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Hey everyone, and welcome to Week 46!

Last week was a meta puzzle, and usually, this post would be dedicated to showing its solution. However, I realize that releasing a meta puzzle in the middle of Labor Day Weekend might have been a tough decision, since I know many of you probably read the blog on Sunday promptly, not read it for six days, and then read it again the next Sunday. That is how weekly blogs work.

So, since today is a new Sunday, I’m giving all of you who were enjoying Labor Day Weekend an extension on the meta puzzle.

I will be accepting Week 45 meta answers all the way until Friday at noon, and I will post the solution to the meta on next Sunday’s blogpost.

This week’s puzzle was inspired by my trip to Myrtle Beach, and was a joy to put together. It’s a subject that’s very near to my heart, and I hope you’ll enjoy it. Maybe it’s because I was enjoying the subject of this puzzle so much that I’m having this meta extension.

Enjoy the puzzle everyone, and be sure to send me your meta solution from last week! It’s a five-day workweek this week, so no excuses!

Chris

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Welcome everyone to Week 45! We are only weeks away from celebrating the one year anniversary of the blog, and we have now finished the ninth complete cycle. Time is certainly a funny thing. But, since this puzzle’s number ends with a 5 or a 0, it’s now time for a meta puzzle!

For this ninth meta of the blog, I’m looking for an appropriate six-letter word. 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. UPDATE: I’ve extended the date until noon Friday, September 18th, due to Labor Day Weekend fun.

The picture used for this blog post is from Monet’s “The Japanese Bridge”, and is a tribute to Merl Reagle, as both Monet and Merl used a lot of green paint.

In BEQ’s recent tribute crossword, he wrote:

“Green paint” is industry shorthand for a crossword answer that while definitely exists in real life, doesn’t feel “conversational enough” to be a truly legit entry in a puzzle. But since Merl’s puzzles were already gonzo, he could get away with it, and those infelicities were filed under “Merl Being Merl.”

I never had the chance to meet Merl Reagle in person, but as with most people in this puzzle community, you certainly felt like you knew him when you were solving his puzzles. He certainly inspired the indie puzzling community, and his inspirations inspired those whose inspirations inspired people like me and many others. Both Matisse and Picasso have described painter Paul Cezanne with the title “the father of us all”, and I can’t think of a better phrase to use to describe Merl. His impact on the crossworld is wide and deep, and we shall all miss him very dearly.

Also, if you haven’t solved both Kevin Der’s and Evan Birnholz’s tribute puzzles to Merl yet, that is something you should do as soon as possible.

Thanks everyone, and enjoy the puzzle. Be sure to email me your answer!

Chris

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Hello everyone, and welcome to Week 44! Next weekend is Labor Day weekend, so that means summer is almost officially over! I don’t know who it is almost officially over for, since both public schools and universities are back in session, but whatever. Enjoy one more blast on the grill!

My first variety edition on Chris Words has come to an end, and “The Horseshoe Letter” has now ended. I want to thank everyone who played the edition, and I hope that all of you thoroughly enjoyed it.

The solutions to the edition can be found [here]. Also, please don’t publicly list the solution anywhere, so that other people can come and enjoy the variety packet. I know that many of you wrote to me and noted that the difficult was nice and easy and that you were able to introduce the concept to new solvers. I am ecstatic that that was possible for those guys! So, a big thanks to everyone who solved the edition with novice solvers!

The first five people who sent me the correct answer to The Horseshoe Letter were, in order: Jeff Davidson, Gideon Fostick, Russ Kale, Todd McClary, and Justin Weinbaum. Congrats guys!

And, everyone else who sent me the correct answer, in alphabetical order: Erik Agard, Evan Birnholz, Alex Boisvert, Drew Dixon, Tyler Hinman, Jeremy Horwitz, Andy Keller, Eric Maddy, Jim Sempsrott, Jim and Becky Siirola, and Stephen Williams.

And, of course, credit should also be awarded to my fellow staff members at USC, who were able to solve the packet within a week! The staff certainly enjoyed it, and I’m glad all of you enjoyed it as well.

And lastly, if you enjoyed this puzzle extravaganza, be sure to head over the Panda Magazine for a bimonthly edition of puzzles and wordplay, and be sure to look out for Puzzle Boat 3, a puzzle hunt extravaganza that will take place in October this year.

