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Welcome everyone to Week 24! Some of you may be visiting the website for the very first time, and I’d like to give you a hearty welcome to Chriswords. There’s new puzzles every week, and I’m sure you’ll learn something along the way.

This week’s puzzle is a fun one I liked putting together. This puzzle marks my first non-15×15, and I think the theme of this puzzle will be well received by you, the puzzling community. Let me know what you think.

For you first-timers to the blog, I hope you’ll come back for next week. I run a metapuzzle every fifth week, which means next week will be a meta! And that’s partly why you are here! What a coincidence. I just hope I can solve #355 by Tuesday. That’d be embarrassing, wouldn’t it?

If this blog post seems cryptic, it’ll be better explained next week.

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

Enjoy!

Chris

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Welcome to the 23rd edition of Chris Words, and I hope all of you celebrated a wonderful Pi Day. As a math major, I try to spread Pi Day cheer for all to hear. I also celebrate February 71st as “E Day”, but that one doesn’t get as much international attention.

Themeless puzzle today, hope you enjoy. I’m coming off the end of a spring break, so I didn’t get around to that USCPH wrap up text. I’ve been trying to relax over the spring break, so I haven’t even really bothered looking at the emails I’ve gotten about the Hunt. Slack, I know, but it is spring break. Let’s just pretend I went to an exotic locale that didn’t have Internet. I went to my home in rural South Carolina, and it didn’t really have Internet either for about 3 days. Sometimes you’re thankful for campus wifi.

Happy Pi Day / Ides of March / St. Patrick’s Day / First Day of Spring everyone!

Chris

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I don’t know about you, but we’ve reach 22.

I know I promised a recap of the USC Puzzle Hunt 2015 for this post, but that’ll wait until next week. Thankfully enough, this week is Spring Break! No exciting destinations for me. I’m back home in the house I grew up in, and won’t be worrying about customs or international waters or whether or not pushes at the blackjack tables let me get me money back.

This week is all about sleeping and enjoying time off. I hope to excel at it.

Also, this puzzle was partially inspired by a message board post on the Learned League. After a trivia question about weapons in the board game clue (which I referred to in Puzzle #17), one of the fellow members of LL thanked me in a post he wrote. You can see his initial post, my response, and then his response below:

Let’s hope that this puzzle can take you a little bit closer. I’m sure we’ll touch on the other subject soon enough.

Enjoy!

Chris

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Welcome to Week 21! It’s hard to believe that I’m approaching the six month anniversary for this blog. Time to go buy a present.

As a voting member of South Carolina’s 5th Congressional District, I am mighty proud of my once-Representative Frank Underwood, whose documentary was further installed on Netflix this weekend.

Anyway, enjoy the puzzle! Next week will be a new puzzle, and a recap of the project that is the USC Puzzle Hunt (I’ve probably mentioned it on this site before).

Chris

No new puzzle this week, mostly because the USC Puzzle Hunt is a behemoth. I always enjoy working on it each year, but man it takes a lot of hours to just admin throughout the week. Besides the actual puzzles themselves, we’ve put on an opening show, a recreation of a game show, a cornhole tournament, a scavenger hunt, and a movie night.

However, there was a metapuzzle last week, and its time to show how this metapuzzle works!

We’re looking for a part of the human body, and this puzzle had five clues just named “Part 1” through “Part 5”.

Solving the crossword leads to those five clues being:

LETTUCE TYPE
MELVILLE WORK
GEORGIAN SENATOR
FENCING SWORD
BE FRESH WITH

Keen crossword solvers should recognize that [Melville work] is a pretty basic clue for OMOO, and [Fencing sword] is a standard clue for EPEE. Seeing those two words, it could be assumed that each of these phrases must clue a word that fits the ABAA scheme.

Lettuce type = BIBB
Melville work = OMOO
Georgian senator = NUNN
Fencing sword = EPEE
Be fresh with = SASS

With the title of the puzzle being “We Are The 75%”, you should look at the letter that appears 3 out of 4 times. Those five letters spell out BONES, this meta’s answer.

So, the phrasing “a part of the human body” confused a number of solvers. The phrase “a part of the human body” was picked since I didn’t want to give the plural hint away. Some solvers even question “Are bones a part of the human body?”. I certainly think so, and I think the phrase “Bones are a part of the human body” makes perfect sense.

Everyone who submitted an answer saw that BONES was spelled out, but some people even overthought the meta. A couple of people submitted EAR, since ears notably contain 3 bones. I accepted this as well, since those people did mention having the “BONES” part first.

Thirty-four correct answers came in for the fourth meta, and Eric Maddy was the randomly selected winner. He will join Jon Delfin, John L. Wilson, and Jim Quinlan in a future section of the site.

