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 (which posts Sunday evenings at 8 pm Eastern time).
Two warm-up puzzles tonight. Unfortunately I can't be here to take part in tonight's puzzle party. An explanation is provided in the puzzle answers.
Even without me present I don't think you'll have any problem solving the puzzles. Have fun with tonight's puzzles, have fun with Villanova's puzzle tomorrow night, and I should be able to take part again next week.
Tonight's first puzzle is our traditional JulieCrostic (named after Sunday Puzzle founder Julie Waters). The second puzzle is a code message -- and you'll get help solving it from the JulieCrostic answer. I'll explain more about that below. But first, here are the clues for tonight's JulieCrostic.
If you're familiar with how JulieCrostics work, have at it! If you're new and don't yet know how JulieCrostics work, you can find complete instructions in the bottom part of the diary.
Tonight's puzzle has 5 rows, with 3 answers per row.
1. masticate
2. lass
3. from where
4. see to
5. famous
6. rat
7. brace
8. stiff
9. cruising
10. noted civil rights group
11. old woman
12. again
13. Janis Fleming
14. person with a great deal of patience
15. giants
That's a partial explanation of why I can't be here tonight. Here's a more complete explanation:
Schreacahy kegcof oabdofic lbmeb nt kcaefgafem pyaiy ucef zcssb eyof oy zrcsf eb wcum ercahkc.
I've encoded it as a Crypto-Gremlin, so you'll need to decode it to read it. But that won't be hard, because I'm providing generous help.
(If you're not familiar with Crypto-Gremlins you can find a complete explanation of what they are and how they work here.)
Now for the promised help. First, write out the answer to the JulieCrostic verticals (10 letters, no spaces). Number them from 1 to 10.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Using that, here are 6 of the letter substitutions. (Use as many as you like -- or none, if you want a harder challenge.)
The letter A in the coded message stands for letter 1.
The letter B stands for 2.
The letter C stands for 3.
The letter E stands for 5.
The letter F stands for 6.
And the letter G stands for 7.
With that for a start, you should have no trouble decoding the rest!
For the benefit of anyone new to Sunday Puzzle, here are instructions for solving JulieCrostics.
In JulieCrostics you are given a set of clues, such as these:
To solve the puzzle, figure out the answers to the clues and enter them into a grid of rows and columns, like so:
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. say what's not so
2. resting
3. concede
then the answers might be LIE, IDLE (= LIE + D), and YIELD (= IDLE + Y)
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:
1. LIE D 2. IDLE Y 3. YIELD
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.
In the example given, the verticals read DAIL YKOS. With proper spacing and capitalization that spells out Daily Kos!