Welcome once again to Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up!
Every Sunday evening, at 8:30 New York time / 5:30 California time, we have a puzzle party featuring puzzles suitable for group solving. That's tomorrow night.
And every Saturday evening, at 8:30 New York time / 5:30 California time, we have a warm-up party to help folks get their brains in gear for Sunday. That's what this is.
On tap tonight:
* a new JulieCrostic
* a new Crypto-Gremlin
* and a bonus puzzle -- from the gremlins!
Come on down to the diary and see which puzzles you can solve!
Puzzle # 1: JulieCrostic
(NOTE: If you're new and don't know what JulieCrostics are, don't panic. A full explanation of how these puzzles work, with an example of a solved puzzle, is included at the bottom of this diary right after the puzzles.)
1. eat
2. excavated
3. unmarried woman
4. what cats do, especially in warm weather
5. leads
6. blocked the light
7. employs
8. tricks
9. caretakers
10. change direction
11. section of a song
12. dire
13. stuff
14. parade
15. bewitches
16. jump
17. wilson's wife
18. ex-trump
As I warned last week,
beware of gremlins! The gremlins which often tamper with my Sunday night puzzles have invaded Saturday night and will be working their mischief here all this month.
But I think I outwitted them tonight!
(a) The gremlins like to group clues in bunches of threes, regardless of how many answers there actually are in a row. But I foiled them by doing an acrostic which actually does have 3 answers per row.
(b) The gremlins also like to remove all the capitalization from the clues, so two of tonight's clues have proper names which they de-capitalized. But I wrote the clues to make it pretty obvious which ones have proper names, so I think you'll be able to spot those two clues without any problem.
(c) The gremlins occasionally fiddle with punctuation and word spacing -- and they nearly had a chance to do that tonight. But fortunately I spotted the clue which had the most potential for them to wreak havok and fixed it before they could tamper with it. Clue # 18 was going to read trump's ex -- and if I'd left it like that, I know you'd now be seeing it as trump sex. But as you can see, I revised it to read ex-trump instead -- and the gremlins couldn't do anything funny with that so they left it alone.
Even so, I think I hear gremlins snickering, so I think they must have done something to tonight's puzzle ...
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SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE /
Puzzle # 2: a bonus puzzle -- from the gremlins!
I found the following puzzle on my desk with gremlin fingerprints smudged all over it. No additional explanation was included but I'm pretty sure they want me to post it here tonight, so here it is.
1. ache
2. rays
3. eat
4. I'm
5. beak
6. hum
7. sake
8. raze
9. eel
10. oak
11. hay
12. shun
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Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party /
SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE /
Puzzle # 3: Crypto-Gremlin
I don't think the gremlins want me to say too much more about what they've done, but I thought they might not mind my providing this little bit of additional help if I did it in their language. So here you go:
Getlit snot oulod Gm amas'on bleep out knsdim gdffet xl HdemtBzniombt. Oulo'id ktbldit ymon rmis'on.
NOTE: Crypto-Gremlins are a special kind of cryptogram. You can find a full explanation of what they are and how the differ from regular cryptograms
here. (And you can find a very useful tool to assist you in making letter substitutions
here.)
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Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party /
SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE /
That's all the puzzles for tonight. Now here's the explanation of how JulieCrostics work, plus an example of a solved puzzle.
How to solve JulieCrostics
For those of you unfamiliar with this kind of puzzle, what you do is solve the clues and write the answers in rows. In tonight's puzzle there are 6 rows with 3 answers per row.
Each word in a row contains all the letters of the previous word, plus one new letter. Write the added letters in the space between the word which doesn't have it and the word which does. The vertical columns created by the added letters will spell out a word or phrase.
As an example of how this works, here are the clues and answers to last week's puzzle:
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Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party /
SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Puzzle Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE /
last week's puzzle:
1. large body
2. devoted followers
3. sword
4. flat-bottomed vessels
5. mixes up
6. blue
7. fruit drinks
8. comforted
9. removed
10. prepares
11. embarrassed
12. sketched
13. propelled a boat
14. very small staff
15. one who gives something
16. go wrong
17. uncommon
18. traveler
19. one who grows things
20. delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787
last week's answers:
sea B base R saber G barges L garbles
sad E ades E eased R erased I readies
red W drew O rowed E wee rod N endower
err A rare F farer M farmer S framers
The verticals read
BEWA REOF GREM LINS -- which, when properly spaced, spells out
beware of gremlins!