Thanks everyone. We’ll be back next week with a new puzzle.

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Week 20! Since it ends with 5 or 0, it’s time for a meta!

For this fourth meta of the blog, I’m looking for a part of the human body. When you think you have it, email me at cking.gow(at)gmail.com with your answer. I’ll accept answers all the way to noon ET on Saturday.

The picture above has nothing to do with the crossword, but are a part of a puzzle used last year in the USC Puzzle Hunt! Kickoff begins tomorrow, so if you still haven’t found a team, now is your chance!

Thanks everyone, and enjoy!

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Welcome to Week 19 everyone! The theme of this puzzle was inspired as Puzzle #11 was coming up, but I decided to put a bookmark in it and to come back to it later. Also, it gave me a reason to use the Schoolhouse Rock title.

Next week is Week #20, which means another meta puzzle is on its way. Also, a week from today is the kickoff to the USC Puzzle Hunt! As of right now, 24 teams have registered, and it looks like we already have a great field. Be sure to get some of your puzzle friends, sign up a team, and enjoy some puzzles mostly written by yours truly!

Enjoy!

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Welcome to Week 18, and welcome to Themeless Four! This puzzle should please people of all ages, so hopefully you’ll find something you like tucked away somewhere in the grid.

For this post, I want to make a plug for the USC Puzzle Hunt, which is a puzzle contest I run here at the University of South Carolina. The event will start Monday February 16th, and will be five fun days of puzzles. I’ve enjoyed putting on the Hunt for three years now, and I’m very excited to put on this year’s. I know you are a puzzle person, so be sure to at least check out the website and some of the old puzzles

Registration can be found at the link provided, and if you have any questions, please email me at uscpuzzlehunt@gmail.com, where any questions can be answered.

Thanks everyone, and I’ll see you next week!

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Welcome back, and welcome to Week 17!

The theme of this crossword comes from an advertising campaign at the University of South Carolina. Hopefully you won’t sweat it too much. Apparently, one of the themers is a phrase somehow unique to USC, but that should stop you.

Anyway, as seen in last week’s post, this has been an exciting week for me. Last weekend, I had the great fortune of taking a trip up to MIT, and I was able to participate in the MIT Mystery Hunt.

I got to Cambridge on Thursday afternoon, and was able to walk around the campus and see the campus finally up close. But, Friday afternoon came soon enough.

This year’s theme was “20,000 Puzzles Under the Sea”, and team Luck, I Am Your Father hit the ground running. If you want actual play-by-play analysis of what our team did, I direct you to fellow teammate devjoe’s posts.

The weekend was the most amazing puzzling experience I’ve ever had. I’ve loved the Hunt for so long, and now I was finally there in person to play it. And I was so gracious to play on a team of some of the best solvers in the country. The puzzles during the Hunt were great, and I enjoyed all the activities we had. Sure, the Atlantis meta was a trick, but the puzzles were really fun. Even this word search we received at 3am Sunday morning.

But, at 5:02am Sunday morning, we won the whole damn thing. I genuinely could not believe that our team had won the Mystery Hunt. Surreal doesn’t even begin to touch it. I couldn’t be any more gracious if we had finished the Hunt, but sure enough our team got the coin first (which looked like this):

That Sunday, I slept from 6:30am to 3:30pm. What a sleep it was. I vaguely remember having to tell a hotel maid that we were alright when she came in at 1 or so.

The trip was amazing, and now Team Luck is already working on picking a theme for the 2016 Hunt. And somehow or another, I have a say on what it’ll be! And I’ll get to write puzzles for the 2016 Hunt! Such exciting times we live in.

Well, as one way to wrap up this post, I’d like to let you know that the USC Puzzle Hunt, an puzzle event I write for, is now open for registration! If you like puzzles (and since you read through an entire blogpost about puzzles), then be sure to grab a few friends and sign up. Starts February 16th, and should be a lot of fun.

Thanks everyone, and I’ll see you next week. Enjoy!

Hey everyone. So, I don’t have a puzzle this week. This entire last week as been a circus as I get ready to go to Boston for the MIT Mystery Hunt. And then this weekend has been insane as I’m up through the night working on puzzles. This all did pay off, as at 5:05am Sunday morning, my team Luck I Am Your Father found the coin.

I’m typing this from my hotel room here in Boston around 6:30am Sunday, and I truly can’t believe everything that has occurred over the last few days. Not only was attending an MIT Mystery Hunt was the greatest puzzling experience in my life, but I was able to play for the winning team in my first onsite appearance. I’ll figure out more of my emotions after I get some sleep in.

There will be a puzzle next week, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this weekend. Sorry for the lack of puzzle on my part. It’s just been a rough week. And by rough, I mean 140+ puzzles in 36 hours.

Chris