Thanks everyone, enjoy the puzzle, and we have a meta next week! Fun times we live in!

Chris

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Sunday. It’s a beautiful day for a crossword puzzle.

Let’s play, shall we?

Rest in peace, Merl Reagle.

Chris

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Hello everyone, and welcome to Week 42!

Unlike several of my crossword cohorts, I do not issue a difficulty with my crosswords. But with this one, I decided to put the difficulty rating in the title. Hopefully, you’ll agree this puzzle is, in fact, mostly harmless.

Thanks to all the kind words about The Horseshoe Letter! For those who have solved it already, I hope you did enjoy it, and for those who haven’t submitted an answer yet, don’t panic! You still have two more weeks to submit your answer. Be sure to send any to all of your answers to cking.gow(at)gmail.com.

Not a lot of words on the post this week. Besides a themeless, I hope to have something else to tickle the collective Chris Words fanbase’s fancy.

Enjoy the puzzle!

Chris

Hello Chris Words fans all across the country and around the world! I’m going back to USC this week, but I was already supposed to be there. My internship this summer ran had to run a little long, but I needed to be in USC so that I could receive training to be an RA (now my third year). Since I couldn’t be there, I left something there so that my coworkers could feel my presence.

As some of you may know, I am the creator of the USC Puzzle Hunt, which I believe is the second-longest currently-continuous collegiate puzzle hunt in the United States. I write crosswords, but I also make a bunch of other kinds of puzzles. And, thanks to a suggestion made by Sam Ezersky at the Indie 500, I thought I’d let you guys play along too.

For any of you unfamiliar with this type of meta challenge, I direct you to Panda Magazine, which is a both a great magazine and a great resource for puzzle people.

Besides a link to a Buzzword Bingo game I created for RA training, I also left this exact email.

As you know, this year is about CHANGE. For Honors, the biggest change is that the Horseshoe will be joining us as a staff this year. However, they are kind of worried about what they can do adapt to being a true pair with Honors. In an effort to learn, they are now ignoring the 11 buildings of their own, and are going to study 11 resident halls around campus.

You can find “The Horseshoe Letter” with all of their findings here: http://uscpuzzlehunt.com/staffpuzzles/

Each building has one specific word that can be taken away as a lesson. That word is the answer. You can use the answer checker on the website to see if you are right. At some point, you must put those answers together in some fashion using wordplay to answer the question “As RMs, what can we provide for them?”

All the puzzles are easy to moderate, and there 11 of them! And there are 11 of you on campus right now! Instead of spending every hour in the resource room, take a break and hang out with each other. This is what this challenge was designed to do.

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So, I have given you the same challenge. The Historic Horseshoe is worried, and they need you to tell them what they have to provide.

When I write the USC Puzzle Hunt, there are always several puzzles that include strict USC knowledge. However, this variety edition does not include things that only a USC student would know. Most involve standard wordplay and trivia.

I haven’t received any errata so far, but if there is some detrimental errata found in the packet, then I will post said errata on this page.

Errata: Some spelling mistakes that you should know
-South Tower = “Inquirers” should be replaced with “Inquires”
-650 Lincoln = “Duffle” should be “Duffel”, and “Seperation” should be “Separation”
-The Roost = “Cape” should be “Caped”

How about I give you three weeks to work on it? So, by August 29th, send me the answer to the question. Please send all email to cking.gow(at)gmail.com.

Also, feel free to work in a group! Let’s say that you can only play in a group of up to 3 people. This way, you can use all of your collective knowledge to solve this puzzle.

I’ll announce the first five teams/players who send in a correct final answer, and I’ll announce all of the teams/players that send us the correct answers for the 11 smaller puzzles. I want you to be recognized for your effort!

Thanks everyone, and there will be just one puzzle posted next week.

Chris

Also, congrats to Francis Heaney for winning LPZ8! Also, big congrats to Trip Payne and Erik Agard for rounding out the medals platform. Geez, that’s three titans of the industry if I’ve ever seen it.

Hey everyone! This post is just a solution to Puzzle #40 “The Path to Freedom”. On Sunday August 9th, I will be posting a puzzle variety packet, so I wanted to make sure the two puzzles weren’t intertwined.

