tide you over until then.

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Puzzle 68: Freestyle 43. I don’t mean to be upfront.

Last Tuesday’s freestyle solution

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Get the PUZ here!

Word count: 70
Mean word length: 5.46

Have something you wanna say? Got a question? Want to do a guest freestyle? Want to collaborate on a freestyle? Want to just say hello? Hit me up by email!

The seed answers for this grid were 21-Across, 49-Across, and 3-Down. This was a little bit more difficult to construct not because there are two fewer words than usual, but because there are more three-letter words than usual. I had to be very careful that there weren’t too many, if any, clunkers in the threes. It had been a 72-word puzzle, but then I happened to discover that I could take out a pair of black squares (where 18-Across and 56-Across are now) and make perfectly good 15-letter entries from the 8s that were already in place! I don’t usually willingly reduce the word count, but this made the vocabulary in the puzzle definitely more interesting… so why not?

Oh, and I couldn’t resist… I live in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, so I just had to namecheck Berkshire County, England with the clue at 50-Down.

My favorite thing that I learned from this puzzle is in 35-Across. I was looking at a map and happened to notice this town, and my foreign language classes from way back kicked in.

As always, I’d like to know, folks… comment is welcome! Come say hello! What did you like? What could I do better?

As always, share this link! Pass it around! New puzzle on Friday!

Puzzle 67: Freestyle 42. It just got real up in here…

Last week’s Double and Nothing solution

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Get the PUZ here!

Word count: 72
Mean word length: 5.39

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The original seed for this puzzle is at 17-Across (believe it or not, it wasn’t 1-Across, though that was one of the seeds).  You probably know what they are, you’ve seen them all over the place, you’re probably familiar with the concept, but you may or may not know that they had a name.

The night before this post, I actually saw a (very well-acted) “Shakespeare in the Park” version of “Romeo and Juliet”. When I heard the line at 16-Across, the light bulb went off in my head because I remembered that I used that line in the clue. What’s more is that this wasn’t even the reason that I picked that puzzle for this post. It’s always whatever grid I have in my queue that strikes me the most at that particular moment, unless I have a more time-sensitive topic. So it really was pure coincidence.

My favorite thing that I learned from this puzzle is at 6-Down. Well, it wasn’t from this puzzle, it was from a feature I watched a while ago on one of those science stations with the high channel numbers. That fact I included in the clue isn’t the only fascinating thing about that parrot by far.

As always, I’d like to know, folks… comment is welcome! Come say hello! What did you like? What could I do better?

As always, share this link! Pass it around! New puzzle on Tuesday!

Puzzle 66: Freestyle 41. You won’t have to look far to find the truth.

Last week’s freestyle solution

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Get the PUZ here!

Word count: 72
Mean word length: 5.28

Have something you wanna say? Got a question? Want to do a guest freestyle? Want to collaborate on a freestyle? Want to just say hello? Hit me up by email!

The unusual structure of this grid owes to a step I had to take when I was not satisfied with the way things were going in a previous arrangement of the black squares. Specifically, I’m talking about the zigzag in the middle. Originally, the black square in the dead center of the grid and the one above and below it weren’t there — it was two “T” shapes that made the middle three rows 6/8, 15, and 8/6 in length. At that point, all four corners, 3-Down, and 10-Down were fixed. I just wasn’t finding a grid spanner that made the rows above it and below it work. Actually, I spent way too much time trying to make it work, truth be told, until I slapped my forehead (not metaphorically… I really did) and formed the zigzag shape you see.

My favorite thing that I learned from this puzzle is in 57-Across. Sometimes company names are named after their founder, but this takes it a step further.

As always, I’d like to know, folks… comment is welcome! Come say hello! What did you like? What could I do better?

As always, share this link! Pass it around! New puzzle on Friday!

 

Puzzle 65: Double And Nothing. The score of this puzzle is two to nothing.

Last Friday’s freestyle solution

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It’s another one of these puzzles that tests a different area of the brain from the crosswords. We’ve got the “two missing words” style of puzzle here again, and the relationship between the words this time is that one of them is the other minus its pairs of double letters (like, in the example I gave inside, SUppREss and SURE). The pair that I was most amused in finding was the one in #10; I was also particularly amused that the pair in #21 could be used in either order with the meaning of the sentence unchanged.

I’ll be back with another crossword puzzle, of course, on Tuesday. The answer to  Freestyle Puzzle 40 will appear there too. But I hope this will tide you over until then.

As always, share this link! Pass it around!

Puzzle 64: Freestyle 40. Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

Last Tuesday’s freestyle solution

Get the PDF here!

Get the PUZ here!

Word count: 72
Mean word length: 5.31

Have something you wanna say? Got a question? Want to do a guest freestyle? Want to collaborate on a freestyle? Want to just say hello? Hit me up by email!

First and foremost, I’d like to give a nice shout to Andrew Ries for his review of (and links to) several other independent puzzle sites, including mine.

Two 14-letter entries form the backbone of this puzzle. 14s constrain the structure of a grid so much, one way or another; they force either a whole bunch of black squares or a significant crossing stack of at least seven letters. Fortunately, I found two 14s that were worth using enough that I didn’t really care what I had to do to make them work.

I had two other interlocking seeds at 7-Down and 27-Down — well, I started with something different at 27-Down, but, luckily, I was able to change the first four letters of that entry because the middle section just wasn’t working out with my original seed entry. Usually, it takes a crowbar and the world’s strongest man to pry constructors away from their seed entries, but I would have had to make some pretty bad not-worth-it (to me, anyways) sacrifices to make the middle work with my original seed.

