Welcome to Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up, a weekly opportunity to have a little fun and to get your brain in gear for the regular Sunday Puzzle.
From now through September is Summer Songfest. Each week the acrostic verticals spell out the title of a noteworthy song; and each week I'll provide a YouTube clip of the song from the previous week at the top of the diary.
These warm-up puzzles are intended to be new-puzzler-friendly. So if you've never tried Sunday Puzzle before, and are scared to dive in the deep end, come on and dip your toes in here. Tonight's puzzle is waiting for you right below...
This is a JulieCrostic. If you're not familiar with this kind of puzzle, don't panic -- full instructions can be found directly below tonight's puzzle.
Tonight's puzzle has 5 rows, with 3 answers per row.
1. a Carter
2. Mother _ _
3. friendship
4. owed
5. couple
6. adjusted
7. boy
8. placed
9. ancient epic
10. average
11. box
12. dice game
13. depressed
14. fine particles
15. very long very high mountain range
For those of you new to Sunday Puzzle, here's an explanation of
How JulieCrostics Work
To solve the puzzle, figure out the answers to the clues and enter them into a grid of rows and columns. For the warm-up puzzles on Saturday I generally tell you how many rows and columns there are in the grid; for the regular puzzles on Sunday that's usually left to the solvers to figure out.
All the rows in the grid will be the same length (i.e. have the same number of answers). All the answers in a column will be the same length (i.e. have the same number of letters). And the words in each column are one letter longer than the words in the column to its left. That's because...
Each word in a row has all the letters of the word before it plus one new letter. For instance, if the clues for a row were (1) Alaska governor, (2) mountainous, and (3) clarify, the answers would be PALIN, ALPINE ( = PALIN + E), and EXPLAIN ( = ALPINE + X).
Write the added letter in the space between the word which doesn't have it and the word which does. For the row in the example you'd write:
PALIN E ALPINE X EXPLAIN
When you have solved all the clues and written down all the added letters, the added letters will form columns that spell out a message of some sort. It might be a person's name, it might be the title of a book, it might be a familiar phrase, or it might be a series of related words. Your challenge is to solve all the clues, fill in the vertical columns, and figure out what the vertical columns mean.
To show you what a completed puzzle looks like, here is the solution to last week's puzzle.
saps W swaps M swamps
sine H shine G hinges
cher E cheer O cohere
mare N ramen N manner
beds I bides E beside
The verticals read
WHENI MGONE. When properly spaced and punctuated that spells out
When I'm Gone.