Also, hello to all of those first tuning in after seeing my puzzle at Lollapuzzoola! I hope you stick around for a while! Also, you can’t compete in the most recent meta contest, but you can go back and solve it. I’ll leave enough spoiler space below so that you still have the chance.

[It was the name of his sled]

[He was dead the whole time]

[The planet was actually Earth]

[It’s people]

[It was all just a kind of purgatory]

[It was Kevin Spacey]

[It was Maggie Simpson]

All right here we go!

This puzzle was looking for a famous music album, and the five theme answers seem to be:

17A – [Baseball strategy that’s a good alternate name to this puzzle] = INTENTIONAL WALK
33D – [Unique feature for Guy #1] = BLUE JEANS
29D – [Unique feature for Guy #2] = BAREFOOTED
30D – [Unique feature for Guy #3] = BLACK SHOES
39D – [Unique feature for Guy #4] = WHITE SUIT

Four clues refer to four guys who each have a certain unique aspect of clothing (or not having it), while the other clues refers to walking. Putting these clues together reveals that this has nothing to do with actual songs, but is describing George, Paul, Ringo, and John on the cover of Abbey Road, our meta answer. 19D – [“Penny ___”] = LANE is also a slight nod to the Beatles overall meta.

I was happy with the construction of this puzzle, because I wanted to recreate the album cover as closely as possible. I was able to combine both the grid and the album cover, and you can see that they match up rather well.

I know a couple of you were confused about the Guy #1, Guy #2, etc numbering. I list George as Guy #1, while technically, John is the one leading the pack. I wanted to have the four numbers read left to right, which is the direction of the Beatles on the cover itself, so I stand with how I listed them.

I was able to talk to a number of you about the greatness of Abbey Road.  I’m glad you agree. It’s an absolutely amazing album, and I don’t think there are too many things in music that even come close to the medley from “You Never Give Me Your Money” to “The End”.

So, 40 readers submitted Abbey Road. This week’s randomly selected winner was Patricia Miga. She will join Jon Delfin, John L. Wilson, Jim Quinlan, Eric Maddy, Andy Keller, David Cole, Roger Barkan in a future section of the site. She will also win a prize that I have yet to determine. Congrats Patricia!

Tomorrow is the release of #41, the puzzle variety pack. It should be a nice intro to things like Panda Magazine, and will have a nice variety of puzzles for you to solve. You should be excited. I know I am.

For any first time readers, hope you like what you see, and be sure to subscribe, which can be found on the right side of this blog.

Thanks everyone! And I’ll see you tomorrow!

Chris

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Welcome back everyone to Week 40! The eighth cycle on the blog is now rounding out, and what a cycle it has been! I hope everyone has been enjoying the output of the blog, and I’m looking forward to what the next cycle has to offer. But let’s go ahead and finish up this cycle! And since 40 ends with a 0 or 5, it’s time for a meta puzzle!

For this eighth meta of the blog, I’m looking for a famous music album. 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 solution to this puzzle will be published Saturday evening, so that the blog post for #41, the variety edition, will be clear of the meta explanation. Also, I plan to give the winner of this contest a prize. Prize TBD, but there will be a prize.

1) I hope you are attending Lollapuzzoola 8! I unfortunately won’t be able to attend, but I am involved in a sponsorship with the event. Thanks to Ben Tausig, the indie puzzlemakers will have a presence in both poster form and in hard copy form. Be sure to support LPZ8, and I hope you continue to support indie puzzling.

2) Don’t think I was able to squeeze in any art history into the puzzle today, so today’s picture is “The Architect’s Dream” by Thomas Cole. You can see a larger version here.

3) Next week is #41 which is the variety puzzle edition. Get excited. The puzzles should be fairly straightforward, and hopefully you enjoy a break from one crossword for the week to having one crossword plus ten other puzzles!

Thanks everyone, and enjoy the puzzle. Be sure to email me your answer!

Chris

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Hey everyone, and welcome to Week 39!

New puzzle up, and I think it’s very “theme-aggressive”. Hopefully that makes more sense when you’re solving it. For the five theme answers, the 2 9- and the 16-letter entries were set, but finding two more that would be good theme entries would slightly harder, but I think the five answers here are great. Hope you enjoy it.

Lots of announcements, so let’s get rolling.