On that same topic, the same decision of whether or not to use that crowbar came into play elsewhere in the puzzle. I discovered a dupe (a minor dupe to me, a three-letter word) in the puzzle, but removing it would necessitate removal of a really nice (to me) entry. Weighing my options, I decided to keep the dupe, because I like the corner I have quite a bit better than any alternative corner without that dupe. You’ll see when you solve it.

My favorite thing that I learned from this puzzle is in 42-Down, of course. I saw it in one source and I just didn’t believe it until I confirmed it by seeing it in several more sources.

As always, I’d like to know, folks… comment is welcome! Come say hello! What did you like? What could I do better?

As always, share this link! Pass it around! New puzzle on Friday!

Puzzle 63: Freestyle 39. You’ll want to sit down for this one.

Last week’s Letter Banks: Movie Edition solution

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Get the PUZ here!

Word count: 70
Average word length: 5.57

Have something you wanna say? Got a question? Want to do a guest freestyle? Want to collaborate on a freestyle? Want to just say hello? Hit me up by email!

I’m very pleased with the number of seeds that stayed intact in this puzzle: 14-, 17-, and 35-Across and 13-, 34-, and 45-Down. Believe it or not, 6-Down was not a seed entry but was found through the magic of the Internet while I was constructing this grid. It was one of those things that was a familiar object with an unfamiliar term… I love when I find things like that. Also, the crossing of 6-Down and 38-Across was not intentional, but it was a happy accident that I kept as soon as I noticed it.

My favorite thing that I learned from this puzzle is the fact at 1-Down. Don’t these people have lives?!

As always, I’d like to know, folks… comment is welcome! Come say hello! What did you like? What could I do better?

As always, share this link! Pass it around! New puzzle on Tuesday!

Puzzle 62: Freestyle 38. Decisions, decisions…

Last week’s freestyle solution

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Get the PUZ here!

Word count: 70
Average word length: 5.34

Have something you wanna say? Got a question? Want to do a guest freestyle? Want to collaborate on a freestyle? Want to just say hello? Hit me up by email!

Here we are again with the stairstep formation down the middle, just like the grid a little while ago. Also, I could have gone for the full quad stack in the lower right/upper left, but I didn’t want to bring it down to 68; as you’ll see, there really wasn’t any other place to put that pair of blocks to make it 70, considering what I wanted to do with this grid. I didn’t want to make four extra three-letter words for myself, but I did what I had to do.

Due to the slightly compartmentalized nature of this puzzle, it came together pretty quickly — I’d say around two hours total to construct the grid. I had a framework of seed answers in this one, at 14-, 30-, and 53-Across and 4-, 16-, and 25-Down, and they didn’t force me to make any compromises in the fill (if they had, I would have taken out a seed answer or two to make the fill work).

My favorite thing that I learned from this puzzle is everything I gathered from reading about 21-Down and the fact in the clue. You just couldn’t make up the stuff that happens in nature even if you tried, no?

As always, I’d like to know, folks… comment is welcome! Come say hello! What did you like? What could I do better?

As always, share this link! Pass it around! New puzzle on Friday!

Puzzle 61: Letter Banks: Movie Edition. Grab your popcorn, folks.

Last week’s Split Decisions Two Ways solution

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If you’re a movie fan (I know you’re already a fan of wordplay), this one is definitely for you. If you’ll remember my Letter Banks puzzle from a while back, it’s a concept introduced by Will Shortz a while back in which shorter words or phrases hold all of the letters needed to spell a longer word or phrase. It’s not really an anagram… if you’re not familiar, click through and it’ll all be explained to you. Instead of single words, the letter banks in this puzzle are for a movie title and one of its stars. This is the first time I’ve really forayed into the movie realm, so this is right up the alley for all you movie buffs out there.

For something a little extra, some of the letter banks are appropriate to the movies and stars to which they correspond. (The others don’t really mean anything at all apropos to their titles.) See if you can figure out which ones they are. I didn’t try to do this for all of the examples, but there were some I stumbled upon that I couldn’t resist.

I’ll be back with another crossword puzzle, of course, on Tuesday. The answer to  Freestyle Puzzle 37 will appear there too. But I hope this will tide you over until then.

As always, share this link! Pass it around!

Puzzle 60: Freestyle 37. Stacked up in your favor.

Last week’s freestyle solution

Get the PDF here!

Get the PUZ here!

Word count: 72
Average word length: 5.50

Have something you wanna say? Got a question? Want to do a guest freestyle? Want to collaborate on a freestyle? Want to just say hello? Hit me up by email!

First off… if you like wordplay (of course you do!) and you like movies, then the variety puzzle I have Friday will be for you. Be sure to come back on Friday for that.

On to today’s grid. The pride of this puzzle for me is the eight-letter stacks… they both came together very quickly and they both worked out very well as I saw it. The seeds in each stack are the top entry and the bottom entry… when I saw what could fit between each of those pairs, I was very pleased that they could work out like that. When I stack eights or nines like that, it usually works out that I have to stack sixes or even fives crossing them vertically, but here I have sevens. I started with those horizontal bars of three blocks in the sixth and eighth rows, but I actually had to move them to the center to make it work out. Lengthening the intersecting stacks to make them work out is not how the process usually goes!

My favorite thing that I learned from this puzzle is at 59-Across. Here was my process for writing this clue. On a whim, I said, “I wonder if they’ve made milk of this stuff yet.” I looked it up. Wouldn’t I know, I found that there IS milk made of this stuff.
A close second is the fact in 9-Down… it was the only country I could find where this is a requirement.

As always, I’d like to know, folks… comment is welcome! Come say hello! What did you like? What could I do better?

As always, share this link! Pass it around! New puzzle on Friday!