1) Lollapuzzoola 8 is August 8th. You should go to it if at all possible. Sadly, I can’t be there in person (School, am I right?), but I will be buying the At-Home Division. No matter what, you needs to get these puzzles.

2) Big thanks to constructor Andrew Ries over at Aries Puzzles for including me in his recent recap of indie puzzles. He also had a succinct tweet about the recap that went like this:

So, this was one of the most awesome tweets I’ve ever read. And I appreciate friend-of-the-show Neville Fogarty for favoriting it.

I especially enjoyed his line on the recap reading “Chris is a budding constructor whose skills have noticeably improved over the last few months”. While I agree I’ve gotten better over the last few months, I started to wonder if there was a tipping point for the website. In my best guess, I’m going to say that #24 was the beginning of the mass improvement. One major factor in this estimation comes from when Matt Gaffney included the URL to this blog in a puzzle the Friday before #24 was published. Since then, I’ve had better web traffic, and it means that I’m more on my A-game. So, I think I’ve done better as a constructor in the sense that more people are now watching mean, and I REALLY don’t want to screw up.

And hey, you get better when you go along. I’ve written four puzzle hunts (so far!) as a part of the USC Puzzle Hunt. When I was recently trying to list my favorites, almost all of them came from the 2014 and 2015 Hunts, as opposed to the 2012 and 2013 Hunts. While those early puzzle hunts have lots of great ideas and puzzles, the more recent ones are more refined and just better in general. I think the same thing can be said about my crossword writing. I made this blog so that I could get better at crossword writing. And I do indeed think I’m getting better.

Again, thanks Andrew for the kind praise!

3) Speaking of puzzle hunts, I got my coin for winning the MIT Mystery Hunt in the mail this week!

Thanks to teammate Rachel Groynom (known to you NPLers as Rock*) for shipping it to me.

4) In the puzzle recommendation section, I want to promote Jeff Chen’s AV Club puzzle “Wearing Thin” found here, and friend-of-the-show Erik Agard’s puzzle “Themeless 36” found here. Both of those were a ton of fun to solve.

Also, Patrick Berry’s recent puzzle “Middle of the Road” (found here) is apparently the greatest thing since crossed bread. I’m sure it is an amazing puzzle, but I don’t know for sure since I haven’t solved it. Unfortunately, two of my weakest puzzle areas are cryptics and logic, so this one hits me twice. However, those puzzle people who are good at those things have praised it as an all-time greatest. So, be sure to check it out, and I’ll let you know if I crack it.

5) Next week puzzle is #40 which means we’ll have a meta! And like I promised last time after the extremely hard award-nominated meta from last time, next week’s puzzle will play like a MGWCC Week 1. Then the week after, #41, will be a variety edition! I’ll be posting a meta suite in lieu of a crossword. The suite plays similar to a Panda Magazine edition, and was written for some co-workers of mine. Don’t worry, it’ll be easy.

6) As you Internet-savvy people know, Alexa.com is a website that ranks websites by amount of traffic and links, which can now be found in list form. Google is globally ranked #1. Youtube is #3. Alexa itself is #2,132.

Chriswords.com is [drumroll] #20,523,573! That seems….not high. So, since you know that we at Chris Words love to apply statistics to things, here’s some research to see which sites of the crossworld get the most hits. Focus on indie people and review sites. Links not included since you can find most on the right side of either mine or another crossword site.

WARNING: Long list of numbers that came from a website that generates numbers somehow. Websites used is the main page of that person’s enterprise. Do not judge any website with any other website on simply the Alexa score. Your own website might be listed below. Alexa can’t pick up on things like a blog on the New York Times site or a subsection of the University of Minnesota’s chemistry department. Some of these sites really just operate through email, and the homepage is just a front. All of the websites listed below are incredibly important to the crossword community, and we’d be in a poorer world if any of them weren’t around.

#138,974 = Rex Parker
#460,488 = Cruciverb
#482,573 = Crossword Fiend
#539,359 = Crossword Corner
#730,730 = Brendan Emmett Quigley
#1,384,515 = xwordinfo.com
#1,529,740 = Evan Birnholz
#1,819,650 = MGWCC
#1,965,442 = Andy Kravis
#2,363,853 = ACPT
#2,705,993 = AVXWord.com
#4,339,658 = The Indie 500
#4,760,480 = Erik Agard
#5,031,611 = Pete Muller
#5,072,472 = Across and Down
#5,442,167 = Tim Croce
#5,818,062 = Todd McClary
#5,846,536 = Trip Payne
#6,596,559 = Patrick Blindauer
#6,665,399 = Elizabeth Gorski
#6,871,168 = Tyler Hinman
#7,279,963 = Patrick Berry
#7.928,216 = Gaffney on Crosswords
#7,997,122 = Sam Ezersky
#10,347,250 = Matt Jones
#10,851,208 = Fireball Crosswords
#11,804,334 = Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project
#13,224,604 = Andrew Ries
#14,041,643 = Peter Broda
#14,924,529 = Neville Fogarty
#15,610,020 = Lollapuzzoola
#20,523,573 = Chris King
#23,961,442 = Dan Feyer’s “Not a Blog”

Looks like I need to contact my marketing team! I actually do have several things in mind to make my traffic a bit better than *cough* I’m currently doing. According to Alexa, “The rank declined 16,122,409 positions versus the previous 3 months”. So, here’s to gaining those back.

But seriously, I love this blog and making these puzzle so damn much,

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That’s all from me today. Enjoy the puzzle!

Chris

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Hey everyone, and welcome to Week 38! Hard to believe that I’ve written eight themeless puzzles now. My expertise lies in themes and metas, so I’ve been pleased in how my themelesses have come out. Hope you enjoy them!

Just a few of announcements:

1) Chris Words is proud to announce that we have a logo!

It was made for me by a good friend of mine, and I look forward to having this properly display on the website, as soon as I figure out how to do that on WordPress.

2) If you haven’t already, please subscribe to this blog. I want to make sure you get up-to-the-minute updates on crosswords that get posted weekly. The subscribe link should be found on the taskbar on the right side of this blog.

3) Finally, I mentioned last week that a was going to an escape room. Well I did. And we didn’t win.

Besides me, there were three friends who have been a part of various USC Puzzle Hunt (two of which who were on winning teams), and six other people which include two groups we didn’t know, and one group that consisted of girls younger than 13. We played a room called “Queen City Bank Heist”, which involved protecting a diamond from thief.

I was pleased with a lot of things that the room offered, but was disappointed in a couple of things. One early setback was that me and another member of my small group were split off from the rest of the group and confined in a cage thing with very little to work on, and had to communicate to our team members through a rickety communication PA thing. Overall, this one step lasted about 10 minutes, which would bite us at the end.

The other huge setback was [some things changed to not give away spoilers for web crawlers] at one point we received a device that played a long message that culminated in the message “look beyond the sun”. We knew that message would probably get us a key that would send us to the next room. However, it was not obvious AT ALL what that sun was. We ended up using some hints, and somehow we found a faint circle drawn on a wooden supporting post in the room, which had the key behind it. I don’t think there was an exact clue that mentioned that, and the room was only lit by a blacklight, so finding this circle at all was a miracle. After the failed the event, another member on the team kind of questioned it, to which the overseer commented “My room, my sun”. In the puzzling world, this is called “Guess what the puzzle writer was thinking”, and is bad.

He let us know we were basically 92% the way through, and that the only room we didn’t get to featured one of the badass elements that was never seen during the 2013 MIT Mystery Hunt (you can take a guess what it might be).

According to a chalkboard out front, the record stands at 53 minutes with hints. The room is listed as hard, but there is a difference between “difficult” and “a stretch”. I think we suffered from a couple of setbacks involving “a stretch”, and that hurt us at the end. Also, if 53 minutes with hints is the record, you might want to look at tweaking some parts.

Also, no word puzzles. Some riddles, but no real logic, word, or trivia puzzles. Really, it was as if The Riddler hosted Legends of the Hidden Temple (of which I would watch every episode, just wouldn’t want to be a part of. That also kind of sounds like the Crystal Maze, but not really).

In conclusion, my team did have fun and we do plan to come back. We’ll probably pick one of the easier rooms not because of the difficulty, but because we’re hoping for fewer logical leaps. I’ve trained my boys well on how to write puzzles and metapuzzles, so they have a sharper eye that the average bear. Unfortunately, we just didn’t beat the room in time.

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That’s it for me today. Enjoy the puzzle!

Chris